Fallen Dragon

Three of the Skins draped sweaters around their shoulders. Lawrence didn't bother. He was scanning the area, still suspicious. The whole village idyll setup was just a little too perfect.

"Where does that path lead?" he asked one of the villagers. Where the road to the village headed off from the wool center, a small footpath disappeared into the forest "Just to the lake."

"It's well used." His sensors were showing him multiple overlapping footprints in the drying mud, and the smaller branches of undergrowth on either side were cut back.

"What have you got, Lawrence?" Kibbo asked.

"Path to the lake, he says."

"What's at the lake?" Kibbo asked the villager.

Lawrence watched the slight smile form, then vanish on the man's face. He was going to say water, Lawrence knew.

"There is a temple at the lake, that's all."

"A temple?" Kibbo said. "What sort of temple?"

"It is a place of tranquillity, where one goes to meditate in solitude."

Kibbo conferred with Ntoko for a minute. "Okay, let's go check it out," the sergeant said.

"As you wish."

The villager's name was Duane Garcia. He was in his late forties, with thick curly black hair and a slightly rounded face to which a smile came easily. He was healthy and fit-looking in that way all people who led and relished outdoor lives appeared to be. Thinking back, Lawrence hadn't yet seen a villager who lacked vitality. Even the elderly ones seemed unrestricted by their age, while the little kids were like a gang of unruly miniature angels.

It started raining heavily as the four Skins and two villagers trudged down the path. Mud splattered Lawrence's legs up to his crotch. The droplets messed up half of his helmet sensors, producing blurred visual images.

Duane Garcia pulled his sweater's hood up over his head and whistled happily.

"Who's this temple dedicated to?" Kibbo asked.

"We don't worship gods," Duane said. "The universe is a natural phenomenon."

"Amen to that," Lawrence said.

"So why the temple?" Kibbo persisted.

"It's not a temple in the standard sense. We call it that because the architecture is a homage to some of Earth's historic buildings. The man who designed and built it was a good friend of my grandfather. Apparently he was quite upset when people started calling it the temple."

They topped a small rise, and the forest fell away along with the ground. Beneath them was an alarmingly steep slope that led down into a heavily forested little valley. It was vistas like this that gave rise to the notion of Shangri-la. And Lawrence could well understand why. Mount Kenzi, the second-largest of the Mitchell peaks, stood guard at the far end, a tremendous rugged wall of rock whose upper reaches were cloaked in a thick layer of snow. Below the frostline, waterfalls tumbled hundreds of meters down its sides to vanish into the upper strata of forest with a continuous explosion of white spray englobed by rainbows. The valley itself was the gulf between two of Kenzi's buttresslike foothills, with a river running its length. Tributaries slithered along the base of every crease in the land.

Directly below where they stood was a perfectly circular crater lake that had bitten slightly into the northern wall, resulting in a crescent cliff. A small island rose out of the center, like the back of some slumbering marine giant. At its highest it could only have been a few meters above the surface of the lake. A few trees grew around the edges, their sun-bleached roots struggling for purchase among the boulders.

There was a simple structure in the middle of the island: five columns of black-and-white fluted marble that supported a wide arched stone roof. Underneath it were two tiers of circular stone seating that could probably hold about twenty people. The whole thing did look distinctly Hellenistic.

A gravel path led away from it to a small wooden jetty. An identical jetty had been constructed on the shore of the lake opposite. A rowboat was tied up to the end.

"That's it?" Ntoko asked.

"Yes," Duane Garcia said.

The sergeant scanned his helmet sensors around. The path in front of them switchbacked down the risky slope. In several places, where the drop was sheer, the villagers had built handrails. Seventy meters below, the path wound into the dense forest again to emerge by the jetty.

"Okay, we've seen enough." Ntoko turned around and started walking back to the wool center. The other Skins went with him.

Lawrence remained on the top of the ridge. He still had that feeling that the villagers were having them on somehow. The rain was easing off now, boisterous clouds rolling away to the south, retreating from Mount Kenzi's imposing bulk. He requested a full-spectrum sensor sweep from his suit AS and targeted the temple. Nothing registered. There was no electromagnetic activity down there. No heat. It was just inert stone. Large gray-and-white birds flapped sedately through the air, their reflections keeping pace on the still black water.

"Hell."

As his sensors shifted their focus back, he was mildly surprised to see Duane Garcia was still waiting for him. "Checking on me?"

"Certainly not. It's a difficult path back, and there are several forks. We wouldn't want you to get lost."

Lawrence chuckled as they started walking. "Funny, I'd have said that was exactly what you wanted to happen."

Duane Garcia acknowledged the gibe with a slight grin. "I admit your arrival here is not the most welcome visit we've ever had. But I really don't want you having a genuine accident out here, if for no other reason than I doubt your commanding officer would believe it was an accident."

"True enough. Can I ask you something?"

"Certainly."

"Where's your jail?"

"A jail? I'm sorry, we don't have one."

"So in a settlement of at least six hundred people, there are no sinners. Sounds like paradise."

"I'm afraid not. We do have miscreants, of course, every community does. It's just that we don't believe in incarceration as a form of correction or punishment. Other penalties are applied. Restrictions, both physical and material."

"Humm. For the record, I don't believe all this Zen bullshit you people are selling the captain. This whole community is way too nice. Normally, by the third generation, any community founded around a single principle has developed a lot of dissenting voices."

"You have seen the way we live. There is little here to complain about. And if you do, you are free to leave."

"Nope. I still don't buy it."

"You're very adamant about that. Why?"

"I was born a third-generation colonist myself. I know all about the resentment directed toward obsolete restrictive ideals."

"That might just be you. Or perhaps our ideals are more appealing than those of your homeworld."

"Touchй." But I still know you're hiding something, he thought.

Captain Lyaute decided that it was safe for the patrol to stay in the village for the night. The villagers clearly didn't represent the kind of threat evident in Dixon.

Families were temporarily evicted from various A-frame houses to make way for the squaddies. Lawrence was billeted with Ntoko, Amersy and 435NK9's latest recruit, Nic Fuccio. Their A-frame was one of those overlooking the central park where the convoy vehicles were drawn up. Five comfortable bedrooms, three bathrooms, a lounge, study, reception room, dining kitchen, a family room full of toys; all arranged in a T-shape. As he walked through it, Lawrence thought about some middle managers from Z-B he knew whose apartments were a lot more cramped. He claimed a bedroom with a big sliding glass door and stripped off his Skin. The bulky suitcase of field-support equipment extruded eight umbilical cords, and he plugged them into the suit. Blood and other fluids began to cycle through the flaccid synthetic muscle.

A warm shower washed off the blue dermalez gel, and he dressed in an olive-green sweatshirt and gray shorts to join his housemates on the balcony. Amersy had already found the drinks cabinet and mixed a jug of some lemon-based cocktail. Lawrence went for a can of Bluesaucer. The beer tasted better than it ever had down in Memu Bay.

He hadn't realized it before, but the village was situated on a gentle slope. Half of their A-frame was supported on thick wooden stilts to keep it level. From the balcony they could see out over a broad shallow valley where the forest formed an unbroken dark blue-green cloak.

"Do we ever get any runaways, Sarge?" Nic asked as he settled back in a cushioned sun lounger.

"No. We're too obvious. Why, you thinking of it?"

Nic gestured round the clearing. Eight of the convoy's squaddies remained in Skin, guarding the trucks and jeeps. It was an easy duty. The kids were hanging around the vehicles, with the Skins letting them sit in the driving seats. Several girls had appeared, in their teens or early twenties. Lawrence was sure they hadn't been around before. He would have remembered. Like the tourists at Memu Bay, they didn't wear much, T-shirts or halter tops, and shorts. From his angle, most of them looked cute to beautiful. They belonged perfectly to the idyll image. The duty Skins were very busy talking to them.

"Got to admit," Nic said. "It's tempting. I can see myself living like this once I've earned a big enough stake."

"I couldn't," Lawrence said.

"Why the hell not? A place like this, you've got everything you could possibly need. Hey, I wonder if they go in for that trimarriage lark? Country folk always stick with the original traditions longer than the townies."

Ntoko chuckled and pushed his cocktail glass toward the tall, healthy girls gathered round a jeep. "Two of them together would finish you off, man."

"There are worse ways to go."

"This whole living with nature in the forest crap is a dead end," Lawrence said.

"Whoa there, the man's got a bug jammed up his ass." Nic laughed. "What could be wrong with this, Lawrence? Do a couple of hours' work each day, then spend the rest of the time lying about drinking and screwing. Look at 'em. They're all smiling, none of them are stressed. They know they're on to a good thing."

"I've seen this kind of setup before. It appeals to us because we see it as a break from our job. But you can't live like this for eighty years. You'd die of boredom after six months."

"Oh hell," Amersy groaned. "Here we go, the starship captain speech again. We're all meant for higher things."

"It's true," Lawrence insisted. "This kind of existence contributes nothing to the human experience. It's a retreat for people who can't handle modern society. And the irony is, they're utterly dependent on that society. Villages like this rely entirely on the industrial products made down in the city."

"That's always been the way, Lawrence," Ntoko said. "Different communities live different lives and produce different things. Trading between them generates wealth. Centuries ago it was different nations; now we've evolved microcosms of that, with communities that are going down highly specialized routes. This kind of lifestyle wasn't possible before modem communications and transport. These villagers are as much a development of our society as Memu Bay is."

"They're dreamers who need a good dose of reality to wake up and take part in what the rest of us are building."

The sergeant raised his cut crystal glass to the sinking sun. "Well, this is the kind of dreaming I like. Now have yourself another beer and chill out, Lawrence."

"Yes, Sarge." Lawrence grinned and fished round in the icebox. A group of children walked past the end of the house's garden. They yelled something unintelligible, and Lawrence waved back. Places like this, he conceded, did have their uses. He'd never managed to relax quite this much before on Thallspring, not even clubbing down on the marina.

If he could just work out what was wrong with Arnoon... Which was when he saw one of the children, a boy, slip his hand into one of the bushes that marked the boundary of the garden. His fingers slithered casually through the chubby blue-green leaves and found one of the fruits hanging within. It was a smallish globe, with a satin orange sheen. He plucked it with an easy twist of his hand and bit into it. Juice dribbled down his chin.

"I knew it!" Lawrence hissed. "Did you see that?"

"See what?" Ntoko asked.

"He's eating fruit. Real fruit. Off a bush. They're all bloody Regressors."

Ntoko frowned at the boy over the rim of his glass. "You sure?"

"I saw him."

"Filthy habit."

"Fancy making your kids do that."

Nic pulled a face at the liquid slopping around the bottom of his own glass. "Hey, you don't think they've given us any, do you?"

"They'd better not have," Amersy growled.

Lawrence slumped back down in the sun lounger again.

He felt a lot happier now that he'd discovered the village's dirty little secret. I knew nothing was this perfect.

The fridge in the A-frame's kitchen had been filled with food ready for them to cook. He made a mental note to check the packaging that tonight's meal came out of. Thank Fate there weren't any animals grazing around the A-frames. At least the villagers weren't that twisted. They ate out on the balcony, microwaving pork barbecue ribs and baked potatoes. Nic even mixed up a couple of TexMex sauces from some sachets he found. Each of the packets had unbroken Memu Bay food refinery seals. Dessert was double-chocolate-chip ice cream.

They sat in the loungers, watching the sun going down behind the huge mountains. The village was dipped in shadow from late afternoon onward. Twilight lasted at least a couple of hours, silhouetting the peaks against a luminous amethyst-and-gold sky. Stars began to shine early on, twinkling brightly through the cold, thin air above the mountains. Eventually, the Milky Way blazed like a fat comet's tail across the night.

Lawrence wasn't really drunk when he went to bed, although he'd had just enough beer to keep his thoughts buzzing. He slept fitfully, waking every few minutes to twist and turn, thumping his pillow. About one o'clock in the morning, he heard the scream.

It was cut off almost immediately. For a moment he thought it might have been the confused end to some dream. Except he thought he'd been awake now for a quarter of an hour.

He lay there, wide-awake alert. It had been a female scream, he was sure of that. Now that he concentrated he could hear some kind of scuffling. Footsteps on wooden stairs. Another cry, muffled this time.

Lawrence came off the bed fast, snatching up a pair of interface glasses. He slipped them on and told his bracelet pearl to give him their light amplification function. The glasses didn't have a particularly advanced capability, certainly nothing like his Skin sensors. But they showed him the darkened bedroom, pulling it into focus with sparkling blue-and-gray tones. He slid the broad patio door open and went outside onto the veranda. His room was facing away from the village clearing, looking along the line of A-frames. Stars glared down on the village, banishing shadows.

A girl, maybe eight or ten years old, was running around between the A-frames. She was barefoot, wearing only a baggy white nightshirt. Her legs and knees were streaked with mud and grassmoss juice. He could see tears streaming down her cheeks.

"Jacintha," she called, then sobbed again. "Jacintha, please, where are you? Jacintha."

Lawrence jogged down the narrow steps from his veranda, asking Fate that Jacintha was her cat, or some other pet.

The girl saw him coming and cowered back. "Please, don't hurt me. Please."

Caught in the silver rain of starlight, she looked just like his sister Janice. She must be twenty-one... Fate no, twenty-two, now. I wonder what she's doing?

He held his hands out toward the little girl. "It's okay, nobody's going to hurt you. I just want to know what's going on. Can you tell me?"

She took a couple of paces away from him. "Nothing. Nothing's happening."

"Well, now, I'm not so sure, I heard a shout. Was that Jacintha?"

"I don't know."

"Listen, er... I'm called Lawrence. Can you tell me your name?"

She sniffled loudly. "Denise."

"Okay. Denise. That's a nice name. So are you going to tell me who Jacintha is?" He was looking round, trying to spot any motion in the village. Several A-frames still had their lights on: he could see the windows glowing around the edges of the curtains, as if they'd been bordered in neon. The convoy vehicles were dark outlines in the middle of the clearing. He could see a couple of Skins standing guard. The fact that they weren't showing any interest in him and the girl made him edgy.

"She's my sister," Denise said.

"Okay. How old is she?"

"Seventeen."

Lawrence swore under his breath. He had a pretty good idea what was happening now. Damn Captain Lyaute for his lack of discipline, and damn Z-B, too, for employing lowlifes as its squaddies. "Tell me, Denise, did somebody take her away?"

"Yes," Denise said meekly. "We were all sleeping together in Paula's home." She pointed at one of the A-frames. Lawrence could see several young faces pressed against one of its windows, staring out at him.

"Go on."

"Two of you came and said they wanted to ask her some questions. That it was about state security. They said she had to go with them."

"Where? Did you see where they all went?"

"Not really. It was this way, though."

She was pointing along the row of houses. And the scream he'd heard must have been fairly close. "Were they in Skin? You know, the big dark suits?"

"No."

"Good." Lawrence started running in the direction she was pointing. "Now you just wait here."

Denise hesitated, her lips quaking.

"You'll be fine." Indigo script scrolled down his glasses, giving him the convoy's current security status. It was level seven, no alerts or irregularities. He told his bracelet pearl to open a link to Ntoko and wake him. There was no light on anywhere inside the first A-frame as he ran past. The second A-frame had one window illuminated. Lawrence dashed up onto the balcony. Three squaddies were inside, sitting around a table playing cards.

The third A-frame had a light on. Its curtains were shut tight. Lawrence took the balcony stairs two at a time, heedless of the slippery dew under his bare feet. He could hear a murmur of voices from inside. The tight, guttural syllables that came from harsh, expectant men.

He pulled the wide patio door open and shoved the curtain aside. It was just as he was expecting. The girl, Jacintha, was lying on the floor, her long T-shirt pulled up round her neck, a pathetic, terrified expression on her face. Three squaddies stood around her: Morteth, Laforth and Kmyre—all from Platoon 482NK3. Laforth already had his trousers off, exposing his erection. Standing between the girl's ankles, he was using his feet to shove her legs farther apart.

All three of them turned to face Lawrence. Their shock and guilt twisted into relief when they realized it was one of their own.

"Jesus, Newton," Laforth spat. "What the fuck is the matter with you?"

"Close the goddamn door," Morteth said.

Lawrence pushed his glasses up so that Jacintha could see his face. "Have they raped you?" he asked.

She shook her head quickly. "No." Her voice was almost a squeak.

"Okay, come with me." He held a hand out and beckoned.

Kmyre stepped between Lawrence and Jacintha, put his hands on his hips and smiled challengingly. "This is our prisoner, Newton. Now either join in or fuck off."

Lawrence could smell the liquor on his breath. "Don't you get it, fuckhead? This is over. Finished. Understand?"

"How can this be over? We haven't started yet, buddy."

"You're not going to start. We're not here for this." He moved to one side. Jacintha was still lying on the floor, staring around uncertainly. Laforth was equally doubtful now; he glanced at Morteth, who was glaring at Lawrence. Jacintha managed to sit up and pull her T-shirt down over her breasts.

"Come on." Once again, Lawrence put his hand out for her.

Kmyre pushed it aside. "Get the fuck out of here, or I'll see to it that you're this terrorist's first victim."

Lawrence bent forward as if he were reaching for Jacintha. As he expected, Kmyre went for a kick to the back of his knee. He spun easily and caught Kmyre's foot as the kick went wide, pushing up hard. Kmyre yelled as his foot was propelled toward the ceiling, sending him toppling backward.

Morteth roared, lunging at Lawrence, arms outstretched. Lawrence stepped inside the bearhug and nutted him. The roar was cut off by the sound of bone snapping. Blood squirted out of Morteth's nose. Jacintha screamed.

Laforth's fist caught Lawrence just to the left of his sternum. He stumbled back from the impact of the blow, catching sight of Kmyre coming at him. This time, he went for the bearhug. A good move, but he didn't quite manage to pull it off. Kmyre predicted him, chopped at his right arm, finding the dead spot perfectly. Lawrence howled at the pain, but kept on pushing, using his momentum to take the two of them into the flapping curtain. It tore free from the rail in a storm of brass rings and they crashed onto the balcony with the thick fabric wrapping round them. Kmyre kicked out. Lawrence kicked back. Without shoes, he had little impact on the other man.

The two of them wrestled around for a moment. But with Lawrence's right arm still useless, Kmyre quickly managed to get on top. Lawrence's knee hit him in the back of his neck. He flopped away just as Laforth caught hold of Lawrence's leg, twisting hard. Lawrence went with the turn, bringing his other leg round to thud into the man's ribs. Laforth fell over, his inertia taking both of them down the stairs.

It was a bad descent, and there was very little Lawrence could do to slow it, not while he was tangled with Laforth. Elbows and knees managed to hit just about every step on the way as they tumbled. His head caught a glancing blow as well, which more than doubled the number of visible stars. They crashed onto the muddy mossgrass and broke apart.

Lawrence was aware of several people approaching at a run. Half of them were children; the others were adults from the village. He couldn't see any of his platoon. Jacintha was still screaming and light from the patio doors was splashing across the A-frame's garden where they'd landed. The whole village must have been attracted by the commotion.

It didn't bother Laforth, who aimed a kick at him. Lawrence rolled aside easily and swung a punch. His accuracy wasn't too good with the pain distracting him. Laforth half ducked, receiving the blow on his shoulder, and tried to tackle Lawrence. As he closed in, Lawrence kneed him on the jaw, sending his head snapping back. Lawrence grinned down with savage satisfaction as Laforth fell heavily, barely conscious. Then Kmyre landed on his back, and they both collapsed onto the damp mossgrass beside Laforth.

"That's him," Denise yelled. "That's the man."

Great, Lawrence thought, as he blocked Kmyre's chop to his Adam's apple, they'll think I'm the rapist.

"They're like savages," a man's voice called out.

"Stop them!" Denise cried. "Stop them. They're hurting them."

"Jacintha? Jacintha, where are you?"

Kmyre kicked Lawrence in the ribs, flipping him over. He rolled twice and crouched. Charged at Kmyre, sending them both sprawling again.

"Stop it!" Denise yelled. "Please, someone."

"Jacintha?"

"Father. Father, I'm here."

"Jacintha."

"Call the dragon," Denise said. "It'll make them stop."

'Wo, child!"

"Are you all right? Jacintha, did they harm you?"

"Stop it, stop it!"

"I'm all right, Father."

With Kmyre pressed against him, hands clawing wildly, there was little Lawrence could do except claw back—the worst kind of wrestling, two drunks writhing round in a gutter. Legs scrabbled and jerked against each other as they rolled again and again.

"Oh please!" Denise wailed.

Brilliant white light stabbed down. Both Lawrence and Kmyre froze. Skin hands closed around them, pulling them apart forcefully.

"What the fuck is going on here?" Ntoko demanded.

Lawrence wheezed down some air, happy to let the Skin support him. He wasn't sure his own legs could do that right now, given how badly they were shaking.

A lot of people had gathered, illuminated by Skin helmet lights: villagers clutching their children; squaddies in shorts, blinking sleep from their eyes; still more villagers arriving.

"Well?" Ntoko asked.

"They—the girl," Lawrence gasped. "I heard a scream."

"Uh-huh." Ntoko glanced at Jacintha, who was in her father's arms, while her mother and Denise clung to her. "Shit," he murmured, and looked at Kmyre in the Skin suit's hold. He was smeared in mud and blood. Laforth was trying to climb to his feet, a painful process. Morteth stood on the balcony, one hand clamped over his nose, pinching the nostrils. His shirt was soaked scarlet by the astonishing amount of blood that had poured out of his mashed nose.

Ntoko beckoned the duty Skin sergeant over, and the two of them put their heads together. Lawrence could hear the occasional murmur.

The two sergeants faced the crowd. "Okay, people, that's it for tonight," Ntoko said. "You three"—and his finger stabbed out at Morteth, Laforth" and Kmyre—"back into your billet, where you will remain until oh-seven-hundred hours. Travers, you have sentry duty. If they come out before the designated hour, you are authorized to use maximum force."

"Sir." One of the Skins saluted.

Ntoko went over to Jacintha and her family. "Ma'am, do you require medical assistance?"

"No," her father said. His arm had tightened around her. "Not from you." Jacintha gave a miserable nod of confirmation.

"Very well. Could you please return to your house for the rest of the night? And I can assure you, there won't be a repeat of this incident."

"Thank you."

Lawrence was impressed by the way such a simple phrase could be made to project so much derision.

The Skin holding Lawrence handed him over to Nic and Amersy. The two of them had to give him plenty of support as he limped back to their A-frame. Everyone else was heading back to bed, talking in low tones.

Denise suddenly appeared in front of Lawrence. She smiled up shyly. "Thanks." She raced away back to her family before he could say anything.

Nic laughed. "Got yourself a new girlfriend, Lawrence. A looker, huh?'

"Give me a fucking break."

Ntoko appeared where Denise had been a moment before. He wasn't smiling. "What the fuck do you think you're doing, man? You want to be a hero, do it on the company's time."

"Come on, Sarge, like you'd play it differently."

"I would have got me some backup. Don't you learn anything in training?"

"I called you."

"Jesus."

They arrived at their A-frame and went up the stairs to the balcony. Lawrence had to grip the handrail. Now that the adrenaline and endorphins were wearing off, he seemed to hurt everywhere. As soon as he was in the lounge, he fell into the sofa. "I need a drink."

Kibbo cracked a can of Bluesaucer and handed it to him. Lawrence took a sip and decided that was just too macho. Ntoko sat beside him, and opened up the first-aid kit. "Hold still, hero."

Despite the medicines, Lawrence was stiff everywhere when he woke the next morning. He took a hot shower, which eased things a bit. One ankle was badly swollen. Both legs were grazed. He had bruises everywhere. But Ntoko had insisted that the injuries were all superficial. "Nothing that gets you out of duty."

He had breakfast with Nic and Amersy, who had a good time joshing him over the fight. The sergeant didn't eat with them; he'd left the A-frame while Lawrence was still in the shower. He arrived back as they were finishing the meal. "You two get lost," he told Nic and Amersy.

"So what's happening about last night?" Lawrence asked.

Ntoko poured himself some coffee and sat down opposite Lawrence. "I've been talking to the captain about last night He wants this shut down fast."

"What does that mean?"

"It means no righteous heroes kicking up a fuss when we get back to barracks."

"What are you saying, that those three get off free? They were going to gang-rape a seventeen-year-old, for Fate's sake. I'm not eating that kind of shit sandwich."

"We all know what they were doing, and they're not getting away with it. But there are ways of dealing with situations like this where we don't all have to lose out."

"How?" Lawrence asked with deep suspicion.

"Okay, let's take it your way, clean and honest, all our dirty laundry out there in public. Morteth, Laforth and Kmyre stand trial. They're guilty, obviously, they get shipped home under guard and serve their fifteen years. Fair enough. But after the facts get read out in court, there's going to have to be an inquiry to find out why it happened."

"They're a bunch of drunken bastards. That's why it happened."

"Sure. But specifically, why didn't Lyaute have enough discipline over his men to prevent them even thinking about this? Why didn't Four-eight-two-NK-three's sergeant stop what was going on? It's the NCOs who take the immediate blame, you know that. How come the Skins on guard duty didn't see what was happening and step in?"

"They should have."

"I know, man. But things are damn slack around here. You've seen how everyone's been helping themselves to everything these poor old hillbillies have. Lyaute should have stepped in hard and fast right at the start. But he didn't, because he wanted a quiet life. So it just keeps getting worse until those three assholes pull a stunt like last night's and land all of us up shit creek. If this ever gets on an official report, half of the convoy is going to have a reprimand on our files."

Lawrence drank some tea, which was getting colder than he liked. "You mean if I do what's right and testify to the commander I'll screw everyone else?"

"Like I said, there are ways of dealing with this. Lyaute can operate through different channels, if you let him."

"What sort of channels?"

"Okay, I'll lay this on the line for you. Say nothing, and you'll come out of this campaign with a commendation on your report that's better than anything you could get for saving the general's ass in full combat and there'll be a stripe on your shoulder for sure. Morteth, Laforth and Kmyre will be quietly shitlisted once we get home. They'll be discharged or given latrine duty for the rest of their lives, and they certainly won't get any sort of campaign bonus, neither will they get any kind of reference from Z-B. Without that, no employer on the planet will touch them. It's the slammer without walls."

"And Lyaute gets himself out of this with a clean record."

"Yeah. Along with a whole bunch of other people who don't deserve a bad rap because he screwed up. And next time, he'll know how to run a command properly. That's got to be worth something, Lawrence. You and I know we've got damn few decent officers."

"Don't, Sarge. Don't try and sell this by telling me I'm going to be improving that useless asshole."

"Okay, man. You look at it any way you want to. But it's your call, and you've got to make it now. This can't be ducked. And if it helps any, I'd have done the same thing last night. It was the right thing."

"Something you haven't mentioned."

"Yeah, what?"

"The girl. Jacintha. What about Jacintha?"

"What about her?"

"Three of Z-B's finest tried to rape her."

"But they didn't rape her, did they? Thanks to the hero of the hour. She had a nasty shock, which is never going to be repeated, because we're never coming back. She can get on with her lotus-eating life again. Six months' time, we'll just be a bad memory fading away."

"That's it? She doesn't count?"

"This is politics, man. Her stake in this isn't as big as ours. So what's your decision?"

Lawrence grinned, even though the bruise on his lip hurt when he did it. At least the sarge was being diplomatic, pretending he even had a choice. He knew damn well if he carried this through and screwed Lyaute and the other sergeants he'd be the one who wound up shitlisted.

That was the way the companies worked. The way they'd always worked. The way they always would work.

He drank some more of his cold tea. "I guess I must have got these bruises falling downstairs last night."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The court-martial was held in the banqueting suite of the Barnsdale Hotel, which was barracks to eight of Z-B's platoons and half of the industrial technology corps. There was a dais at one end of the long room, normally used by a band. Today it had a single table with three chairs for the presiding officers, of which Ebrey Zhang was president of the court. Arranged below them, on the dance floor, were another two tables. One was occupied by the prosecution team, led by the Z-B attorney, who was being supported by the Memu Bay police magistrate, Heather Fernandes, and two more high-powered legal assistants. The defense table had two chairs, where Hal sat with Lieutenant Bralow.

Behind them, fifty plastic chairs had been arranged in rows to seat Z-B personnel, selected members of the public and a few media representatives. The first row was reserved for the mayor and whoever he chose to have with him—a couple of old friends, Margret Reece and Detective Galliani. Ten Skins were standing guard around the room, being pointedly ignored by the civilian audience. For once, the power supply was uninterrupted, allowing the lightcones to shine at full intensity.

When Lawrence arrived, escorting Hal, he was disgusted by the weighting. The kid had taken one look at the layout and virtually cringed.

"It's a fucking show trial," Lawrence growled at Bralow while Hal was distracted. The lieutenant answered with a slightly guilty shrug.

Lawrence took a chair from the audience section and brought it up to the defense table. He sat on it and gave Hal a solid, reassuring pat on the knee. The kid responded with a pathetically grateful smile.

Nobody remonstrated with Lawrence. He was wearing his full dress uniform, displaying more decorations than most of the officers in the room. If he wanted to stand by a squaddie under his command, none of the NCOs helping with the court arrangements were going to stop him. Bryant saw where he was and glared before sitting with the other officers.

The sergeant major called for silence. The presiding officers marched in and took their seats on the dais.

Lawrence couldn't fault the procedure. Prosecution made its case well. The details of the case were explained to the court. Selective sections of various police interviews with Hal were also played. Twenty minutes in, and already it looked bad.

Detective Galliani was called to the stand and told the court about Hal's alibi, which the kid had stuck to the whole time.

"Did you manage to trace the taxi that the defendant claims he took?" prosecution asked.

"No, sir," Galliani answered. "The traffic regulator AS has no log of any taxi being used on that street at that time of night. And Mr. Grabowski was most insistent on the time he left the barracks. In fact, we pulled the logs for every taxi in Memu Bay that day. None of them were unaccounted for at either of the times when Mr. Grabowski said he was traveling to and from the alleged brothel."

"Ah yes," prosecution said smugly. "The brothel the defendant says he visited. Does it exist, Detective?"

"No, sir. Mr. Grabowski himself identified Minster Avenue as the street where this alleged brothel was situated. We investigated every house. They are all private residences."

Lawrence had visited Minster Avenue himself two days ago. Not in Skin, he wore civilian clothes, a shirt with a high collar to cover his valves. Before he went, he trawled images of the street from the town hall planning department and showed them to Hal, who'd pointed unhesitatingly to number eighteen.

Standing outside the house Lawrence took his time looking around. There was the neat little front garden with its wrought-iron fence, just as Hal described. It guarded a squat white stone facade, with big windows, the paintwork clean and bright. Like all the others along the street, a home for the upper-middle classes. Lawrence activated his bracelet pearl and called up his Prime. A complex indigo image slid across his optronic membranes as the quasi-sentient program decompressed from its storage block. Perhaps it was his imagination, but it seemed brighter than the bracelet pearl's standard icons.

He opened a link into Memu Bay's datapool and told the Prime to trawl the household AS and the local traffic logs. Information began to scroll up almost at once. Whatever software the KillBoy resistance group used to cover their tracks, it was excellent, which strengthened his suspicions that they had compromised e-alpha.

Number eighteen's household AS told him nothing, because it had been inactive for over a week. The system was still waiting repair. Smaller independent sections of the house's network were functioning on autonomous backup mode, but they didn't have memory logs. Strangest of all, the security system was also offline; its sensors weren't even drawing power.

Minster Avenue's road traffic logs confirmed there had been very few vehicles driving along the street during the night Hal claimed he'd visited. Certainly no taxi had pulled up outside number eighteen. But the Prime dug deeper into the local transport network. Between 1:48 and 2:10 the network dataflow had increased by a small percentage.

After Hal had left.

There was nothing in the logs to account for the increase.

"Shutting up shop," Lawrence muttered to himself. The minute data abnormality wouldn't convince a court that had Hal's DNA sample taken off the girl. He wasn't even sure if it would be admissible in court. But it was good enough for him: an electronic graffiti roughly equivalent to spraying KillBoy was here across the front of the house.

Lawrence walked over the road and rang the brass bell. It took a minute before the black front door swung open. A woman in an apron stood in the hallway, giving him a suspicious stare. "Yes?"

"Elena Melchett?"

"Yes? Who are you?"

"Lawrence Newton. I'm covering the alien rape case."

Elena Melchett didn't look as if she wanted to cooperate with the media. "So?"

"Ah, the alien suspect claims he was somewhere in this street when the incident happened. It's his alibi. I was wondering if you had seen anything?"

"Mr. Newton, that obscene crime took place at one o'clock in the morning. I was in bed asleep. I certainly didn't see any alien thug hanging around outside."

"I didn't think so, thank you. Er..." He fished around in his pockets while Elena Melchett grew increasingly impatient. He found his media card and activated a visual file. "Sorry to be such a pain, but do you recognize this man?" The card's screen showed a picture of Hal.

Elena Melchett studied it. "No."

"Really? That's odd."

"What do you mean?"

Lawrence told the card to switch to another file. "This is a blueprint of your hall, isn't it?" He peered past the woman at the big staircase that curved up to the second-floor landing.

This time Elena Melchett barely glanced at the image. "It's similar."

"I'd say it's identical. Even down to the marble tiling."

"What do you want, Mr. Newton?"

"That alien suspect, he put this image together with an architect program. How would he know what your hallway looked like if he'd never been here? You did say you didn't recognize him, didn't you?"

"Get out!" Elena Melchett ordered him in a strident voice. "Out, and don't come back. If I see you around here again, I'll call the police." The glossy door slammed shut.

The prosecution had got Hal up on the witness stand. Lawrence could finally appreciate the saying about someone being his own worst enemy. It wasn't going well. In fact it was excruciating just being in the same room.

The prosecution wanted to know why he'd jumped curfew.

Hal—good old honest fresh-from-the-farm Hal—said he did it because he was desperate for sex.

The prosecution wanted to know where he'd gone that night to hunt for sex.

Hal told them the brothel on Minster Avenue, doggedly sticking to his version of events. Lawrence presumed it was because his mother had always told him to tell the truth.

The prosecution tore that version of the fateful night to shreds, and there wasn't any evidence that Lieutenant Bra-low could produce to back Hal up. Then they went on to ask about the genetic samples. Hal claimed the girl was a whore, and that the rest of it—the rape allegation, the nonexistent brothel—was all a setup by KillBoy.

It didn't go down well. Francine Hazeldine's haunting statement had already been played back to the court. Lawrence had watched the presiding officers as her fragile voice had described what happened that night, detail by agonizing detail.

The more the farce carried on, the more Lawrence admired KillBoy's strategy and resourcefulness, and the more angry he became. Hal was just too easy. He wanted to stand up in the banqueting suite and face the locals, asking: "Why don't you try this one with me?" But then, the devastating effect that the trial would have on Z-B's morale was the final triumph of that elegant strategy.

He was also haunted by the terrible specter of responsibility. There should have been a trial very similar to this last time he was on Thallspring. The fact that it had never happened was in no small part due to him. Justice then had been circumvented rather than served. Now justice was coming back to strike them with a vengeance.

Lawrence spent most of the time wondering if the two could possibly be connected.

Only by a God with a very twisted sense of humor, he decided.

After five hours of testimony and witness examination, the presiding officers recessed the court so they might consider their verdict. They took ninety minutes, which Lawrence thought was a diplomatic enough length of time given that they'd already decided that verdict before the court-martial even began.

Hal stood in front of the dais facing the presiding officers, his shoulders squared, as Ebrey Zhang announced the findings.

On the charge of disobeying a direct order and breaking curfew: guilty.

On the charge of misleading the local police: guilty.

On the charge of assault and rape of a minor: guilty.

"No!" Hal yelled, incensed. "I'm not."

There was a sigh from the audience, not of jubilation, but a shared sense of justice and victory. Against all the odds, they'd been given the right outcome.

Hal sat down again while Lieutenant Bralow gave what Lawrence had to acknowledge was an eloquent plea for clemency. Then everyone stood for the sentence.

A very troubled-looking Ebrey Zhang said: "Halford Grabowski, given the grave nature of this abominable crime, we find we have no alternative but to impose the most severe sentence it is within this court's power to issue. You are hereby sentenced to death."

Hal Grabowski went berserk. He screamed obscenities at the presiding officers and started to run for the door. Anyone who got in his way was felled with powerful punches from his hulking frame. The audience scrambled for safety, also screaming.

It took two Skins to hold on to the enraged squaddie and administer a sedative. His unconscious body was dragged out of the banqueting suite.

Ebrey Zhang straightened his uniform and cleared his throat. "Sentence to be carried out at dawn the day after tomorrow. Leave to appeal is denied. Lieutenant Bralow, please inform your client of the outcome. This court is now concluded."

The presiding officers filed out. Lawrence didn't move.

Bralow turned to him and said: "I really am sorry. He didn't deserve this." As he didn't get an answer, he nodded nervously and hurried out. The audience was lining up at the doors at the rear to get out and back to their town and their lives. It wasn't long before everyone else had left.

Amersy and the remaining members of 435NK9 lined up in front of the defense counsel table. Lawrence looked at them one by one. "If anybody wants to stick with Zantiu-Braun, you'd better leave now."

A couple of them snorted in derision; the rest simply waited expectantly for their sarge to tell them what to do next.

"Okay," Lawrence said. "Time for us to start playing unfair."

* * *

This time Josep drove a car out to the spaceport. He arrived in the middle of the afternoon and passed through the main gate with the identity of Andyl Pyne, a junior manager with the catering company that had the franchise for the administration block. The spaceport's general management AS assigned his car a slot in park 7. Because of Andyl Pyne's somewhat lowly status, he had a long walk back to the block itself.

He carried a slim briefcase with him, de rigueur for management of any level. Sunglasses were also obligatory, so he wore a cheap plastic pair. His light green one-piece coverall wasn't quite regular, but it had the catering company logo on its breast pocket. He had boots rather than shoes. All in all, his appearance was well inside the permissible norm.

Ahead of him, the afternoon sun shone on a five-sided structure with slightly convex walls of darkened glass. From where he was, the administration block resembled a closed-up tulip flower with a blunt tip. It stood by itself to one end of the terminal building, away from the much taller control tower. Although the building was only five stories high, the architect's plans that his Prime had trawled out of the data-pool showed a service level and another five floors below-ground.

When he reached the main entrance he had to repeat the whole security identification procedure, allowing the AS to check his palm and facial pattern. Security in general was a lot tighter in the administration block than the main terminal, thanks to all the Z-B staff that worked there now.

Inside, he ignored the reception desk and the two Skins standing beside it, walking directly to the bank of elevators in the central lobby. No one who came in on a regular basis would be intimidated or even concerned by them anymore. He took an elevator down to the first sublevel, where building maintenance had its offices, along with the canteen. So far everything matched the floor plan and security camera images they'd trawled.

Josep went into the toilets and claimed an empty cubicle. The AS logged him through a security camera. Coverage inside the administration block was almost universal, with only places like the toilet cubicles free of cameras. Not that their absence mattered: the AS followed everyone's position constantly, you couldn't trade places or switch with anybody else. It was Andyl Pyne who went into the cubicle; if anyone else came out the AS would sound the alarm.

It wasn't the AS that Josep was trying to avoid, he simply needed time to make a few alterations. At this stage, sharp-eyed humans were his greatest worry. His Prime went into the administration block's network and began editing the monitor logs. The AS soon registered that it was Sket Magersan who was in the cubicle. Once the switch of electronic records was complete, Josep stood still and concentrated. The d-written organelles deep inside his cells quickened and began to modify his flesh. Facial skin pigmentation darkened slightly. Features started to morph. The tip of his nose broadened out, while the nostrils widened. Lips fattened up. His cheeks sagged slightly, then stiffened, giving the impression of a flatter jawbone. Irises became a light hazel.

There was a small vanity mirror in his briefcase. Josep took it out and examined his rearranged face.

They'd spent a long time observing Sket Magersan as the Z-B spaceplane pilot drank in Durrell's bars and ate in its restaurants. He'd been chosen because he was similar in height, weight, age and general profile, so Josep's d-written systems would be able to imitate his physical appearance without too much trouble. His voice was deeper than Josep's, and his accent was pure Capetown, but a direct link with a neurotronic pearl running a vocalsynthesizer program took care of that. Josep even had the man's walk down pat; his shoulders had a lavish swing when he hurried.

The image in the mirror was that of Sket. Nodding in satisfaction, Josep stripped off his green one-piece and reversed it. This way round it was a standard dark-gray Z-B pilot's flight suit, complete with insignia, baggy leg pockets and elastic waist.

Josep stepped out of the cubicle and took his time washing his hands, making sure the toilet's security camera could see him clearly. The Prime monitored the security AS, but there was no caution alert issued. He went back to the elevators, and descended to sublevel five.

Simon Roderick had decided on the simplest system possible to monitor the key vault. Keep electronics to an absolute minimum and rely on human observers. That distrust of electronics extended to not informing the spaceport security AS that a covert operation was being mounted. They didn't even tell the local security staff.

According to the administration block records, the office on sublevel four was assigned to Quan and Raines, who were Third Fleet quartermaster staff. They were the ones in charge of spare parts being shipped down from the starships to keep the Xiantis flying, working with their own AS to keep expenditure to the lowest level possible. Even the data that flowed into the office from local networks supported their assignment, although it did contain a large amount of information not directly applicable, such as staff schedules and flight profiles. Typical bloatware overload.

Simon occupied the office next to theirs. The AS had him listed as a spaceplane avionics systems manager, a title that could be confirmed by the number of boxes and small packages that kept getting taken inside, all of them labeled with electronics department bar codes.

The only thing missing from the two offices was a security camera. Simon wasn't going to risk the opposition being able to spy on his own spies.

They'd set up the first office as an observation center. One wall was now covered in sheet screens, relaying various scenes from the administration block. Each one was connected to a single fixed-position lens via fiberoptic cable. Picture quality was well down on standard sensors, but this way there was no electrical cabling. A power flow, however small, could always be detected. The screens even had their own independent power supply, a bank of cells in one corner. That way there was no drain on the administration block circuits, which could be tracked through the datapool.

Adul Quan watched the elevator doors open on sublevel five. A man in a Z-B flight uniform walked out.

"Who've we got here?" Adul grunted. Procedure was to confirm everybody who arrived on sublevel five. The screen feed was linked to a desktop pearl that had no connection to the local network: instead, it was loaded with personnel files. Whoever the new arrival was, he walked right underneath the lens covering the elevators.

"Sket Magersan," Braddock read off the card's display.

"One minute." He was frowning as he riffled through a stack of hard copy. Both he and Adul had privately bitched about Simon Roderick insisting on keeping printed records. But their chief was convinced that e-alpha had been compromised, leaving their data memories wide open to manipulation. So every morning, the spaceport's personnel schedules were printed out. This way they could check who was supposed to be in the administration block and who was suspect.

Braddock glanced down Magersan's sheet, stopped and read it carefully. "Shit, he's supposed to be on leave today. Spent the last five days flying."

Adul straightened up and peered at the other screens covering sublevel five. "So what's he doing here, and down at that level?"

"Good question." Braddock went to stand beside his colleague. They watched Magersan walk along a corridor, nodding affably to people.

"Heading toward the vault," Adul said in a low, excited tone.

"That's not certain."

"Bullshit." Adul was on the edge of his seat.

Magersan had arrived at the communications department He gave the security sensor a codeword and put his hand over the scanner. His voiceprint and blood vessel pattern must have matched. The door slid open.

"Sir!" Braddock was heading for their office's connecting door. He opened it hurriedly. "Sir, I think we have something."

There were three offices making up the communications department, linked by a short corridor. Security cameras confirmed that as usual there were only two people inside, one in the first office, one in the third. When the outer door opened, Josep slipped in and waited for it to shut. Prime edited him out of the security cameras' vision. Neither of the two Z-B officers inside the department had heard the door. He paused for a second, then ordered his Prime to call the man in the first office. It was a query from the maintenance division about a glitch in a spaceplane satellite tracking unit, with the quasi-sentient program generating the supervisor's image and voice.

When the communications officer started to answer, Josep walked quickly past the office and went into the second. His Prime disabled three alarm sensors that were triggered by his entry. He shut the door and locked it with a manual bolt, then drew a quiet breath as he waited to see if either of the officers had reacted. Images from the security cameras hung behind his eyes, showing both of them at work behind then-desks.

The key vault had a big steel door reinforced by boron longchain fiber. Before Z-B arrived, it had stored the gold and platinum used in the microgee manufacture of electronic components. Now the metal had been shipped up to the star-ships, leaving a lot of empty space for Z-B to store its keys.

There were two locks that worked on deep-scanned hand patterns. They had to be activated simultaneously by two different people. Josep took a pair of slim dragon-extruded modules from his trouser leg pockets and applied the first one over the top lock. Its surface undulated slowly as it melded itself to the scanner. The second module went over the bottom lock. He activated them together, and the magnetic bolts snapped out with a clunk loud enough to make Josep flinch.

He pulled at the heavy door, swinging it back. The vault was a cube, measuring eight meters along each side. Bright lights came on in the ceiling as he walked in. The walls were lined by metal grid shelves; a single metal table stood in the center. There were fifteen black plastic cases stacked up on the shelving—seventy-five centimeters long, fifteen centimeters high. Z-B's silver emblem was embossed on the top of each one.

Josep took the first one off the shelf and put it on the table. He ran a sensor over it, which drew a complete blank. There was no detectable power source inside. If it was alarmed, they'd done it in a way he couldn't beat. He flipped the catch and opened the lid. His Prime reported that the datapool remained silent. No alarm.

The case contained three trays stacked on top of each other, each with a hundred memory chips. He scanned them quickly, looking for the number they wanted. The Xianti flights for the next five days had already been scheduled, and their communication code assigned to them. He and Ray had chosen one in four days' time, which would give everyone else involved in the operation plenty of time to prepare and fly over from Memu Bay.

He found the designated key in the third case he opened. The little memory chip fit into the interface slot on his bracelet pearl, and the code transferred without a hitch.

Josep smiled broadly. That was it. The last major obstacle eliminated. Not that the rest of it was easy, but the odds of a successful completion had just risen considerably. So much was waiting behind this moment, so many awesome possibilities.

He put the case back on the shelf exactly as he'd found it and left the vault.

Simon Roderick waited patiently outside the elevators on sublevel five. His DNI provided him with a simple audio channel to Adul, who was watching the screen in his office on the floor above.

"He's closing the vault," Adul said. "Gadgets coming off the locks. Putting them back in his pocket."

Simon shifted his sensorium focus. The blue-gray corridor around him melted into hazier shadows. It was sliced by long, thin threads of brilliant emerald light, lurking just below every fuzzy surface. Some of them glowed with an intensity that rivaled the sun, while others were more delicate, flickering at frequencies almost too fast to notice. He was even aware of the little jade ember alight inside his own skull.

The standard human senses of taste, touch, sight, smell and hearing provide a phenomenal range of input for the brain to cope with. In most cases it does so by subtly concentrating on one sense at a time, sliding the others into a peripheral mode. By using this inherent neural programming ability, geneticists reasoned that the sensorium could be expanded to cope with new inputs. The batches of Rodericks provided them with a perfect opportunity to experiment, by adapting and modifying each fresh generation.

The idea behind it, developing an ability to "see" electrical patterns, was an old one. Psychics, shamans and con artists had been claiming they could find north for centuries, along with other mystical perceptual traits. The discovery of magnetite in human brain cells back in the late twentieth century had bolstered their claims with the kind of pseudo-science backing such people thrived on. Given the minuscule quantities of magnetite actually involved, it was extremely unlikely that any of them could act as a human compass. In any case, there was no specific interface between the particles and the brain's neural tissue. That had to wait for genetic engineering to manipulate cells, incorporating magnetite particles into a ferro-vesicle cell model. The actions of a magnetic field on the particles suspended in serous fluid were found to generate discernible neural impulses.

After that, the alignment of the ferro-vesicles to provide a valid image had to be determined, along with its size and how the impulses were best introduced into the brain. By the time the SK2s were gestated, the design was essentially complete. Their electric sense organ took the form of a membranous crown with a nerve path direct into the medulla oblongata. It allowed them to see wires carrying current, or dataflow. But most important, and the reason the Rodericks wanted the ability in the first place, it allowed them to sense the impulses of another human brain. They were never going to be able to read thoughts directly, but by observing a brain in action, they could determine the emotional composition, see how much creativity was going into the thought processes, how much memory. As a lie detector, the ferro-vesicle organ was almost infallible. In negotiations with the senior management of other companies they had a profound advantage.

"He's coming out," Adul said.

Simon started walking forward. There were a few other people in the corridor. He certainly couldn't risk clearing the building; that would have alerted Sket Magersan. Simon was already quite worried about the man's capabilities; the last thing he wanted was for this operation to degenerate into violence.

He passed one man whose aura was bright and dense, barely distorted by his clothes. It corresponded to the contentment running through his brain. Another man was considerably dimmer, with areas resembling sunspots amid his emanations. Simon was experienced enough to spot a hangover without even having to ask any calibrating questions.

Sket Magersan stepped out of the communications division. In the electromagnetic spectrum he was a human nova. Simon almost stopped, he was so surprised at how bright the man's aura was. For a moment he thought he might even be some kind of android. But no, the body's bioelectric patterns were all recognizably human, simply more intense by an order of magnitude. He also carried several electronic modules in his pockets. Tight flux lines pulsed around them, indicating high-level power cells.

Simon didn't recognize any of them. It was hard to resolve anything through the vibrant electromagnetic glare, but the secondary patterns induced by the internal systems were fabulously complex and pervasive. He couldn't spot the usual signature of neurotronic pearls.

When the two of them passed in the corridor, Sket Magersan's thoughts registered a small degree of nervousness, but nothing to indicate suspicion. Simon wondered what his own brain activity must reveal. If he'd known this was what he was up against he would never have allowed himself to be in the same building as the ... refined man and his alien gadgetry. This discovery could well have a value greater than every asset realized on Thallspring. Where the hell did he come from? And what was causing that aura? One thing was for sure, this wasn't Sket Magersan, the pilot who was in Z-B's files.

"Sir?" Adul queried.

"He might have weapons, but I'm not sure. Proceed as planned."

Josep pressed for an elevator. It took a few seconds to arrive. He resisted the impulse to shout at the slow old mechanism to hurry. I did it! Walked into Z-B's most secure facility and stole their crown jewels. Their last remaining problem would be to get the dragon through spaceplane cargo security. He and Raymond had already developed ideas about that. The elevator doors opened. A man came out, giving Josep a distracted nod. Josep stood to one side, then walked in. He pressed for the first sublevel. The doors closed and the elevator began to rise.

A quick change of identity back to Andyl Pyne in the toilets. Maybe thirty minutes after that he'd be back in the car and away from the spaceport.

His d-written neural cells lost all contact with the administration block network. How could that happen? He frowned, but the lights were still on and the elevator still moving. Maybe the elevator was somehow isolating him from the node. But it hadn't happened on the way down.

Josep blinked as he swayed against the wall. The control panel with its buttons and illuminated floor display wavered as if he were looking at it through water.

What the fuck is this?

He jabbed the emergency stop button. Nothing happened. The elevator was still moving. His legs sagged, taking him down to his knees. Blotches danced across his vision. There was no air. He drew down a deep breath, but it made no difference. His strength was fading fast.

Air, he had to have air. He called up what strength he could and punched at the door, where the two halves sealed in the middle. The metal buckled under his fist. It was smeared with blood. He punched it again, and the dent deepened. There was no gap between. Another punch. This one had no effect. He didn't even hear the bang of the impact. His forehead was resting against the door. It wasn't cold. He couldn't feel anything. His last conscious thought was directed at the Prime stored in his bracelet pearl: help.

* * *

That evening they asked Hal if he wanted a priest in the morning. He told them to go and fuck themselves with a Skin dick. They asked what he wanted for his last meal. He said a boiled egg. After that, they left him alone.

Dawn was at five-twenty-two.

At four-thirty, Lawrence and Dennis came to visit. Hal was being kept in one of the cellars under the Barnsdale Hotel. Two Skins were on permanent guard outside the tough wooden door, and the master-at-arms had fitted Hal with a remote restraint bracelet—just in case. Nobody was really expecting any trouble. The Skins got a call alerting them to Lawrence's arrival a minute before he turned up. He and Dennis were pushing a small hotel kitchen trolley along in front of them.

"But he didn't want a meal," one of the Skins said.

"I know," Lawrence said. "But we brought it anyway. It's a fillet steak, his favorite." He took the silver top off a plate so the Skin could see.

"Okay then, you'd better go in."

Hal was lying on the small cot in the corner of the room, hands behind his head. He looked around when Lawrence and Dennis rattled the trolley across the floor. "I told them I didn't want any of that crap."

"The chef's a local," Lawrence said. "And the guilt's starting to sink in. If we go back and tell him he left it under the grill too long he'll probably need therapy for the rest of his life. You know what a pain these liberals are."

Hal grinned and went over to the trolley. The guard shut the door.

"Sarge," Hal said quietly. "I know what you said, but I've been thinking. I want to take the injection. It doesn't hurt none, and it'll be just like going to sleep. I figure that's for the best, you know."

"Hal, I need you to face the firing squad. I'm sorry, I know it's going to be tough, the toughest it could ever get for anyone. But that's the only way."

"Only way for what?"

Dennis bent down and pulled the trolley's white linen cloth aside. There was a field-aid case on the lower shelf.

"What's that for?" Hal asked.

"A simple way out of this mess," Lawrence said. "Which is the only thing that worries me. Someone else might figure this out. Sit down, Hal."

Hal did as he was told.

Dennis put the case down beside him and opened it up. He unwound two coils of clear thin tubing and plugged them into Hal's neck valves.

"Now listen," Lawrence said, and started to explain.

It was uncharacteristically cold for Memu Bay as the first traces of wan predawn light skimmed eagerly over the horizon. Myles Hazeldine had put on a warm woolen coat to accompany Ebrey Zhang out into the orchard garden at the back of the Barnsdale Hotel. The orchard had been selected because it was enclosed by a tall stone wall.

Myles assumed Z-B wanted to keep the execution private from the morbidly curious local citizens. But Zhang had told him the wall would also help stop the bullets. It had taken a moment for Myles to understand what he meant. "A firing squad?" the horrified mayor had asked. He couldn't believe that even Z-B was this barbaric. Like the rest of Memu Bay, he'd assumed they'd simply administer an overdose of some sedative. That Grabowski would quietly slip from sleep into death and that would be the end of it.

He should have known better. This whole terrible event was never going to finish with quiet dignity. Now he was going to have to stand and watch as bullets tore into a man with an explosion of blood. It was an outrage against civilized decency. He couldn't even feel glad that Grabowski was going to die like this. He'd wanted justice, certainly. But this was more like medieval vengeance.

"The condemned man does have this right," Zhang had explained awkwardly. "There are three methods of execution, and he can select one. If he doesn't, the court will decide for him. It is unusual to ask for firing squad." There was a thin line of perspiration on Zhang's forehead, despite the early morning chill.

Myles didn't ask what the third method was. He followed Zhang to a place at the rear of the orchard garden. His eyes never left the single post that had been set into the ground in front of the far wall. The earth was fresh around its base. Sandbags were stacked up behind it.

This was everything his ancestors had left Earth for. The ultimate act of callous inhumanity. Myles jammed his shaking hands into his pockets and looked at the grass. Think of Francine, he ordered himself sternly, the terror she went through.

Someone was barking out orders. Myles forced his head up.

The sergeant major marched the eight-strong firing squad out of the door and halted them behind the line painted on the grass seven meters away from the post. The unlucky squaddies had been chosen by the old short-straw draw. He'd spoken with each of them beforehand, telling them that Grabowski would want someone who could shoot straight and clean, and they were not to let him down no matter their feelings, assuring them that this duty would never go on their record.

When they'd left the briefing, sullen and subdued, he'd quietly thanked Allah that he wouldn't actually be pulling a trigger himself. Then Lawrence Newton slipped in and had a quiet word. The sergeant major had listened to his old comrade's request and nodded agreement. Anything else, he didn't want to know about.

Edmond Orlov and Corporal Amersy led the condemned man out into the orchard. Hal showed no emotion as they stopped him by the post. Edmond tied his wrists together behind the post and whispered something to his friend. A smile played over Hal's lips. Amersy offered him a blindfold, which he accepted.

The two men from Platoon 435NK9 saluted their comrade and marched away.

The sergeant major looked to Ebrey Zhang, who gave a slight nod.

"Squad, raise your weapons."

The sound of palms slapping precisely against weapons carried across the orchard.

"Take aim."

"Hey, Zhang," Hal called out "You are one miserable fuckup of a commander, man."

"Fire."

Myles Hazeldine threw up. The sound of eight rifles firing at once had stunned him. It suspended time in silence. Then he casually turned his head and saw Grabowski's body shudder as it was thrown back against the post. Blood burst out of his chest with frightening speed. And the big young man was falling, slumping forward onto his knees, with only his bound hands holding his ruined torso up. Sound returned to Myles's universe, a roaring in his ears. A human being had been slaughtered in front of him. Because of him, the deal he'd cut. He knelt forward and vomited helplessly onto the orchard's dew-moistened grass.

Traditionally they were called the burial detail, though on Thallspring there would never be any grave dug for a member of Zantiu-Braun. Company policy governing death away from Earth was for a cremation and scattering of the ashes.

Hal Grabowski's own platoon had demanded the right to perform that last duty, and Captain Bryant certainly wasn't going to try to say no—he really didn't need any open rebellion among his own men right now. So while the firing squad was marched quickly away they walked out of the hotel with a stretcher and a bodybag. They untied Hal's hands as Ebrey Zhang was supporting the retching mayor and laid their dead friend out on the blood-soaked grass. He was lifted gently into the bodybag, which was zipped up, then transferred onto the stretcher.

They carried him away as the mayor and the senior officers went back into the hotel. The cleanup detail emerged after that, to take down the post and remove the sandbags.

There was the blood to be washed away, too. By midmorning, there would be no trace left of the execution.

The burial detail carried the stretcher through the rear corridors of the hotel and out into the small courtyard used by delivery trucks. A van was waiting there to take the body to the crematorium. Its doors were opened quickly, and the stretcher pushed inside. Had anyone managed to see the interior, they would have been surprised to see how much medical equipment was inside. It could almost have been mistaken for an ambulance.

"Go!" Lawrence yelled at Lewis.

The van sped out of the courtyard.

Dennis was already ripping the bodybag open. "Oh hell," the medic grunted when he saw the mess of gore that was Hal's chest. "How many bullets?"

"Only three," Lawrence said. He caught sight of the body. "Sweet mother of Fate! Can you do it?"

Dennis was already activating Hal's Skin suit, which lay crumpled in the corner of the van. He brought the extension tubes out and began plugging them into the kid's valves. "Cut the shirt off."

Blood began to squirt out of the jagged wounds, pouring onto the floor of the van. Lawrence took a scalpel and sliced the shirt fabric, pulling the saturated cloth aside, leaving room for Dennis to work. When he brought his hands away, they were dripping blood.

For the first time he began to have doubts—something he hadn't acknowledged before. He refused to let doubt be part of the equation as he focused himself on accomplishing just one thing: not letting the bastards murder Hal. He wanted a victory over KillBoy as subtle and devious as KillBoy's relentless assault against the platoons on the streets of Memu Bay. But now he could actually see the terrible damage that the bullets had caused....

Dennis was trying to clamp off the torn arteries in the chest cavity. "His heart's so much raw meat. We'll have to drain and reinflate the lungs."

"The brain?" Lawrence demanded. "What about the brain?"

"I don't know." Dennis gave him an anguished look. "It was seven minutes." His optronic membranes were scrolling medical data almost too quickly for him to follow; Hal's Skin was using up its drug capsules at a dangerous rate as it tried to minimize cellular trauma.

"But we superoxygenated his blood," Lawrence said. "You said that would last him."

"It should, it should." Dennis finished clamping one artery and went for the next. "Odel, anything?"

Odel was attaching a sensor to Hal's scalp. He looked at a palmtop display. "Not yet. Still flatlined."

"Come on," Dennis screamed at the kid. His face was streaked with Hal's blood, which he'd smeared there with the back of his hand.

"Lewis, how long till we get there?" Lawrence shouted.

"Three minutes, Sarge."

"Is he alive?"

"I don't know," Dennis barked.

"Three minutes, Dennis, that's all. The crash team's waiting."

"Crash team?" Dennis's voice was veering toward hysteria. "Crash team? One struck-off doctor and a couple of field medics, and you expect them to perform a fucking heart transplant?"

"It's a biomech heart, Dennis, you just plug it in and switch it on."

Dennis laughed. "Oh, Jesus fucking Christ"

"Dennis! What about Hal?"

"I'm trying, god damn you." There were tears in the corners of his eyes. "I'm trying."

"Hey," Odel cried. "Hey, I've got brainwaves showing here."

Hal's mouth dropped open. His tongue flopped about weakly as he gurgled through the scarlet blood that was foaming out of his throat.

"Hal!" Lawrence shouted. "Hal, you hear me? You hear me, Hal? You hang on for us, kid. We've got you. We won't let you go."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Santa Chico. The original paradise planet.

From orbit its colors were intense—Earth-like, but brighter, more alive. There were no pastels here, no gentle shadings. Vegetation was vivid emerald; fast-growing, all-conquering. That made the few real deserts intolerably bleak: hot as hell and dry as Mars. Barriers between the extremes of rich life and barren desolation were short, making the contrasts ever more striking. The oceans that covered over half of its surface were livid sapphire. Snow-white clouds were magnified by the deep atmosphere as they hurtled through the high, turbulent jetstreams.

The air with its 30 percent oxygen content was poisonous to unmodified humans. But for native life, the abundant gas was raw nuclear power to its biochemical processes. Evolution here had grown thorns on everything.

For some it was a magnificent challenge. A chance to live differently, abandoning the strictures that governed society on Earth.

Just how differently, Corporal Lawrence Newton was only just realizing. Now that the company of eight platoons had arrived at the chemical-processing factory, all he could see was decay. The facility was spread out over several acres. Its design illustrated only too well the new angles with which Santa Chico's inhabitants set about attacking old problems. The closest he could come to describing it was organic gothic. Large sections of the machinery were alive, membranes and nodules blending smoothly into the metal and plastic portions. Or had been alive. Or were still alive but de-evolving, reverting to more primitive forms. He couldn't quite decide. The factory obviously hadn't been in use for some time.

It had been sited in a small valley that was a natural habitat for the gargul plant, a bush of yellow-and-scarlet sponge-like dendrites whose sap contained wondrously complex molecules that could be employed as vaccine bases. Such compounds were a big factor in the original settlement effort. Santa Chico's vegetation was a natural pharmacopoeia, which when harvested properly produced an astonishing array of medical and industrial applications. Now the garguls had returned to the factory, growing over and under the inert machinery. In many cases, Lawrence could see fissures in the pipes and organolytic crackers allowing the bush to take root. Fluffy lichens tarnished the big metal mountings. Pink moniliform fungi spiraled up support struts. Vines and creepers scaled the highest burner towers, forming thick-webbed buttresses.

Jeeps and trucks transporting the platoons fanned out from the narrow, overgrown track and halted beside the fecund equipment. Captain Lyaute ordered a sweep of the area. "I know it looks like a complete waste of time," he told the platoons over the general frequency. "But we have to find out if anything can be salvaged from this crock of shit."

Lawrence took Kibbo, Amersy, Nic and Jones with him. They stuck together as they searched their assigned section of the factory. For an hour they wandered through the tangle of machinery. Green-and-yellow-striped tigergrass had sprouted along the roads between the equipment, reaching their knees, which made it tough to walk even with Skin. Pipes that looked as if they were made out of bark arched overhead, connecting tanks to refinery buildings. Dark, dank fluids dripped down from small splits. They walked around ion exchangers and splitters grafted together out of translucent mushrooms the size of apartment blocks. Metal pumps and valves jutted out of the ground at odd intervals, hopelessly antiquated and out of place amid the slick biomechanical systems. One end of their section had an office block of stacked oblong rooms in a cube of girders: no power, broken windows, dead electronics. When they peered in through the open doors, creatures slithered through the darker recesses, escaping observation. There was nothing of any value anywhere. Nothing left working.

Every time they saw a bird in the distance, Lawrence flinched. Four of the fleet's drop gliders had collided with windshrikes, flying animals larger than pterodactyls. The impacts had killed the windshrikes instantly, but they'd also sent the drop gliders tumbling out of the sky to smash across the landscape.

That was when Lawrence knew they'd made a mistake coming here. From the moment 435KN9's drop glider ashed down in the lake outside Roseport all he wanted to do was get into a spaceplane and fly back up to a starship. If there were any left. He really hadn't wanted to fly down to the surface to begin with.

They'd encountered exo-spheric weapons on their approach. One starship wiped out completely, all hands lost Two more badly damaged. You couldn't keep that sort of news from the platoons in the surviving starships.

Rumor had it that at first the admiral and the captains didn't even know what attacked them. Sensors showed massive storms within the planet's far-flung magnetosphere, where the flux bands compressed and twisted into hundred-kilometer vortices that spat out lethal particle beams. Remote satellites sent into the heart of the magnetic hurricanes revealed huge webs of chain molecule filaments, spinning for stability and manipulating the planetary magnetic field. Santa Chico had discovered how to create ephemeral energy cannon on a titanic scale. They weren't even purpose-built. As the fleet found out later, the webs were simple induction systems to power orbital craft and microgee station facilities. Turning them into weapons was just a matter of reprogramming.

When the starships did reach parking orbit, the satellites couldn't find any major cities on the planet. There were just large towns like Roseport on the existing settlement areas. They did find thousands of smaller towns and villages, all with identical pearl-white buildings. And there didn't seem to be a datapool, at least nothing the fleet could link into. Which meant there was no central government to receive Z-B's legal claim for asset realization. The flipside of that was it left them unable to deliver a warning about the gamma soak threat Not that they knew where to gamma soak to intimidate the locals.

It gave everyone a foretaste of future events.

For Lawrence the defining moment had come when he waded ashore from the drop glider. They'd aimed for a broad lake that ran along the side of Roseport, one of the first settlements. On the final approach the drop glider's forward camera had shown them a smear of white houses almost engulfed by brilliant emerald vegetation. The place resembled a Greek fishing town embracing the stony slopes that led away from the water.

Roseport might have been built by humans originally, but the new-natives who occupied it now were no longer thoroughbreds. Bipeds, tripeds, quadrupeds, even serpentine organisms, were ranged on the open ground between the buildings and the lake; they were mammalian, reptilian, equine, canine, simian, hulking things that didn't fit any terrestrial classification. Each of them had retained a few human elements—hands, limb joints, facial composition, even hair in the form of manes and plumes—but that was all. Most had a kind of segmented exoskeleton, a dark amber shell as flexible as thick rubber. Some had developed entirely new types of hides.

The Skins stood in silence just above the shore in a long line, staring up at the city's inhabitants as a variety of eyes and sonic pulses stared back.

"Who the fuck are they?" Ntoko asked as he crossed himself.

He should have known.

The Santa Chico settlement and investment company had been formed out of some very specific companies on Earth, those that relished challenge and tackled it with a bravura lack of orthodoxy. The majority came from one location.

Always a technology leader, California attracted the smartest researchers and entrepreneurs to its cutting-edge companies, most of which were moderately unconventional. Money excused a great deal, allowing them to live almost entirely as they pleased provided nobody else got hurt, and the technology companies did make a great deal of money. With Hollywood as their neighbor and prime example, every combination of sexual and narcotic abuse was enthusiastically pursued, along with freewheeling households.

To start with, this hippie chic company culture was based on electronic hardware and software, spreading from the techno heartland of Silicon Valley to install factories in every urban industrial precinct. Then, with the human genome finally read, genetics and biotech began their rise to prominence. The whole nature of "outrageous behavior" began to alter. Instead of using drugs, the new lords of biotechnology experimented upon themselves. The ethical review boards that licensed their company research activities were predominantly made up of elderly advisors, many of whom had strong religious beliefs. They saw cloning as inherently evil, and altering the human norm as an unholy sin. These were not the kind of restrictions acceptable to pioneers who more often than not had a completely different set of moral values. Several areas of research went underground.

Rejuvenation was the main goal, biotechnology's holy grail. Though to that should be added enhanced body and organ functions, new and expanded senses, innovative methods of pleasure stimulation and limb redesign, among others. Athletes, professional and amateur, were keen devotees. The cosmetic applications were also hot topics; California's ultimate deity. Just as the Internet had broken down the privacy and censorship barriers fifteen years before, so the tidal wave of quasi-legal medical, genomorph and cosmetic products helped overwhelm the moral legislators.

Billionaires cured themselves of cancer, cloned themselves to create new styles of dynasties, changed sex, lost weight without resorting to diets or liposuction, added new senses and prolonged their lives for decades. Organic AIs were germinated, and in many cases interfaced with humans. The muscle skeleton suits (Skin's predecessors) were a popular product with government and corporate paramilitary divisions. Neurotronic pearls dominated the processing market. Thousands of new products made extensive inroads into millions of lives. At the heart of it all were the specialist companies. Small partnerships of ideas people with a few research labs and a lot of stock options, whose products would be licensed out to the bigger companies for mass production. They were the ones who were fascinated by Santa Chico. Here was a whole new range of high-energy biochemistry ripe for exploitation. And the only way to physically access it was by taking their current physiology modification processes to the extreme. They didn't need crude gamma soak areas on which to build settlements, they could adapt themselves to the excessive oxygen. Even body shape could be reprofiled to take advantage of the environment.

They never expected this conversion to be carried out in one clean switch. Various avenues would be explored over generations. Mistakes abandoned. Successes built upon. But slowly and surely the divergence from terrestrial humanity would grow until the final generation could walk naked under an alien sun and breathe the air without technological support.

Z-B's briefing had explained all this to the platoons. The emphasis had been on cellular adaptation, giving the impression of ordinary-looking people with slightly different lungs. It had never mentioned just how great the physiological changes would be.

Looking at the inhabitants of Roseport, Lawrence knew the briefing had barely touched the history of Santa Chico. Whatever had happened here since settlement began, it wasn't going to act in the platoon's favor.

In the beginning, Santa Chico had been the one exception to interstellar trade being a nonprofit activity. Among other things, the planet churned out a panoply of high-grade vaccines, biologicals, antivirals, vector treatments and biotronics, products that were unique, cutting-edge, and hard to duplicate. With an entire planetary ecology of potent vegetation and aquatic plants as raw materials, every new batch was an improvement on the last: more sophisticated, more effective. New settlers would travel outbound from Earth, and the completed biologicals would return, paying for starship maintenance and any technological and industrial equipment the inhabitants had requested. But over the last few years the starships had been returning with less and less cargo. As fewer settlers were heading out, the Earth-based portion of the Santa Chico development corporation became heavily debt-laden. Zantiu-Braun had performed a leveraged buyout and sent its Third Fleet to realize all those highly profitable biological assets.

The platoons lining the shore were ordered to advance up into Roseport. Their audience moved aside, filling the air with a loud, high-pitched cluttering sound, as if a whole jungle full of chimpanzees were screaming at once. Later, the AS up in the starship would decipher the cluttering as a very-high-speed hybrid of Spanish and Valley English. Captains ordered snatch squads forward to fix collateral necklaces. Skin amplifiers boomed out instructions, telling the new-natives not to resist, that they were being held responsible for...

The fight started immediately. New-natives swarmed down the rocky slope into the line of Skins. They didn't seem to have any weapons, but they were strong and extremely fast, easily a physical match for Skin. There were so many of them, and the platoons were so closely bunched still, that using darts and other nonlethal weapons was difficult What appeared to be a hairless ape leaped on Lawrence, carrying him to the ground. Huge clawed hands were either trying to remove his Skin helmet, or more likely just rip his entire head off. Lawrence gripped the thing's wrists and tried to prize them off. His Skin wasn't strong enough. Sheer surprise made him freeze for a second. Nothing in training had dealt with a situation like this. Skin always gave squaddies the advantage.

He pushed down with his right leg, shifting the pair of them over. Then he punched the thing on its sternum. It grunted in pain but kept twisting its claws round Lawrence's neck. Lawrence punched it again, feeling the tough amber hide give fractionally. After a few more seconds of futile wrestling, Lawrence ordered the Skin to fire its electrical pulse. The ape-thing screamed, its limbs locked as the charge ripped through it, then resumed its attempted decapitation. Something like a baby elephant joined in, kicking Lawrence in the ribs. He was left with no choice. His Skin's nine-millimeter pistol deployed through the carapace, and he shot the ape-thing at point-blank range. The first bullet simply enraged it further. Lawrence had to pump half a dozen shots into the demented creature before it finally lay motionless on the tigergrass. Vivid scarlet blood spilled out from the bullet holes in its torso and neck.

Lawrence staggered away from the thing, his ribs aching from the kicking administered by the baby elephant. He ignored that. Nausea and giddiness threatened to knock his legs from under him. He'd never killed anyone before. Not another human. And that's what this was, however distorted. Those clever Skin weapons had always absolved him, turned it into a nonissue.

Now the air around him crackled with weapons being discharged. The agonized screams of mortally injured new-natives cut through it all. Something approximating a Neanderthal ran straight into Lawrence, sending both of them tumbling to the ground. Lawrence brought his pistol arm around automatically. Targeting graphics centered on the prehistoric throwback's head. It had a tall, scalloped ridge running from the top of its nose over the crown of its skull, with a lacework of blue veins throbbing prominently. Very Homo sapiens eyes stared wildly at him, allowing him to read the new-native's fright and anger.

"Fuck off," Lawrence bellowed. He jerked the pistol nozzle up and fired three shots into the air. The new-native rolled aside and scrambled to its feet, sprinting away. Lawrence slowly clambered up as his Skin's peristaltic muscles pushed fresh ammunition along a feed tube into the pistol's magazine.

There was movement on every side of him, with a hundred voices shouting into his communication link. It took Lawrence a long moment to realize what was happening. The fight was breaking up. New-natives were fleeing back up the slope into the streets and buildings of Roseport, running, galloping, limping, even hopping. Dozens of bodies lay behind them, draped over the pale rocks; some were drifting through the shallows, blood spreading out of their wounds to stain the water a dense crimson. Hundreds of little ripples were expanding as aquatic creatures began to feed on the unexpected bounty. It was carnage on a scale Lawrence had never envisaged. Nor was it exclusively new-natives sprawled on the ground. Several Skins were tangled among them, their carapaces pulped and buckled, oozing gore.

Shots were still being fired into the backs of the retreating new-natives. Sergeants and captains yelled to cease fire.

"Sweet Fate," Lawrence whispered. Skins were on their knees around him, helmet valves open, allowing them to vomit. Lawrence's Skin AS reported it was infusing a cocktail of narcotics to help him cope with the shock its medical monitors had revealed. He felt light-headed, as if everything he'd just witnessed were part of some terrible i-drama. He didn't want to move, to take part, help his injured comrades. Just wanted someone to switch the whole image off and wipe the memory clean.

"Hey, look," Nic shouted. "Look up there. Jesus God, what is the deal here?"

Lawrence pushed his sensor focus into the cloudless sky above. He almost laughed; the numbing drugs made it seem funny. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse ... The cargo pods were hitting the lower atmosphere, their madcap descent slowing to subsonic speed. White-and-yellow parachutes bloomed high overhead, lowering them gently. A flock of windshrikes glided among them with fast grace. Massive crocodile-contoured jaws snapped and champed at the domes of fabric. Teeth the size of human hands tore easily through the nylon. With their chute panels ripped apart the pods began to plummet downward. They hit the ground at terminal velocity and burst apart in silent explosions of shattered crates and mangled equipment.

After the injured Skins had been treated as best their limited medical supplies would allow them, the erstwhile governor of Roseport gathered his officers for an emergency conference. They had been down for ninety minutes and hadn't even entered the city yet, let alone established collateral. Nearly a third of their equipment pods had been wrecked. The local inhabitants were nothing like they'd been led to expect. And the starship captains were reporting continued attempts to sabotage and attack the big vessels in orbit: subversive software was contaminating every datalink, while kinetic spears in retrograde orbits were probing their physical defenses. The admiral's orders were to establish a dominant presence among the new-natives, then draw up an inventory of possible assets.

Roseport's governor went along with that, but put securing the local spaceport at the top of his priority list. Lawrence was in the company assigned to retrieve the pods that had survived. He just counted himself lucky 435NK9 wasn't one of the platoons ordered into Roseport itself. As he and the others tramped through the clinging tigergrass, they heard a near-constant barrage of small-arms fire and grenade explosions. They could see very little movement amid the peaceful sprawl of squat white towers that formed the majority of the little city's buildings. But the communications link gave them a continuing story of ambushes and booby traps.

Even out on the lush plain skirting the city they weren't immune. Infrared sensors were all but useless in the rolling expanse of tall tigergrass. New-natives lay in wait, hunched down among the roots, bulky creatures capable of damaging Skin carapaces with a couple of swift blows and often making a clean escape after they'd battered a squaddie to the ground. Communications became difficult as interference and jamming increased throughout the day. Somebody here was operating sophisticated electronics.

By nightfall the company had gathered enough equipment to set up a camp with a heavily guarded perimeter. Jeeps and trucks transported the whole lot over to the spaceport, a single runway that had been set out to the north of town. With their escape route secure and a large-caliber arsenal at hand, the squaddies relaxed slightly.

Lights shone in the city that night, lemon-yellow windows radiant against the deep night. Strange shadows moved along the walls in jerky motions. Sounds echoed through the still air, helping to fuel the invaders' imagination, making them wonder what the new-natives were busy building.

On the second day, the governor divided up his forces. Several platoons would attempt to establish a foothold in the city again, while other companies were dispatched to known industrial sites. Satellite observation had revealed the factory structures were still intact, though most were apparently deserted. Best of all, a squadron of twelve TVL88 tactical support helicopters had survived, and the engineers had spent the night assembling them. The companies could call on a full aerial assault if they got into any trouble. When Lawrence's company drove out that morning, the pilots were taking odds on how many windshrikes they were going to bag apiece.

Lawrence called in the empty factory offices to Ntoko, and they turned around to walk back to the company's vehicles. After the first few reports, Captain Lyaute had decided the factory was never going to work again. He was recalling all the scouting parties.

"I don't get it," Kibbo said. "Why did they let this place fall apart in the first place?"

"Fate knows," Lawrence said. "But at least we know why they stopped exporting all that fancy expensive biological junk. They just don't produce it anymore."

"That's not a reason, Corp," Jones said. "Why did they abandon factories like this? We know they worked better than anything on Earth."

"They're animals, man, that's why," Kibbo said. "What are you, blind? Didn't you guys see those things that attacked us yesterday? They ain't human anymore; they're freaks. This is a fucking great planet full of freaks. No animal can run a factory. And they don't need human medicines anymore."

"They're not animals," Lawrence said. "They're people; they just look different, that's all."

"No way, man, they're filthy animals. They don't even talk, all they do is scream all funny. They attacked us for no reason."

"It was territorial," Amersy said.

"What?"

"Territorial; you said they were animals."

"The corp said they weren't."

"In which case we're in deep shit," Jones said. "If they fight like that and they're smart with it there's no telling what they'll throw at us next."

"You think I don't know that?" Amersy grumbled.

"So why did they dump this place?" Kibbo said.

"Who knows?" Amersy said. "They still use machinery. You saw the lights in Roseport last night. Our communications links are being screwed by their jamming. And the spaceport runway was intact. One of the engineers I talked to this morning said the spaceplanes they found in the hangar were still flightworthy. Somebody's been maintaining them."

"So there's some real people left? So what? That doesn't mean there's anything here for us."

Lawrence agreed with Kibbo, though not for the same reasons. He didn't think the new-natives were animals. They might not have quite the same behavior pattern as humans, but they were certainly sentient. Exactly where that put them on the evolutionary scale he wasn't sure.

Captain Lyaute got everybody into the vehicles and ordered them back to Roseport's spaceport. When he called in their return to the governor, he was informed that all the similar exploratory missions had found the same thing. The cities were occupied by extremely hostile new-natives, while the factories were abandoned and decaying. No real dialogue with the new-natives had been established. The admiral and Simon Roderick didn't know what to do next. They were considering sending a starship to rendezvous with the big captured asteroid that was in a two-thousand-kilometer polar orbit. Sections of the planet's space-based industry were obviously still functioning, although a lot of the stations and microgee modules had been destroyed when the induction webs were eliminated. If nothing else, the starships could take the surviving orbital industrial facilities back to Earth; that would show some kind of gain on the balance sheet.

In the meantime, the governor advised, they were probably going to boost the platoons straight back up to orbit, although there were worries about the availability of hydrogen at the spaceports that had already been secured. Roseport spaceport did have several storage tanks full, but the refinery itself had been switched off. The engineers were going over it now to see if they could restart production.

Lawrence drove one of the jeeps, with half of 435NK9 as his passengers. They were eighth in the long convoy as it wound back along the route it had taken to the factory. It was slow going; the road was thoroughly overgrown with tiger-grass and creepers, although there was evidence that some kind of vehicles still used it occasionally. Lawrence remembered the Great Loop Highway back on Thallspring and quietly wished for something that clear and level again.

The terrain they were driving through was hilly, a landscape of crumpled valleys and short, awkward slopes. Tall trees thrived along the upper slopes of the ridges, projecting impossibly slim spires above the forest roof. Topped with fluffy violet leaf plumes, they looked like the battle pennants of some medieval army marching to war. Down in the valley floors the trees were fat bruisers, nearly spherical, their gray-silver bark bristling with hard, venomous thorns to repel wood-drillers and acidlice. The upper half of their swollen boles sprouted concentric circles of whip branches, shaking small leathery leaves in the breeze to produce a continuous discordant clattering. They grew together in an almost solid fence, pushing and straining at each other as decades-long battles were fought for ground and light. Those that lost and died were riddled with holes as animals burrowed their nests into the rotting wood. Swarms of fungus leeched to the crumbling bark, producing a glistening rampage of color as they wept glutinous fluids saturated with spores. Ferns and tuber leaves dominated the dim floor of the forest, banishing tiger-grass and bushes, while carnivorous coilwraiths hung from forks in the overhead branches to catch insects amid their wriggling fronds.

The road reached the first swath of forest a couple of kilometers from the factory. Its builders had tried to avoid the trees where possible, curving it around along valley walls or letting it run beside the fast-flowing streams. As a consequence, the lead vehicle could rarely see more than two or three hundred meters ahead.

Lawrence frowned as they began to slow. He couldn't see any reason for it. The road was a mess, sure, but it didn't pose too much of a problem for their vehicles. They weren't even in the forest yet; it was running along the side of them fifty meters away. Up ahead there was a sharp curve around the base of a small hill. But there was no barrier, nothing blocking the track.

"What's happening?" he asked over the command link. They were almost stationary now.

"Something up ahead. The ground's moving."

"Moving?" Lawrence didn't understand.

"Can you hear that?" Nic asked.

Lawrence braked to a halt. "Hear what?" He ordered his AS to turn up the Skin's audio sensitivity. That was when he realized the jeep was shaking slightly.

"That!" Nic insisted.

The Skin's receptors were picking up a bass rumbling.

"Six-nine-three and Seven-six-two, deploy forward with carbines," Captain Lyaute ordered. "Five-four-one, watch our tail."

Skins were jumping down from the jeeps, moving forward in a double buddy formation. Squat muzzles had emerged from their arm carapaces.

Lawrence didn't like the situation at all. None of his briefings had mentioned this being an earthquake zone.

The herd of macrorexes lumbered around the side of the mountain, a wall of beasts over eight meters high, with the smallest weighing in at ten tons. Unlike Earth's dinosaurs, they didn't have long necks and tails. Their bodies were husky cylinders fifteen meters in length, with three sets of legs. It was an arrangement that allowed them to move in a sequence of synchronized jumps, arching their spine so that a wave motion rippled down their dorsal column, each set of legs bounding forward in unison. A flattened heart-shaped head rose and fell as the body undulated, swinging occasionally from side to side as far as the stumpy neck permitted. The end of the jaw was caged by three curving tusks longer than a man's arm, two pointing up, one down; they opened and closed in a steady rhythm. The sides of the head swept together in a series of bladelike triangular fins that looked as if they could cut through steel. Their eyes were invisible somewhere among the sharply crinkled bone ridges of the upper skull.

Now that the macrorexes were in full view, their trumpeting cries split the air. Shrubs and bushes simply detonated under the pounding impact of their legs.

Lawrence thought yesterday's drugs must still be kicking through his blood cells. He remembered the giant beasts from his briefing files, but couldn't really grasp that forty or fifty of the monsters were coming at him in a motion that resembled a perpetual skidding crash.

"You've got to be fucking kidding," Nic groaned. There was real fear in his voice.

The Skins out in front of the jeeps opened fire. Lawrence couldn't even tell if the bullets were penetrating the filthy ash-gray hides. They certainly weren't having any effect The trumpeting rose to a crescendo, and Lawrence realized the macrorexes were only 150 meters away. Nothing was going to stop them.

Captain Lyaute was yelling incoherently in the command communication link. Someone else was calling desperately for helicopter support. Skins were running hard, ripping through the cloying tigergrass as the macrorexes pounded toward them. Lawrence jammed down hard on the accelerator and pulled the wheel over. Tires spun wildly in the greasy soil. There was absolutely no way he was going to be able to loop around a full 180 degrees before the front rank of macrorexes reached them. "Hold on," he shouted, and sent the jeep skidding and bouncing toward the edge of the forest Out of the corner of his eye he could see a couple of macrorexes charging along the treeline. Smaller trunks were pulverized into a cascade of splinters as their huge armored legs plowed into them. Long whip branches were severed cleanly by the fin-blades on the edges of the beasts' heads, twirling away through the air.

The first rank of the herd caught up with the fleeing Skins. Jaw tusks flashed behind the slowest, puncturing his carapace without even slowing. He was tossed aside, fountaining blood as he cartwheeled through space. A couple more were overtaken, vanishing below the thundering legs. The tusks chomped down again. Screams reverberated along the communication link, cut off with horrifying swiftness. The macrorexes were moving at a phenomenal speed. A cool part of Lawrence's mind knew they'd never be able to keep it up for long, not even with this planet's oxygen feeding them. They must have started the charge just seconds before meeting the company.

The corpulent trees were only fifteen meters ahead of him. His view jounced about wildly as the suspension thrummed over rocks and hidden furrows. He turned the wheel savagely, aiming for a gap that was probably wide enough to take the jeep. To his right, the macrorexes were closing fast amid a debris plume of shattered timber.

That was when he caught sight of something sitting on the neck of one of them. A crouched profile of a man-leopard hybrid, forelimbs windmilling with wild enthusiasm. Mouth flung wide in an insane jubilant laugh.

That Couldn't Be—

"Lawrence!" Amersy shrieked.

Lawrence yanked at the wheel. The front fender of the jeep clipped a spiky, bloated trunk, knocking them violently to the right. Lawrence fought the motion, Skin muscles and power steering forcing the wheels around. Inertia shunted them through the gap at a wide angle. One tire burst as it slammed into a rock. Lawrence kept the accelerator hard down, sending them plunging farther under the trees. Whip branches slapped across the windshield. Then there was a giant tree dead ahead. Lawrence thrust his other heel down on the brake, which made no appreciable difference to the chaotic rush. The jeep's front bumper hit the tree full on, sending everybody tumbling forward. Skin carapaces hardened, protecting the vulnerable bodies from the worst of the impact "Out!" Lawrence ordered. "Move it."

It was as though the crash were still happening. The sound of disintegrating wood grew louder. They could barely balance on the shaking ground.

Lawrence staggered onward, hoping to hell he was heading in the right direction. His orientation was screwed up. The AS display grid was out of focus.

Three meters behind him, a giant leg descended vertically on the jeep, crushing it into the soil. The shock wave sent Lawrence sprawling. Then the pillar of flesh was lifting. He managed to shift his helmet so the sensors showed him the compacted wreck, just before the beast's midlegs streaked down. Lawrence crawled forward as fast as he could. The final set of legs landed, flipping the jeep through ninety degrees. It stood on its ruined tail as the legs disappeared up into the sky, then slowly toppled back. Several shredded whip branches rained down on top of it Lawrence twisted around. His nine-millimeter pistol had deployed from one forearm, while the carbine was sticking out of the other. He swung his arms in fast arcs, covering the trail of devastation the macrorex had left in its wake. Targeting graphics slid around the scene on semiautonomous seeker mode, hunting for any conceivable threat. Now would be a perfect time for ground troops to finish off the Skins. Neither Lawrence nor his AS could find a new-native.

His weapons retracted. He could still hear the herd thundering away, but the loudest noise right now was his yammering heart. The medical grid display showed just how much adrenaline was coursing through his blood. Beneath Ms Skin, his skin was already chilling as the immediate danger faded out.

He called up the telemetry grid, checking on the Skins under his command. Everyone, it seemed, had survived the jeep's madcap dash. Looking around, he could see them picking themselves up. Dust churned through the air, glowing ocher in the bright sunbeams pouring through the broken forest canopy.

"Sarge?" Lawrence asked. "You intact?"

"Holy shit, man," Ntoko spat. "Yeah, I guess so." It was the lead vehicles that had taken the brunt of the macrorex charge. Too close to get out of the way, either they'd raced into the forest like Lawrence, or the Skins had abandoned them to take their chances on foot. The jeeps toward the rear of the column had enough time to turn and drive clear of the rampage, though most of the trucks were too bulky and slow to maneuver like that. In total, four jeeps and one truck had survived. Over twenty Skins had perished, either mauled by tusks or trampled to death. There were a number of other casualties, as well.

One of the macrorexes had been felled, the victim of intense carbine fire from three Skins who made their stand from the edge of the forest. They'd managed to shatter its enormous skull. Even so, raw inertia had kept it slithering forward until it crunched into one of the bulky trees, knocking the trunk almost horizontal. It had plowed up a broad furrow of slick black earth behind it Captain Lyaute set up a field camp on the side of the forest. There were fifty-four survivors, of whom seventeen were injured; another five had damaged Skin. Two platoons were assigned to gather up what weapons and equipment they could find amid the trail of destruction left by the macro-rexes. Communications with the spaceport were patchy. There seemed to be something wrong with the satellite relay. Lyaute's urgent request for airborne evacuation was tamed down flat. Two helicopters were already down. Other scout companies had been attacked. The governor was keeping the remaining helicopters assigned to guarding the spaceport.

A platoon dispatched to find out what had happened to the macrorexes reported that they were now milling about quietly a kilometer down the road. There was no sign of the new-natives who'd been spotted riding them.

Lyaute announced they were going to pile the wounded onto the remaining vehicles and make their way directly back to the spaceport. It was going to be a slow trip: some of the injuries were bad, and everyone else was going to walk escort. It had taken two and a half hours to drive out to the factory, and it was midday now; he estimated they should be able to make it back for nightfall. Lawrence knew that was bullshit.

"We'll take point, sir," Ntoko told the captain. "Scout out any trouble lying ahead of you."

Lyaute agreed quickly enough. None of the other sergeants volunteered their platoons.

Lawrence switched to a secure link and asked the sergeant: "Why? Those dinosaur monsters were only the start; they won't be the last assault today, no way. We'll get hit by whatever it is they've got out there."

Ntoko was walking along the line of salvaged weapons. He picked up a couple of rotary feed grenade launchers and handed one to Lawrence. "Maybe, maybe not" His voice was quiet and intent. "Look at it this way. The captain's just given us the pick of the weapons. We can deploy in a decent formation so nobody takes us by surprise. And we'll be a good distance out in front."

"Big deal."

"Think, man. Right now we're in shit that doesn't get any deeper. Those injured guys we've got, there's some that are in a real bad way. They're going to slow the rest of the company down."

"Yeah, but—"

"You been keeping up on tactical? There's not enough hydrogen to lift everyone off, Lawrence. That's if they even get the spaceplanes down past the windshrikes. Now do you want to be at the front of the line?"

Lawrence looked around the temporary camp. The wounded were being helped onto the jeeps. Field medics had already used a lot of aid kits getting them ready for that first move. A couple of engineers were working on a jeep, replacing bent suspension components with parts cannibalized off a wreck.

He had to admit, the company was hurting. When that happened, you mucked in and made sure everyone got back to base okay. That's what his training and first instinct was, anyway. Ntoko had drilled that into him. Being part of a unit was what it was all about.

Now there was doubt, among other disturbing notions, bubbling around in his thoughts. But selling out the others... Although his loyalty had always been to the platoon itself. What the hell did a simple corporal know about the overall strategy? He couldn't take the whole invasion force into account, much less save them. So where did you draw the line?

"We should never have come here," Ntoko said.

Lawrence took the bulky grenade launcher from the sergeant and slung the ammunition bag over his shoulder. His Skin AS interfaced with the weapon's targeting system. "Yeah, right."

Platoon 435NK9 set off first, walking down the battered track that was the road back to Roseport. Ntoko had put Lawrence and Nic out in front, leaving the rest in single file, spaced about seven meters apart. He brought up the rear himself.

Lyaute's brief was to flush out any possible ambushes. Don't bother too much with investigating potential sightings, just use firepower to eliminate new-natives. The rest of the company would follow a couple of hundred meters behind.

Twenty minutes along the road they'd already built the distance to four hundred meters. Ntoko had dictated the pace to Lawrence. "I'll handle any flak from Lyaute," he'd said. They didn't get any. The electronic interference was relentless. It had to be more than simple powerblock jamming. They were almost reduced to line-of-sight communication.

At the start Lawrence was busy with his AS, pulling in relevant data. They had enough bloodpaks to last twenty hours. He figured if they hadn't reached the spaceport by then they'd be dead anyway, though he found it somewhat unnerving that they couldn't just shed the Skins if they ran out of supplies. They needed some kind of protection from the oxygen. Ntoko had talked about disconnecting the helmet and using it purely as an air filter. It could remain plugged into the neck valves, and the body's organs would be able to sustain it without too much strain. Lawrence also called up tactical scans from the low-orbit observation satellite, trying to predict ambush points. He would have handed over his entire mission bonus (not that he expected to get one) for a realtime infrared scan of the area around them. But the low-orbit satellites had dropped out of the communications network hours ago.

"Surprised you're with us anyway, Corp," Nic said as they splashed through a stream. "What happened to your transfer over to the starship boys?"

Lawrence would like to blame it all on Morteth, Laforth and Kmyre. But it wasn't really their fault. They were the trigger, not the cause. They'd been dismissed from Z-B as soon as the platoon arrived back on Earth, sullen and thuggishly resentful to the end, swearing vengeance. It was the whole way the Arnoon village incident had been dealt with that troubled him. Maybe it was his own background that was the real problem, but he just kept thinking that the three of them should have been prosecuted. That way there would be accountability, responsibility. By agreeing to help out and play it quiet and canny he'd collaborated with the company. It was the kind of deal his father would have made. "The real way the world works," Doug Newton called it.

So what the fuck did I ever leave Amethi for?

When he thought about it these days it was only ever Roselyn and the pain she'd inflicted. Joona hadn't been too far wrong about the companies and their uniculture. Every human world was developing into a bland Xerox of Earth. Except for Santa Chico, of course.

"I got my promotion," Lawrence said. "It was more important at the time. I can transfer over to the starship division whenever I want."

"Not after this," Nic said. "We aren't going to have any starships left."

Lawrence kept expecting Lyaute to order them to slow down and wait. He'd kept up the same pace for over an hour and a half, striding along the track of beaten-down tigergrass. The jeeps were out of sight behind them now. Communications with Lyaute and his two lieutenants was becoming very intermittent. They just kept calling in their position and progress whenever they got a link.

Even in Skin, Lawrence was sure he could feel this planet's thick, heavy atmosphere working against him. There seemed to be a slight resistance to every movement. It wasn't gravity, Santa Chico was .95 Earth standard. It had to be the sluggish air pushing against him. Another damn problem.

Haze from the powerful sun was a further side effect. Anything more than a kilometer away wobbled in the heat radiating off the ground in fast distortion ripples. It played hell with their long-range sensors. Infrared was hopeless, of course. All a new-native had to do was crouch down in the tigergrass, and scrub, and he'd become invisible. Platoon 435NK9 all had their laser radars on, sending out fans of pale-pink light to sweep the sides of the road. So far they'd had a few probable sightings, but nothing they could shoot at.

Ten kilometers out from the factory, the road emerged from the end of a wide valley onto a gently undulating lowland terrain of tigergrass. It made a change to have an open view of the countryside ahead, though when Lawrence scanned his helmet sensors around, the eternal wave motion of tigergrass in the wind swamped the discrimination program.

"Nothing in sight," he reported.

"Keep going," Ntoko replied.

They moved out. Away to the north Lawrence could see a couple of macrorexes moving along a stream. Their ponderous motion was easy enough to see, as was their grubby hide color against the bright tigergrass. He wondered what kind of nerve it took to climb up on the back of one of those brutes and goad it into a run. More than he had, that was for sure. Who in Fate's name thought of doing such a thing in the first place?

"Somebody moving," Nic said.

"Where?"

"Two hundred meters southwest."

Lawrence expanded Nic's telemetry grid, meshing the sensor imagery to his own. There was something, a blur that wasn't all heat shimmer.

"I think we have a shadow," Lawrence told Ntoko.

"We've got a couple back here as well," Ntoko said.

Lawrence called up a tactical map. There was a small group of buildings a couple of kilometers ahead and to the east with small homesteads ranged around it, barely large enough to be classed as a village. The satellite sweep had revealed some activity, but that was a day out of date. Lyaute hadn't bothered investigating the place when they'd driven past that morning.

"Close in," Ntoko ordered.

"Easier target for them," Lawrence said over the secure command link.

"I know that. But they're sneaking in anyway, that means they're going to attack. This way we've got a better firepower concentration."

Lawrence's audio sensors picked up a number of warbling calls out amid the tall tigergrass. He was tempted to play one back at them on high volume. The Skin AS couldn't translate them.

A small bronze-colored bird darted above the tigergrass, moving fast toward them. It had three wings, one smaller than the others, and used some kind of spinning motion, like an asymmetric propeller. Silver-tipped wings traced bright spiral afterimages as they caught the sunlight. Nic shot it with his nine-millimeter pistol. It burst apart in a mist of blood.

"What are you shooting at?" Ntoko asked.

"Nothing, Sarge," Lawrence said. "Just a bird."

"You guys keep calm up there."

"You hear that?" Lawrence asked.

"I don't trust nothing in this place," Nic grunted.

Lawrence's sensors were picking up bursts of motion all around now. New-natives were dashing through the tigergrass, running for a few meters, then ducking down. None of them were closer than 150 meters. More of the bronze birds were being flushed out of the clumps of tigergrass by their antics. Lawrence watched them flitter about. He wasn't quite as suspicious as Nic, but he had his doubts. There were a lot of them. When he asked his AS to run a check through its files on indigenous life, there was no reference. But then the information was limited to a few dozen prominent species like the windshrikes and macrorexes.

The birds were clumping together in small flocks of six or seven, swooping and curving just above the tips of the tiger-grass. The more Lawrence watched them the more he was convinced that they were being driven in toward the platoon.

"Sarge?"

"Yeah, man, I got them. But I can't see us shooting every one—we don't have enough ammo for that, even if we could hit them."

One of the telemetry grids on Lawrence's display flashed red.

"Shit!" Kibbo yelled.

"What is it?" Lawrence could see from Kibbo's telemetry that his Skin suit had been struck by something.

"Took a hit. Ahh, shit."

Lawrence turned to see Kibbo fifty meters away, stumbling badly. He fell to his knees, clutching an arm. Skins were running toward him.

The telemetry grid was scrolling down weird data. Lawrence had never seen anything like it. Something had penetrated the carapace, but it was small, barely a couple of millimeters wide. If a bullet had split the surface, the tissue underneath should have absorbed it and clotted immediately. But the synthetic muscle around the puncture was starting to overheat. Its nerve fibers were failing.

Kibbo started screaming. His medical readouts were going wild.

"Down," Ntoko ordered. "Keep down, people."

Lawrence arrived just as Kibbo fell flat on his face. His arms and legs started thrashing, hammering into the ground.

"Some kind of convulsion."

"What's his medical program doing, for fuck's sake?"

"It's his Skin, it's spasming."

Ntoko hurried up, so Lawrence was looking right at him when the dart struck. It slammed into the grenade-launcher ammunition bag he was wearing on his back, nearly knocking him off his feet. He dropped to all fours, grunting hard at the impact Lawrence scrambled over and pushed his sensor focus on the little crater in the bag.

"What the hell was it?" Ntoko demanded.

"Don't know." Lawrence shifted to infrared. The small hole was damp. Spectrographic analysis revealed an unknown type of hydrocarbon fluid. "Shit. Could be some kind of bio weapon." His Skin deployed its aerosol nozzle and sprayed the area with a multispectrum neutralizing agent. The fluid fizzed a livid saffron.

Kibbo screamed again, his bucking lifting him off the ground. The rest of the platoon circled around, not knowing what to do. The Skin's AS and medical systems couldn't even stabilize him. The wild motions stopped suddenly. His helmet's emergency disposal valves opened. Blood poured out.

"Jesus!"

The Skins lurched back, fearful that any of the crimson fluid should splash against them.

"Was that the birds?" Nic asked. "Did they do that?"

"No way, man," Amersy said. "How could they?"

Lawrence risked a quick look around. The air was full of hundreds of fast-spinning birds, a sparkling river that hurtled through the sky. They'd formed a complete ring around the platoon.

"These are the people whose granddaddies invented Skin," Nic said. "If anyone knows how to shut us down, it's them."

"Shoot them," Ntoko ordered. "Carbines out; give me a circular formation, ten-degree overlap. Move."

They were firing as they rose to their feet hosing the bullets at the thick dazzling stipple gyrating around them. The birds broke apart, soaring higher in a scintillating plume. Targeting individual birds was impossible at that distance.

Foster screamed at the same time his telemetry grid flashed its alert. He toppled over, limbs jerking about. The rest of them automatically dived for cover.

"They're killing us," Jones cried. "We're fucking dead. Dead!"

Foster's agonized gurgling was filling the general communication link.

"Lawrence, incendiary grenades," Ntoko said. "We're going to start using this goddamn environment to our advantage. Range two hundred and fifty meters, semicircular pattern. You take north."

"Got it, Sarge." He rolled onto his back and angled the grenade launcher toward north, moving the muzzle until the targeting graphics confirmed he'd ranged ground zero. He began firing. The dull thud of the grenades was audible through his Skin helmet. Ntoko was firing in the opposite direction. Faint smoke trails appeared in the air, forming wide arches that radiated out from the huddled-up platoon.

The first grenade detonated. It was like the dawn of a blue-dwarf sun. A halo of fierce light rose out of the tigergrass. Designed for operation in a normal atmosphere, the incendiaries were burning far hotter than usual in the abundant oxygen. The undergrowth ignited immediately.

Lawrence kept firing, moving the launcher around in precise increments. The brilliant detonations merged swiftly into a solid wall of crackling light. Flames burned a vivid blue, consuming even the living vegetation. Sap sizzled and evaporated before the onslaught, leaving withered blades that burst alight instantly.

It took less than a minute before they were completely surrounded by flame. The circle began to burn inward relentlessly, though Lawrence's sensors could just see another, wider, ring burning outward.

"Use the rest of the grenades," Ntoko said. "I'm not risking the manufacturer's heat-proof guarantee on these ammo bags."

"Right." Lawrence waited until he'd fired all the incendiaries, then switched to fragmentation, using a random dispersal pattern. When he finished, he unslung the bag and threw it and the launcher away toward the advancing inferno.

The birds had all gone, zooming high over the rampaging flames. Foster lay dead on the ground, blood soaking into the soil as it dripped from his open disposal valve.

"Now we'll see," Ntoko growled.

"How do we get out of this?" Jones asked. His voice was panicky. "There's no way through the flame."

"That's the idea," Ntoko said. "You've got to believe in your Skin, my friend. This flame burns so fast it'll be past us in a couple of seconds."

"Oh, Jesus fucking wept, Sarge!"

"Just hold your place."

Lawrence nearly laughed. He'd worked it out just before he started firing. The time to object was long past. They'd all have to ride it out now.

His Skin's audio sensors were relaying the fierce roar produced by the flames. It grew steadily louder. They were approaching at a phenomenal rate as they consumed the tigergrass. His briefing had included strong warnings about fire in this atmosphere, but he'd never imagined anything this potent. There were screams now, rising above the background roar. A new-native charged past the platoon. He was bipedal, with arms that reached down to his knees. There was a long mane of ginger hair streaming out from his spine as he ran, already singed and smoldering. Lawrence caught sight of a narrow bandoleer, with some kind of cylindrical electronic modules slotted into hoops.

The terrified new-native saw the platoon and immediately altered course, more from fear than sense.

"You can run, asshole," Ntoko yelled after him, "but you can't hide."

Two more new-natives rushed past. One of them was a husky quadruped with some kind of canine DNA in its genetic makeup. Lawrence watched as it sprinted at the wall of flame sweeping in toward them. It jumped. He couldn't believe anything that big could get so far off the ground. Even with its muscular limbs it didn't get high enough. The ferocious blue flames speared into its underbelly, excoriating its tough amber hide. Raw splits opened into its blackening flesh, spewing out steaming fluid. It howled in agony as its entire epidermal layer ignited spontaneously. Death must have struck with blissful speed. It was silent and motionless as it struck the ground in the middle of the conflagration.

"Holy shit," Ntoko whispered. The flames were barely fifty meters away and closing fast. They were stabbing up seven to eight meters into the air.

Lawrence's display was already issuing heat cautions. His carapace was turning white to reflect the massive infrared input. He slowly stood to face the flames, seeing the rest of the platoon follow his lead and climb to their feet. Sensors had to bring two layers of filters online to combat the glare of hellish light given off by the flames.

He ordered the visual sensors off altogether in some crazy effort to make the horror go away. That didn't work: the darkness was even more unnerving. His indigo display grid hung in the middle of nothingness. The digits recording external temperature blurred as if they'd begun to count milliseconds instead. He brought the sensors back online. The flames were ten meters away.

A couple of the platoon were murmuring prayers. He wished he knew how to join in. The temperature warnings were now so ridiculous they were laughable.

All around him the tigergrass was withering, vapor effervescing out of every blade as it smoldered and blackened.

Then the grass burst into flame around his legs. The main tsunami of fire hit, nearly knocking him down again. Something gripped his Skin and started shaking him; it was like being trapped in a slow-motion explosion.

He could see nothing. No discrimination program could possibly make sense of the incandescent chaos buffeting against him. All he knew was the one display grid reporting his Skin status. Every thermal indicator was leaping toward overload. Yet here he was, perfectly comfortable at the center of the fury. He held his breath, tensing every muscle against imminent death, then forced himself to breathe out and inhale calmly. Nothing he could do would make the slightest difference. It was all down to technology, and just how much of a safety margin had been built into his Skin.

His hand went to the base of his throat, covering the lump that was his pendant Patterns began to appear around him, faint shadows that purled within the intolerable light, then slowly began to darken. It was as if water were sluicing down a muddy window, producing streaked images of what lay outside.

Flames shrank away, revealing a land that was completely black. Spiky root clumps of incinerated tigergrass mottled the baked soil, puffing out streamers of grubby blue smoke. A dense rain of ash fell, flakes settling gently on every surface, including Skin.

He turned to see the wall of flame not ten meters behind him and retreating rapidly. The rest of the platoon was standing in a loose circle, sable silhouettes against the solid glare. When he brought a hand up to examine it, he saw his carapace was glowing a dull vermilion as the weave of thermal fibers hurriedly expelled their excessive loading. He reviewed his status, relieved to see his Skin's reserve bladders had retained their integrity; with them and the spare bloodpaks he could easily make it back to the spaceport.

Laughter and delirious whoops began to fill the general communication band. The shouted jubilation had a strong note of hysteria.

Ash was still falling, but Lawrence extended his sensor range, trying to see what lay through it The second wave of wildfire was still rampaging out ahead of him, lurid flames chewing their way voraciously across the tigergrass, sending up a broad veil of smoke and yet more ash. He couldn't believe so much destruction had spread so quickly. The holocaust they'd unleashed was easily over a kilometer wide now and still expanding. He wondered how far it would continue for. Not that there was much guilt associated with the thought. Santa Chico must be used to such events.

"Can't raise the captain," Ntoko said.

"You reckon the fire's reached him?"

"Could be. The Skins will come through okay. Don't know about the vehicles."

"You want to go back and check?"

"No. We keep going unless ordered different Even then I'm not keen."

"Sure."

"One good thing, nobody's going to be creeping up on us unseen now."

"Sarge, there's nobody left to creep up on us." His sensors had found a small mound that was the remains of a new-native. It looked like a lump of coal.

There was no hint of where the road had lain across the land. They checked their inertial guidance and started marching again. A couple of them were unhappy about leaving Kibbo and Foster behind, but Ntoko quelled their dissent with a few gruff words about how the guys would want the platoon to reach the spaceport.

The ground was still furiously hot, although it didn't present too much of a problem for their thermal fiber weave. As they walked they found patches of tigergrass and even trees that the fire had completely bypassed. There didn't seem to be any particular reason for any of them being spared. Vagaries of the land. Streams too broad for the flames to leap. Even some scrub trees with fat spire leaves that were resistant to the flames entirely, standing alone and unblemished amid the scorched desolation.

A broad ridge of rocky ground had saved the village from the firestorm. They examined it through the continuing fall of ash. Their sensors detected movement among the buildings. Ntoko decided they couldn't ignore it.

By the time they arrived, the carpet of delicate loose ash was a couple of centimeters thick, covering everything. Gusts would stir it up in small twisters, but that just rearranged it. Nothing was free of the mantle. The skirt of tigergrass around the buildings swayed and quivered in the breeze, as if trying to shake the flakes off. But they were too small, too insidious to release their hold.

The village homes were simple structures, broad circular towers with domed roofs, never more than two stories high. They seemed to be made from a pale cream coral with a rough, grainy surface that was a magnet for the ash, allowing it to lodge in every crinkle. Windows were arches covered with a thick membrane, laced with delicate silver veins.

The new-native inhabitants were mostly bipedal, smaller than the average human, with shaggy hair that continued down their spines in a thick mane; in some cases it extended out along their arms almost to the elbow. Their shirts and jerkins were cut to allow the hair to flow through. It was often braided. Bright-colored beads were favored by the children.

There were exceptions. Feline hominoids who struggled to stay upright, dropping down to use their forelimbs to walk a few paces. A squat giant that looked like a cross between a sumo wrestler and a troll. Delicate spindly elves, whose legs seemed too slim to support their bodies.

They didn't look alien, Lawrence thought, so much as primitive, although their hides were the typical Santa Chico tough, translucent amber, and none of the bipeds had a terrestrial human rib cage and abdominal arrangement. Ridges around their torsos were more insectile than anything else. Their faces, though stiffer than skin, still managed to express basic emotions, although that could have been just the eyes. Sullen glances were more or less the same the universe over.

Ntoko took Lawrence and Amersy into the village with him, deploying the rest of the platoon outside. They were subject to blank stares from the inhabitants who stood in open doorways. New-natives in the streets moved aside to let them pass. It was the first time their authority had ever been acknowledged, even if it was at gunpoint.

Lawrence's sensors detected a small level of electronic activity in the buildings, nothing above desktop pearl level. They seemed almost devoid of mechanical or electronic technology. Certainly there were no vehicles in evidence.

The new-natives appeared uncertain what to do about the Skins; they were waiting for them to set the agenda. As they walked into the center of the village more new-natives appeared and followed at a respectful distance. Unless half of the homes were deserted, the numbers didn't match up. Lawrence wondered how many villagers had been in the group beating the birds out of the tigergrass. And how many had survived.

Ntoko stopped beside a big overhanging tree that had a coating of the ubiquitous ash. "Anybody want to tell me what's going on here?"

"You fired our lands," a voice said. It was heavily accented, but had the easy lilt of Spanish roots.

Lawrence identified its owner, a woman who wouldn't reach his shoulder. Her luxuriant hair was snow-white, though whether that indicated old age he wasn't sure. She had a flat face, with several creases in her cheeks, giving her jaw a considerable degree of flexibility. The robe she wore was decorated with silver piping: a DNA helix had been embroidered down the front in scarlet and turquoise.

"You the big chieftain around here?" Ntoko asked.

"No. I am Calandrinia." She combed a hand through her hair, shaking out the latest dusting of ash.

"You going to talk to me?"

"Are you going to kill me?"

"Not unless you give me a reason."

She bared her teeth, which were long enough to qualify as tusks. "I have many reasons, but I won't be acting on them today."

"Well, thank you. Now you want to tell me what the fuck is going on around here?"

"You violated our lives. This is how we respond. What did you expect?"

"Less violence would be a good start. You people have got to be crazy. Do you know how much firepower we've got backing us up?"

Calandrinia showed her tusks again. "Less than you started with."

Lawrence used his secure command link. "Sarge, can I talk to her?"

"Sure, go right ahead if you think it will get us anywhere. I hate a smartmouth."

"Thanks." Lawrence was never quite certain, but Calandrinia seemed to turn to him just before he started talking. "I'd like to know, why did you abandon your factories?"

"Why does anybody abandon anything, Earthman? They are obsolete and irrelevant. Now we grow whatever we need directly."

"But your products weren't obsolete on Earth; they were damn useful. Why stop exporting?"

"If Earth wants medicines it should make them for itself."

"Well, for a start, without the cash from those exports you won't be able to import the products you don't make here."

She laughed at him outright. "If we don't make it, we don't want it. If we don't want it, we don't make it."

"So that's it? You've kissed good-bye to technological civilization? You're all happy regressing?" Somewhere at the back of his mind was the question of how many times he would have this conversation, and on how many planets. Regressor types seemed to get everywhere.

"Technological, no," Calandrinia said. "Mechanical, yes. What do you need machines for? Biological systems are much more efficient at providing for us."

"You can't make biological equivalents of everything."

"Not everything your society requires in order to function, no. But then we don't have your kind of society anymore. We've adapted ourselves, not bent the world to our vision. Worlds are too big for that. Why live in isolated settlements built on dead, irradiated earth when you can modify yourself to enjoy the freedom of the whole world?"

"That must be quite an ideology you've got here, to convince people they have to leave their past behind."

"It's not ideology, it's evolution. You know our ancestors came here with the intent of modifying themselves; why are you so surprised by what you found?"

"Nobody knew how far you'd taken the modifications. We didn't expect any of this. If we knew what was here, we wouldn't have come."

"Yet here you are. Now what will you do?"

"Me personally? Go home."

"Why not join us? Your children would have a beautiful future. They would never want or need for anything."

"Excuse me, but that's not even remotely tempting. If I take this helmet off, I die. You know it, and I know it."

"I could grow you an oxygen filter in my housewomb. It would be a part of you in a way your Skin never is. You would live with it in perfect symbiosis."

Lawrence held a finger up. "Yeah, stop right there. I'm not coming to live with you, okay?"

"Why? What do we lack? I do not mock, I am genuinely curious. You seem so primitive compared to us. I don't understand your reluctance. Do you not wish to better yourself, to be a part of a richer, more mature culture?"

"We're the primitives? Which of us is living in mud huts, lady? I wouldn't wish this existence on my worst enemy, let alone my own children. You're going backward faster than progress ever pulled us out of medieval squalor. Sure, this kind of life looks appealing now; you're still close enough to the industrial market economy to make you think this is all stress-free and rich in karma. Another two generations, and you won't be able to cure a cold, let alone cancer. And you call that living life to the full. I call it betraying your children."

"Ah." Calandrinia shook her hair again. "Now I begin to understand. How old am I, Earthman?"

"I haven't got a clue."

"I'm fourteen."

The information left Lawrence nonplussed. He simply couldn't see the relevance. "Really?"

"Yes. It wasn't just their biotechnology skills that our ancestors brought to this world, they brought a saying with them as well. Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse. Thanks to them I can do that."

"How long do you live for?" Lawrence didn't want to ask it, because he suddenly knew he wasn't going to like the answer.

"Probably thirty years. Can you imagine such a time? How it must stretch at the end."

"The oxygen. It's the oxygen, isn't it?"

"Of course. Everything here is faster, more dynamic."

"But... thirty?'

"Thirty whole years, during which time I will live and love and think. Why do you think that is wrong? Why do you want to live for such a long time?"

"To live is to experience. You can't do that in thirty years. There's so much of the universe to know."

"I do experience, far more than you ever will. I grow faster. I learn faster. I live faster. We all do. This world's life is so much more vital than your bland biology. As for the universe, it is contained in your mind. Observation is purely relative. I can watch the stars from here, all of them, while you crawl between them in your tin cans and see only one at a time. I appreciate my life, Earthman; there is less memory in my brain, and much more thought."

"Thought," he sneered. "But you don't use it. What's the point of thinking if you have no way to apply it, nothing to create?"

Calandrinia let her breath whistle out between her teeth, as did several other new-natives. "We do nothing else but create, Earthman. Do you think we have time to carry and birth our young as your women do? I adapt my children to the world as I see it and know it."

"You're talking about shape, aren't you? That's why you all look different."

"We have become morphogenic, the greatest gift our ancestors left us. What I think, my children become. Can you imagine what that is like? If I see a tree that is so tall and full of grace that I have to sit at its foot and gaze up in admiration, I can engender a child who will be able to climb to its apex and laugh with the joy of doing so. When I swim in a mountain lake, I do so for a few exciting minutes, while my daughter will be able to glide through its deeps and play with the fish. And when I shake with awe as a macrorex walks past, I can absorb its essence and mingle it with my own."

"Sweet Fate, you're talking bestiality."

"How simple your mind is. How pitiable. Do you think we alone should remain sentient and aware? If we are to live with this planet, we must share the best of what we are with it. Are you so unselfish, Earthman? Would you stop us from doing that, from waking Gaia?"

"I won't stop you. But I want no part in it. You're not human anymore."

"Why, thank you. I rarely get paid such a compliment."

"Wait a goddamn minute here," Ntoko said. "Are you telling me that the macrorexes are part human, that they're self-aware?'

"Some of them," Calandrinia said. "They are our friends, they help us when we ask."

"And the windshrikes, too?"

"Of course."

"Jesus H. Christ."

"If you don't have pregnancy anymore," Lawrence said, "where do all these kids come from?"

"The housewombs gestate them," Calandrinia said simply.

"House...?" He looked at the dumpy buildings that made up the village. "You mean your homes contain some kind of artificial womb?"

"Do you listen to anything? There is nothing artificial about a housewomb, it is perfectly natural. Our houses were the last stage in bridging the gap from what we were to what we are. Tell me, do your files have fastrocks in them?"

"Yeah." His Skin AS was retrieving the information. Fastrocks were essentially a polyp-type plant that grew quite slowly by Santa Chico's standards. They resembled ocher stones that grew clustered together in vast colonies and were completely fireproof. Their shells were also tough enough to resist being split open by the jaws of anything smaller than a macrorex.

Calandrinia gestured at the houses. "Our ancestors modified those small plants into the sturdy buildings you see today, a true and grand amalgamation of the genes from two planets. Now we live in living houses. Their roots grow deep to collect water and nutrients, while their shells harvest the sunlight. Within our houses we are nurtured without violating the planet as you do. Their organs provide for us in the way your machines do for you, although our bond is closer and more appreciative."

"You mean symbiotic."

"Ah, you are listening. Yes, our houses are a part of our family. Once I have a fertilized ovum, I place it in a housewomb to gestate."

"Did you give them sentience as well?"

"Of course. How could you marry an entity devoid of thought?"

"Good point," Lawrence retorted sarcastically. "Surely you've made yourselves overdependent on these constructs? Do they grow your food for you as well? Our satellites didn't see any working protein cell refineries."

Calandrinia reached up and pulled a cluster of small red berries from the tree. "Modifying Santa Chico's plants to fruit terrestrial food was the first and hardest task facing our ancestors. Once they understood how to merge the two different genetic molecules in a successful union, then everything we are today became possible. It took decades of effort before anything so complex was achieved, which is why we had to involve ourselves with commerce. So much of our respective biochemistries was incompatible, as it is on every world humans colonize. The old ways of life, your markets and machines, had to be sustained for that whole time while the problems were solved. Now, as you can see, we have left them far behind."

"And left yourself in debt," Ntoko said.

"Only on your planet, Earthman. Here there is no such thing. Here we are one."

"Claiming you are above such things as money is a very convenient way to duck the issue," Lawrence said. "But I know you understand economics and technology. You still have spaceplanes and orbital systems. They have to be maintained, spare parts manufactured, fuel produced. House-wombs can't do that for you."

"We had such machines until you arrived and destroyed them," Calandrinia said. "Some among us have the kind of dream you have, Lawrence Newton, that of spreading out through space. They are involved with ideas of modifying our cells to live up there in the desert beyond the sky. Our space enthusiasts want what we are to blossom on the comets and moons that share our star. It is a pleasant dream, I think. But they are a minority. And your arrival has put an end to their aspirations. They have agreed to turn their minds back toward Santa Chico. They will help to seal the sky and prevent you from returning."

"How did you know my name?"

"I'm sorry," Calandrinia said. "I didn't know it was a secret"

Lawrence didn't like how casual she was being. If they'd decrypted the communication links, which he acknowledged as a strong possibility, then they might have heard his name being used, as well as his conversation with Nic. But to identify individual Skin suits would be difficult. There were too many things here that the new-natives made light of. He still didn't even know how they communicated over long distances.

"What do you mean seal the sky?" Ntoko asked.

"You said you are leaving, which is what we want," Calandrinia said. "What we need to do after that is to make sure you do not return. At least, not while your present society is the dominant culture on Earth. To do that we must seal the sky." She exposed her tusks again.

"Come on," Ntoko said to Lawrence on the secure communication link. "This is wasting our time. We're outta here. If they had anything that could knock us down they would have used it by now. We just gotta watch our backs, and kill anything that moves out there."

"Right."

"Okay, we're going now," Ntoko told the new-natives. "You-all make sure you don't follow us. That way there's no misunderstandings, and nobody gets hurt."

"Such wise advice, Sergeant," Calandrinia said. "We will try to make use of it"

"Motherfucking smartmouths," Ntoko grumbled. "I wish we could nuke every fucking one of them."

The platoon tramped away, the soles of their Skin kicking up huge clouds of powdered ash. They crossed over from the island of tigergrass and trees around the village onto the black wasteland scoured by the wildfires. The ash rain had stopped falling around them, allowing them to see out across the countryside. Flames were still burning in the distance ahead of them, sending thick columns of smoke and ash soaring hundreds of meters into the deep-indigo sky. But it was no longer a solid wall; the wildfire had split around rivers and gullies, breaking into dozens of small blazes that raced onward.

"What the hell did you make of all that?" Ntoko asked.

"I'm not sure," Lawrence admitted. "It could just be a whole load of bullshit she made up to scare us. Or it could be true, in which case it's even scarier. There's a lot of things around here that don't add up."

"Jesus, smart animals for one. Maybe that part's true."

"Some of it has to be wrong. They used everything they've got to strike the starships when we were on our way in. They can't close off this planet from space."

"Damn, I wish we had some kind of contact with the captain. We should be telling people this."

"Satellite relay's still down."

"Yeah, I know. Let's hope the governor is still holding on at Roseport."

Lawrence was on edge for the rest of the march. If Calandrinia had been telling the truth, there was no way of telling what represented a danger to them.

By late afternoon the wildfires seemed to have died down. Smoke and ash hazed the air, darkening the sky to a sullen gray blue. They didn't see any more animals, large or small. Several times Lawrence thought he caught sight of wind-shrikes in the distance. But it could have just been dense swirls amid the lingering smoke. Underfoot, the tigergrass clumps started to weep, gooey sap leaking out of the burned blades. Their roots had obviously survived the fire, but then it had been so quick that it probably didn't heat the soil below a few centimeters. It wouldn't be long before the first new shoots were poking up through the mantle of ash.

The burnout zone ended along a narrow, deep gully with a brook of reddish water gurgling along its rocky floor. The land on both sides was covered in stones and boulders; there was little vegetation growing out of the cracks between them, which had reduced the fire's intensity. As he walked up to the gully, Lawrence realized it wasn't actually stone he was walking on. None of them moved under his feet, not even the pebbles. It was actually a vast bed of fastrock.

As the platoon crossed the gully a Xianti 5005 swept overhead, less than a kilometer in altitude. It was losing height.

"We've still got the spaceport," Nic said. "Thank Christ for that."

Half an hour later they topped a ridge that gave them a view of Roseport a couple of kilometers away. The lakeside city was in a bad way, with many of its houses smashed open. Lawrence's sensors zoomed in. Dark, glutinous fluid was oozing out of the broken shells, slithering slowly along the streets like molten tar. Internal organs lay exposed, reduced to a mass of pulped ginger jelly. Nobody was moving down any streets.

When he pulled the focus back he saw autosentinel guns had been set up in a broad perimeter around the outskirts— olive-green spheres on thick metal legs that were anchored into the ground, each with a trio of magnetic Gatling rifles protruding from its midsection, swiveling slowly from side to side as they tracked across the smashed houses. If anybody emerged from the city, they'd be cut apart in milliseconds.

Lawrence knew the autosentinels were part of the fleet's equipment, but he'd never seen them deployed before. Like land mines and laserfencing they were last-resort weapons.

Now that the platoon had line of sight, their communications link to the governor's field headquarters came back online. Ntoko reported in, telling the staff that they'd lost contact with Captain Lyaute hours ago.

With access to fleet tactical data restored, Lawrence requested a situation update from the headquarters AS. It was even worse than he'd been expecting. There had been a near-constant battle around Roseport. Skins entering the city had been killed by a variety of chemical and biological weapons. Each time they learned how to protect themselves from one, something new would hit them. In the end the governor ordered the autosentinel deployment in the hope they could confine the new-natives until the evacuation was complete. Even that was going to be touch and go. Macrorex herds had charged the spaceport three times. The Skins had to use armor-piercing smart missiles against them before the huge beasts reached the runway: nothing else could bring them down. Windshrikes were harassing the Xiantis when they lined up on final approach. The spaceplanes were having to fire antimissile airmine clusters from their countermeasure pods to kill them.

Of the eleven companies dispatched on scouring missions to factories and industrial facilities, only four had returned. Three more (including Lyaute) had reported in that they were under attack before communication was lost. The remaining four were currently classified as missing in action.

Events in orbit were equally hostile. The software assault on the starships was relentless. Communications bandwidth was reduced to a minimum to enable the onboard AS to examine every byte entering the ship's network. Kinetic slugs in a retrograde orbit had taken out several satellites. One swarm had got through the Mahonia's defenses, damaging a life support wheel and one of the compression drive's tokamaks.

In view of the unfolding catastrophe, the admiral had ordered a complete evacuation. Plans to capture Santa Chico's orbital industry stations weren't even on the agenda anymore.

Lawrence couldn't find out how many spaceplanes were operational. The data was classified. Estimates on how long the evacuation would take were also restricted. As was the number of surviving Skins.

Ntoko managed a few terse words of encouragement to the platoon and started to lead them toward the spaceport in a wide semicircle around Roseport. They jogged toward the runway, saying little. Lawrence knew they all shared the same anxiety. They were close to making it now. All they had to do was reach the runway. Someone else would take care of the rest—the admiral, the Xianti pilots. That just left the ground between here and there. Halfway around they stumbled into a wide patch of burned ground. Tigergrass was still smoldering round the edges. In the middle was the mangled wreckage of a TVL88 helicopter.

Ntoko decided they would be too exposed crossing the open space and took them around the side. Another couple of minutes added to the journey. It didn't help that they heard an autosentinel firing.

The last three hundred meters was a straight sprint. Discipline went all to hell, and the whole platoon charged over the tigergrass, dodging around trees, jumping low rocks, heedless of the target they presented. They made it past the perimeter, where Skins were lying in shallow trenches, armed with the heaviest portable weaponry in their armory.

Ntoko reported to the local lieutenant, who allowed them an hour's rest. They were issued with a ration pack of paste food, which they could eat with their helmets on. Headquarters also gave them a flight number. If the spaceplanes kept up their current schedule, they'd take off in another six hours.

The lieutenant gave them guard duty around the maintenance hangar. They took up position just as the sun sank below the horizon, integrating the new weaponry they'd drawn from the armory. Lawrence had taken a smart missile rack. So far the new-natives hadn't managed to glitch them.

He settled down to walk a regular route, making sure to keep his times random. His visual spectrum sensors provided him with a fuzzy blue-and-white image of the nighttime countryside, with the infrared bleed painting in small vermilion patches as rocks slowly radiated away the heat they'd absorbed during the day. Nothing moved among the tigergrass, not even small animals. He was thankful for that.

When he scoped Roseport, it glowed strongly in infrared, throwing off a coral-pink aura. There were no lights in any of the buildings. The autosentinels were taking shots at something every few minutes. Gossip on the general communication band centered on how much ammunition the robots had left and how long it would last.

Spaceplanes continued to arrive, thumping down out of the night sky amid the strident bellow of their Rolls-Royce turbojets on full reverse thrust. Sometimes they were preceded by the spectacular green-and-crimson magnesium firework display of their countermeasures clearing a path through the air.

An hour after nightfall one of the lost companies made contact. According to their report they'd suffered from a macrorex charge, losing most of their vehicles. On their way back they'd endured near-constant sniping and harassment from new-natives. Then they'd joined up with another company, which had a 30 percent casualty rate. Between them they had enough firepower to keep the new-natives back. It had been slow going with all the injured to care for, but they estimated they'd be arriving at the spaceport in another ninety minutes. Altogether there were over 120 of them.

Lawrence had a flush of guilty relief that it wasn't Lyaute, who would have wanted a damn good explanation about where 435NK9 had got to and what had happened. Everyone else was cheered by the news. It would mean at least one extra spaceplane flight, delaying the final departure by another twenty minutes.

The autosentinels' rate of fire slowed considerably after me first couple of hours, but Lawrence was convinced the new-natives would try to infiltrate the spaceport. It gave him a brittle edge that his Skin pharmacy couldn't dampen. Standing by himself on the edge of the spaceport facing the unknowable threats creeping through the tigergrass was using up a lot of his resolve. The area directly outside had been seeded with hundreds of remote sensors that had secure links to his display grid. He didn't entirely trust them: his droughts were bent toward Calandrinia and how she had quietly mocked them.

Two hours before their scheduled departure time he learned why she had been so confident. Everything she'd said had been true. To start with he thought another Xianti was on its way down and dispensing countermeasures. Several streaks of flame shot across the sky, fading almost immediately. He scanned around, but couldn't locate the intense thermal signature of a spaceplane. More streaks blossomed, stretching out across the stars. As far as the flightpath was concerned, they were in the wrong section of sky. He realized it was a meteor shower and grinned briefly. Before they died away a third batch had begun to fizzle their way down. These Were slightly larger particles, with a bulbous head stretching out a sparkling tail as they tore down through the upper atmosphere. There seemed no end to them streaking out of one section of sky. Lawrence's grin faded. The patch was elongated, extending north-south and still growing.

"Oh, bloody Fate," Lawrence groaned. He understood then. We will seal the sky.

A Skin was running toward him from the hangar.

"Lawrence?" It was Ntoko, using his Skin's speaker on low volume.

"Yeah," Lawrence replied, using his own speaker.

"They've done it, haven't they? This is what Calandrinia was talking about."

"Yeah. They must have nuked the polar-orbit asteroid, pulverized the fucker. This shower's just the edge of the debris swarm."

"Goddamn it! You know all about this orbital-mechanics shit. Can the starships get away through it?"

"Yeah, but they'll have to leave soon, if they haven't already. The debris won't have started to cascade yet. All we have for the moment is just an expanding cloud of rock in polar orbit."

"What's a cascade?"

"Look, the nukes will have shattered the asteroid into a million pieces, okay? Some of them will just fly straight down and burn up in the atmo-sphere. We're seeing that start now. But if the new-natives set the charges right, then there's a shitload of mountains and boulders and pebbles still in orbit. Right now they're separating, flying apart into their own irregular orbit, but once they've spread out enough, then they're going to start colliding. Each boulder that crashes another releases another cascade of smaller rocks, which are going to smash into another batch of rocks and so on. It's a chain reaction that is never going to stop. In a year's time, this planet is going to be surrounded by a shield of rock splinters ten thousand kilometers thick. It'll be like Saturn's rings, only spherical. She was right, that Calandrinia. Nothing will be able to get through this. They have sealed themselves away from the universe. It will take millennia for the shield particles to decay and burn up in the atmosphere. Maybe they never will. Fate, I don't know. Nobody's ever seen a cascade before."

"Okay, grab the guys. Head for that spaceplane." He pointed. "It's fueled."

"But—"

"You said it, man, the starships have got to leave. There aren't going to be any more spaceplane flights after these. Now get your ass in gear, Corporal."

Lawrence pumped his speaker volume up. "To me, people, come on, let's go." He started jogging, then broke into a sprint. Ntoko was shouting as well. The survivors of 435NK9 began running toward them.

High above them, larger debris particles had reached the atmosphere. They screamed down in a sheath of plasma until the pressure shock detonated them into a dazzling halo shoal that expanded and brightened as it sank ever downward. Sometimes the shoal particles would explode again and again as the rocks were broken into smaller and smaller fragments by the superheated ions, sending pyrotechnic shock waves radiating outward. A hundred conical plumes of incandescence flowered against the night, flaring through the spectrum as they slowly withered away to violet specters.

Half of the continent was drenched in a light greater than that of the sun. Lawrence could see the entire spaceport on the move. Skins were running about in chaos, not knowing what was happening. There was no chain of command. No orders. No information. No discipline. Not even new-natives with their hyperoxygenated muscles could match the turbo-charged speed of the Skins. Everything was happening in accelerated time.

A hundred meters ahead of Lawrence the Xianti was parked in its flight preparation bay. Its turbofans were already starting up. Fueling arms had disengaged. They began to sink back down into the concrete.

The airstairs were still in place. Skins were surging up them, desperate for a place. Lawrence had no idea how many were already inside. He reached the bottom of the airstairs in five seconds. Twenty Skins were clustered there, funneling onto the aluminum steps. More Skins were heading their way.

Out on the runway a Xianti began its takeoff run.

"Lawrence," Ntoko called. "Give me your rack."

Lawrence handed over the weapon as he shoved and wriggled his way toward the bottom of the stairs. Apart from Ntoko, who already held an identical rack, he couldn't tell who was who. His AS wasn't tagging individual suits. The entire communications band had crashed.

"What do you want it for?"

"You take care, Lawrence. You look after my guys for me."

"Sarge? Ntoko!"

"I'll be watching." Ntoko was already slipping free from the throng of Skins. He opened the bottom of the rack that Lawrence had given him and pulled out a data cable, which he plugged into his Skin's interface port. The tubes at the top of the rack spat hazy orange flames that pulsed for several seconds.

Explosions bloomed across the taxiway. The swarm of Skins sprinting for the remaining spaceplanes dived for cover. More explosions rippled down the side of a hangar as Ntoko tried to deflect the onrush that threatened to overwhelm the last two spaceplanes. Composite panels and steel girders crashed over the tarmac. Smoke and dust billowed out. Skins started firing. Armor-piercing rounds pummeled the control tower. Carbines opened up.

"Ntoko! For fuck's sake, you can't!" Lawrence was at the foot of the stairs. His sensors showed him Ntoko walking calmly away from the rear of the melee, a rack held in each arm. Flames stabbed out as more smart missiles leaped from their tubes. The sergeant raised one of the racks in salute and kept on walking.

For an instant, Lawrence hesitated. But the Skins behind were pressing him on. And his own sense of self-preservation was just too strong. He clambered up the airstairs and into the cabin. The spaceplane began to move, pulling free from the airstairs. Lawrence grabbed at the Skin on top, helping to drag him in. Another Skin leaped across the widening gap, crashing into everyone crammed into the airlock. Another jumped and just managed to grab the rim of the hatch. He hung there, dangling as the spaceplane accelerated onto the taxiway. Lawrence was looking at the abandoned airstair as it wobbled about The Skins on it were using their speakers at full volume, shouting at the Xianti to come back. One of them deployed his carbine and started firing. A couple of bullets ricocheted inside the airlock. Lawrence ducked automatically. Then an explosion went off at the base of the airstair. The whole structure collapsed, taking the Skins with it "Thanks, Sarge," Lawrence whispered.

He moved back into the Xianti as the hatch swung shut. The cabin was badly overcrowded, with Skins crammed along the aisle. He didn't even consider the extra weight. The sarge was out there, covering their asses like he always did. They'd make it.

Inside the sealed cabin, his Skin could link into the space-plane's internal network. He called up the external cameras.

Outside, the asteroid fragments were still sleeting down in a blaze of light. On the ground, Skins were racing about in their distinct fast motion. All of them seemed to be shooting at something. Explosions erupted from the shattered buildings. Wild clouds of smoke writhed across the ground as vigorous blue-white flames swirled out of wrecked equipment blocks. The Xianti turned sharply onto the runway. The pilot didn't waste any time; Lawrence could feel the vibration building as the turbojets wound up to full power before the nose was lined up. Then they were racing forward, lifting from the ground.

They flew up steeply, the giant turbojets pushed to their redline. The spaceplane's cameras showed the calm upper cloud bands fluorescing a lambent silver in the lurid radiance thrown out from hundreds of descending fireballs. As they passed through the thin layer the perspective shifted until it looked as if they'd climbed above a frosted desert gleaming in winter moonlight.

Their scramjet ignited, thrusting them higher. The swaths of cloud shrank away to a shimmering haze that veiled the world. Scintillating rose-gold contrails scored their way through the empty darkness toward it, plunging underneath to dwindle and vanish.

Ahead of the spaceplane's nose, stars glittered coldly in welcome.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

There were a number of medical modules attached to Hal's torso, clustered around the red-weal wounds and surgical scars. Some of them were integral with patches of artificial skin that were busy melding with his spoiled dermal layers, infusing regeneration virals into the plexus of capillaries. Others were more complex systems, sprouting slim tubes that penetrated the scars, pumping specialist fluids in and out of damaged organs, supporting them until he could be given replacements and proper treatments. He wore a baggy white shirt to cover them, but the modules were too bulky to hide completely. It was as though his torso was busy growing plastic tumors.

He sat in his high-backed leather seat, head lolling against the side cushions as if his neck didn't have quite enough strength to hold it upright. Every time one of his friends came into the hotel's small private staff lounge that they'd taken over to care for him he grinned at them and made a happy grunting sound. Edmond went over and gave him a high five. Just watching Hal's hand wavering unsteadily through the air as he concentrated hard to make contact made Lawrence chill deep inside. The others were looking away, their expressions grim as they were reminded of Hal's state.

Only Dennis stared unflinchingly. And Lawrence knew he'd been taking too many of his own sedatives lately.

Amersy was the last in. He closed the door and gave Hal a quick thumbs-up, the way anyone would to a longtime pal. It was his eyes, flicking away quickly, that betrayed what he must be thinking.

What was left of Platoon 435NK9 turned to Lawrence.

"First off," Lawrence said. "Don't worry about getting Hal back up to the Koribu. I have a contact at Durrell spaceport."

Hal let out a long wheezy groan. His jaw started to move, chewing on air. When Hal had come round after Lawrence's ragtag medical team installed the biomech heart he'd lost all sensation and movement down his right side. Since then, feeling had been returning slowly, as with a recovering stroke victim. If that was his only complication Lawrence would have been happy. But despite the superoxygenated blood in his brain, there had been some starvation damage. The kid's thoughts were slow and muddled, coupled with memory lapses. With the paralyzed muscles and the difficulty he had putting words together, watching him try to speak was painful. Most of the time he knew what he wanted to say, but grew angry with himself when the words refused to form. Sometimes the anger would cause him to punch the arm of the chair with his good arm, tears of frustration leaking down his cheeks.

"Thank. You. Sarge," he grunted out. Tendons stood proud from his throat with the effort of forming three words.

"That's what I'm here for, Hal." Lawrence glanced around at the other faces in the room, trying to judge the collective mood. They were all quietly expectant, curious what he'd brought them together for. Since the court-martial and the firing squad they'd been directing their shock and anger at Z-B in the form of Captain Bryant and Ebrey Zhang. Resentment and the sense of betrayal hadn't manifested in any coherent form, but they'd become difficult to command. Not that the rest of the platoons in Memu Bay were any more disciplined right now. But with a ruined Hal to rally round and help, 435NK9 retained a degree of internal cohesion. They did what Lawrence told them, not because they were orders from Bryant, but because Lawrence wanted them carried out.

He couldn't have asked for a group of men more suited to help achieve his personal goal.

Funny how things work out.

"The reason I have a contact at Durrell is something I was going to share with you at some time anyway. Might as well be now. I think there's a big asset out in the hinterland that Z-B doesn't know about. I want to collect that asset."

"For Z-B?" Karl asked quickly.

Lawrence smiled without humor. "Not a chance."

Lewis clapped his hands together. "Fucking-a."

"More like it."

"What kind of asset?" Amersy asked. He sounded more cautious than curious.

Lawrence pulled out a desktop pearl. Its pane unfolded and began to display a satellite image of the plateau behind Memu Bay. "This is Arnoon Province. I went up there last time I was on Thallspring, a patrol that was sent on a sweep through the hinterlands. According to Memu Bay's official records, the people living up there harvest willow webs in the forest and turn the stuff into sweaters and blankets, crap like that. What we found when we got there was a nice little village in the woods, with a very decent standard of living. It was like a five-star holiday resort. I've seen the same kind of isolated community on several worlds. No big deal. But there were a few things wrong about this one. You'll have to take my word on this, but there's no way they could afford the standard of living I saw by just selling blankets. Every house was crammed full of gadgets and electronics, all of it top-of-the-range gear. There were a lot of people living there as well, more than Memu Bay knew about, and too many for their community income to support. And none of them were ill, either. I'm not talking about hospital cases. I didn't even see a kid with a runny nose. They were the healthiest group of people I've known."

"So you're saying they've got another source of income?" Amersy said. "Lawrence, I've seen communities like this, too. They'll have some kind of illegal scam running up there in the forest, away from the city police and, more important, the taxman. It won't be anything we can take home."

"No, they have money on a scale that goes way beyond anything like that. I'm talking orders of magnitude, here. They're probably the richest people on this planet"

"How do you figure that?"

"It took me a while to realize, because they've used the best camouflage there is: put your biggest secret in plain sight. I thought they were Regressors that first time. I saw them eating fruit from a tree." He smiled softly at the platoon.

"So?" Lewis asked. "They are Regressors. Nobody else does that kind of thing. It's filthy. Decent people eat protein cell food."

Lawrence chuckled. "Which just proves my point. You can't see it either. Willow webs are a local plant. The forest up there in the hills is indigenous. Arnoon Province wasn't gamma soaked."

"No way," Dennis said sharply. "Terrestrial plants won't grow in alien environments. For a start, the soil bacteria is all wrong. That's why you have to gamma soak the land and re-seed it with our own bacteria."

"Exactly," Lawrence said. "But I saw it. I saw them pluck fruit from a bush and eat it. From what I remember, it wasn't even a terrestrial bush."

"Then you didn't see it, Sarge. Sorry, but humans don't have a biochemistry that is compatible with this planet's indigenous organisms. I might have flunked my degree, but I did manage to take in stuff that basic."

"I know. But I've seen this happen on one other planet as well. You weren't with us then." Lawrence cocked an eyebrow at Amersy. "You remember Calandrinia?"

"Hardly likely to forget her."

"She was a new-native on Santa Chico," Lawrence told the others. "They ate fruit that was growing on trees. I called them Regressors, too. But I was wrong there as well. Calandrinia told us that the biotechnology experts who emigrated from California eventually worked out how to blend the terrestrial and alien gene pools. It made Calandrinia's generation what they were, and it gave them food the old-fashioned way, so they weren't dependent on food refineries. That was a big part of their philosophy, liberating themselves from machinery. So it is possible."

Dennis pulled a face. "Maybe. On Santa Chico I could believe it. But here, on Thallspring? Christ, Sarge, the most advanced thing ever to come out of Memu Bay is a new shape for a windsurfing board."

"Yeah. And according to Calandrinia it took decades for Santa Chico to develop the gene blend. Decades of work by hundreds of the greatest geneticists and biotechnicians Earth ever had. Yet here we are, in the middle of the hinterlands on a planet thirty-seven light-years from Santa Chico, and I see the same thing. How do you explain that, Dennis?"

"You think they bought the genetic blending technology from Santa Chico. Don't you?" Amersy asked.

"There's nowhere else it could have come from. And it would have taken a lot of money. You'd have to travel from here to Santa Chico carrying a complete range of Thallspring botanical and bacterial samples. Then you'd have to employ a team of geneticists to adapt the techniques. That takes serious money. Billions in anyone's currency."

"Santa Chico's cut off," Edmond said. "Everyone knows that."

Lawrence shook his head. "I was on Thallspring before I went to Santa Chico. This must have happened thirty, forty years ago, maybe even longer. Back when credit meant something to Santa Chico."

"All right," Amersy said. "I can accept that it's theoretically possible for the Arnoon villagers to have trees that produce terrestrial food. But where did the money come from?"

"Two possibilities," Lawrence said. "The first is they're exiles. A group of billionaires setting up a colony inside a colony. Essentially, they're self-sufficient—that's where the food trees come in. They have a high standard of living, which they support by quietly buying in all the consumer goodies that a relatively advanced world can provide. The problem I have with this idea is billionaires don't live like that. You don't work your ass off amassing that kind of fortune and then spend it on some forest idyll community. Earth is their element, with its stock markets and stakes and boards."

"So what's the other possibility?" Odel asked.

"That Arnoon began exactly the way they said it did. A group of honest people looking for a quiet life who harvested willow webs for a living. They start their community, establish some decent tenets to live by. Then suddenly they find something valuable. Fabulously valuable. This is the mother-lode of all motherlodes, here. What do they do? If they tell the rest of their world, everyone will want a piece of the action. Arnoon Province is developed and industrialized. Their way of life will be wiped out. So they decide to spend it on safeguarding that good quiet life they've got for themselves.

"A few of them buy passage to Earth on a Navarro house starship. Then fly on to Santa Chico. Several years later, when the gene blending has been accomplished, they come back the same way. After that, it's easy. They can expand their population without the local authorities knowing about it, because they have an independent food supply. Buying in every civilized luxury is relatively easy; they set up a couple of wholesale companies down here in Memu Bay, maybe another in the capital. They're fronts so they can send the products up to the plateau without anyone knowing."

"How did they know about Santa Chico?" Amersy asked. "We damn well didn't until after we landed."

"We didn't know how far they'd carried the modifications," Lawrence said. "We knew about the modification project. It was the big difference that the settlers were so proud of. Santa Chico was not going to be colonized the same way as every other planet. They made that very clear right at the start and went out of their way to advertise the fact. Even on Amethi I'd heard of Santa Chico."

"All right, maybe you did, but a bunch of willow web farmers?"

"They had datapool access and money. It's a wonderful combination; it always gets you what you want in the end."

"I don't believe hundreds of people can keep a secret that big for so long. One of them would come down into Memu Bay and blow his wad in a marina club. Word would leak out."

"Nobody knows about them," Lawrence said. "So the secret has been kept. Simple logic."

"I don't see how."

Lawrence didn't know what else to say to convince him. You couldn't dispute the plain facts.

"Hey, Sarge," Karl said. "What do you reckon this motherlode is?"

"That's where it gets interesting. The survey satellites never came up with anything on the plateau other than the bauxite. So, geologically speaking, it's got to be something that shouldn't be there, an anomaly. Expand on Arnoon," he told the desktop pearl AS. The picture flowed. Snow-capped mountains rippled up as the focus shifted past them. Huge tracts of forest swept by until the AS centered on a valley with a circular lake. There was a small island in the middle. "I saw this, too, when I was there last time. I didn't recognize it then, because you don't often see these all covered in trees and grass."

"Oh, my goodness," Odel murmured. "It's a crater."

"You got it. And it's impact, not volcanic. That island is the central peak. A chunk of some asteroid or comet hit the plateau a few thousand years ago, maybe less. The cliff on the west side is still almost sheer. There's been very little movement or erosion since it happened."

"So what hit it?" Karl was leaning forward, staring intently at the pane.

"I'm betting on metal," Lawrence said. "A near-solid lump of it. That would survive the flight through the atmosphere, and the impact. It also gives the Arnoon villagers something to mine."

"What kind of metal?" Karl wanted to believe. Manna from heaven mixed in with a great treasure hunt. He was buying in heavily.

"I don't know for sure, but it's got to be one of the precious ones. Gold, platinum. Or maybe I'm wrong, and it was an ordinary carbonaceous chondritic that fused into diamond from all that heat and pressure during the impact."

Karl slapped Odel's shoulder. "You hear that? There's a diamond mountain in them there hills, and it's all ours."

Odel gave him a pitying look.

"Maybe it's there," Lawrence said. "And that's what you've got to decide. By yourselves. I need to know if you're in or out. All I know for certain is there's evidence of a lot of money up on that plateau, and there's an impact crater in the same place. To me that's more than coincidence, but I can't guarantee anything."

"What sort of proposition are you offering, Sergeant?" Odel asked.

"Equal share for everyone who goes up there with me. We also have to pay off my contact and a spaceplane pilot."

"How do we get there?" Amersy asked.

"We've been assigned a hinterland patrol, leaving oh-eight-thirty tomorrow. Estimated duration two days."

"Jesus." Amersy gave a surprised, slightly troubled grin. "That's some contact you've got. Our assignments come out of Zhang's office."

"I've been planning this for a while" was all Lawrence said. Even now he wasn't about to trust anyone else with Prime.

"Man, we're covered," Lewis said as his smile broadened. "We're going to be up there on an official mission. And the villagers are going to be the last people to protest about some private asset realization. They can't let on they had anything worth taking in the first place." He looked at Lawrence in admiration. "Fucking-a, Sarge. Count me in."

They all turned as Hal began his loud grunting. "I'm. With. Sarge," he ground out. "Need. Money. To. Be. Better. Not. Live. Like. This."

Edmond patted his friend. "It's okay, man. You get a share anyway."

"Actually, if we go we have to take him with us," Lawrence said. "There's nobody here to give him the kind of care he needs. He can ride in the back of the jeep."