Judas Unchained

CHAPTER SIX

Morton was still smiling when his bubble dropped out of the wormhole, fifteen meters above the Highmarsh Valley in the Dau’sing Mountains.

It had been two days since Mellanie’s last visit at the barracks. She’d cut it fine, arriving just hours before Kingsville was closed off and everyone received their final clearance orders. It had been one hell of a visit, the two of them screwing each other senseless in the little rec room, like teenagers who’d unexpectedly found the house empty one afternoon. Hence the long-lasting smile.

That memory of the two of them together was the last one to be loaded into his secure store. So if, as likely, his body was blown to shit on this mission, that would be the strongest memory in his brain when he was re-lifed. Now that was a stylish way to emerge back into reality.

His bubble was a translucent gray-blue sphere of plyplastic, three meters in diameter, its surface stealthed against every known sensor type used by the Primes. He was suspended at the center by the transparent impact gel that filled the interior. During training it had seemed like a sensible way to arrive on a hostile planet light-years behind enemy lines. They were neat little machines: tough, highly mobile, and reasonably armed. Actually riding one down as it exhibited all the aerodynamics of a granite boulder pulled the smile off his face. Fear hit him for the first time, making his heart pound and his stomach quake. Life didn’t get any more extreme than this.

The rest of Cat’s Claws had come through the wormhole okay, their bubbles very hard to see in the visual spectrum as they all fell toward the ground. It was only their high-UV IFF beacons that gave him their locations. The three combat aerobots that had led the deployment zoomed away across the grungy landscape, disgorging chaff and decoy drones.

Up above them, the wormhole closed. It had been open for about ten seconds, just long enough to shoot them out. Back on Wessex, the gateway had been surrounded by a giant mechanical loading system, resembling a scaled-up version of an artillery gun magazine, with over a thousand bubbles sitting on conveyor racks ready for the assault. Parallel racks carrying wedge-shaped combat aerobots moved forward smoothly beside them, their separate ranks merging at the gateway amid the weird cluster of lithe malmetal tentacles that was the actual launch delivery mechanism.

Cat’s Claws had joined several hundred other troops lined up on one of five gantry ledges as the bubbles trundled past in stop-start sequences. Along with the rest of them, Morton had finally been given the activation codes for the aggressor systems wetwired into his body. Now the squad were all making nervous, jokey comments about those systems not firing outward, war tourism, which body parts you protected above all else, alien rights lawyers suing them, and other stupid stuff. Trying to bull out the wait.

After a surprisingly short time Cat’s Claws was at the head of the line. Morton pulled his armor suit helmet down, checked his breathing circuit integrity, and slithered through the slit in the side of his bubble. As soon as the straps closed around him, the gel was pumped in under pressure. His e-butler integrated itself with the bubble’s array, confirming internal systems functionality. By then he was already ten meters down the conveyor rack.

The Elan strategic assault display flashed up across his virtual vision. He saw batches of wormholes opening a hundred kilometers above the planetary surface. They would remain in place for several seconds, disgorging a phenomenal quantity of munitions: missiles, ground-attack warheads, electronic warfare pods, decoy vehicles, beam-weapons platforms. It was all covering fire, a diversion while other, smaller wormholes opened just above the surface, deploying squads all around the fringes of Prime installations and bases. The Primes were fighting back, sending up flyers and big ships, their beam weapons punching through the scuzzy continent-wide clouds to intercept the rain of lethal machines as they sank down through the ionosphere. There were also flyers scouring the ground as the troop wormholes flipped in and out of existence. But electronic warfare aerobots were causing havoc with the Prime communications and sensors, hampering the flyers. Initial reports indicated that the landings were succeeding, by which the navy meant beachhead casualties were under thirty percent.

Morton hit the ground. The impact wasn’t as bad as any of the bone-buster hits they’d given him in training. His bubble bounced twice, the plyplastic flexing and bending to dissipate as much of the shock as it could; pressure waves moved sluggishly through the gel to squish lightly up against him. On the third landing, it sagged like a punctured balloon and stayed on the ground. “Down,” he told the rest of Cat’s Claws.

According to the inertial navigation readout, he was within half a kilometer of his predicted landing coordinate. The land immediately around him was flat, a field that had been seeded in springtime and had run rampant before starting to decay. Some kind of bean crop, judging by the yellow-green mush pressing against the lower section of his bubble. Abrupt climate change hadn’t helped this land’s recent delicate conversion to cultivation. It was raining in the Highmarsh; a thick blanket of dark turbulent cloud was stretched across the roof of the valley, flowing slowly from east to west. It produced a constant downpour of gray water that had overwhelmed the drainage dikes and beaten the surviving crops into a straggly mat of insipid green stalks lying flat against the sodden soil. Tall liipoplar trees that had been planted in long lines up and down the valley had been battered by the nuclear blast and subsequent storms, few of them were still intact; the majority had snapped to crash over the roads they once marked.

Morton checked around, and found the mountain he was supposed to be heading for, three kilometers away. The bubble started to stiffen up again, reverting to its standard spherical configuration. His virtual hands zipped over a sequence of control icons, and the single broad caterpillar track running around the compact machine’s vertical equator began to spin up. The bubble began its stabilized counterspin, keeping him perfectly level. Dips and lumps in the ground jounced him from side to side, but in the main it was a smooth ride, the gel acting as the ultimate suspension system.

External sensors showed Morton water spraying out from either side of the track. A rigid trail of squashed muddy plants lay behind him. “Goddamn!”

The bubble’s chromometic skin was doing a wonderful job defusing the moldy green color of the crop around the entire exterior. Any eye or visual sensor looking down would just see a hazy patch just the same color as the rest of the field; but that crushed track and little wake of water was a dead giveaway.

“We need to get on the farm roads,” he told the others. “This wet ground is painting us as big fat targets.” Pre-invasion map images flipped up in his virtual vision, and he steered the bubble to the right, his body tilting over as if he were riding a bike. The bubble changed direction, heading for the top corner of the field.

“Incoming,” Doc Roberts warned. “Four flyers.”

Morton saw the symbols creep into his virtual vision. They’d come into the valley at the western end, following the old highway route around Blackwater Crag.

Aerobots curved around to meet them head-on. Maser beams slashed between the two opposing formations, etching themselves in lines of steam through the downpour. Force fields flared brightly as they deflected the energy strikes. The aerobots fired salvos of missiles, their fiery contrails spluttering in the rain. Powerful ion bolts ripped through the air like slow-motion lightning, casting stark shadows for kilometers across the ground below.

Morton reached the rough farm track bordering the field. It was awash with muddy water that was spilling over the banks of the dike, but only a few centimeters thick. He throttled up the bubble’s track. A limp fantail of water squirted up behind him as his speed reached an easy eighty kph.

Tactical decision: that the aliens in their flyers would be a little preoccupied to spot a ripple in the mud right now.

The aerobots were always going to lose. They were outnumbered from the start. The flyers were heavier and slower, but their beam weapons had a much higher power level. Maneuverability and superior tactical ability gave the first two kills to the aerobots and their host of submunitions, but eventually brute force won out.

After seven minutes of furious combat the remaining two flyers thundered over the area where the wormhole had opened. One of the stubby cylinders was trailing a thin brown vapor trail from a gash on its side, but its straining engines managed to keep it airborne. They began to spiral out, sensors sweeping the ground.

Ten kilometers away, and already three hundred meters above the valley floor in the rugged folds of the foothills, Morton watched the aliens circling around and around. His bubble was stationary, resting at the bottom of a narrow gully cut out of the soil by an earlier spring storm. Mud and stones were pressed against the base, their mottled shading replicated all around him. A web of thermal shunt fibers completed the disguise, giving the bubble’s chromometic skin the same temperature as the land it rested on.

“Bugger,” Rob Tanne said. “Eight more of the bastards.”

The new flyers raced up the Highmarsh Valley to join the first two in the search for any surviving human trespasser. Their flight paths brought them closer and closer to the foothills.

“Don’t they have anything else to do?” Parker complained.

“Guess not,” Morton said.

Cat’s Claws waited as the flyers swooped low overhead, their bubbles inert, operating on low power mode, hidden among the abundant secluded folds and hollows provided by the rugged landscape. Morton could hear the bass thrumming of the engines through the bubble’s gel. They must be very loud out in the open.

One passed about fifty meters away. His bubble’s passive sensors scanned the layout. There wasn’t much to add to the database already in his array. The Primes didn’t seem to vary their machines.

After thirty minutes, six of the flyers peeled off and left, leaving the remaining two patrolling the Highmarsh. “Let’s go, boys,” Cat said as the flyers loitered at the far end of the valley.

Morton was slightly surprised she was still with them, not to mention sticking to the deployment plan. He’d half expected her to take off on her own as soon as they were down. Under his guidance, the bubble’s plyplastic skin rippled, squeezing itself up out of the gully with a fast lurch. The caterpillar track held it steady on the soaking sulphur-yellow boltgrass that covered the slope. There was only a kilometer or so of desolate ground to cover before the unruly cloud base. They’d be a lot safer inside the thick, cool vapor.

The strategic assault display was empty now. Elan’s deployment was complete. The wormholes above the planet had all closed, shutting down the temporary communications feeds. Morton switched to a local display, checking the position of the other bubbles against his own. Unsurprisingly, Cat was already above cloud level, waiting for the rest of them. He fed power to the tread, and began his ascent.

The navy had been concerned that the snow that lay on the Dau’sing peaks all year round would leave tracks that the Primes could follow. For that reason the path preloaded into the bubble’s navigation array skirted the very high ground, taking Morton on a long winding route through tough passes and clinging to contour lines along alarmingly steep slopes. They need not have worried. The gray clouds were several degrees warmer and a lot muckier than the usual weather fronts besieging the mountains at the onset of the southern continent’s winter. The snowline had undergone a long retreat upward, exposing vast tracts of slatey shingle that hadn’t seen daylight for millennia.

Morton drove through the dark, murky fog for a couple of hours. He had to move slowly; visibility was down to thirty meters at best, and that was using the passive sensors on full resolution. All he saw was kilometer after kilometer of the same slippery, muddy shingle crunching below the translucent track. No other features emerged out of the fog. The angle of the slope changed, but that was it for variety.

They were traveling in a very loose convoy, with Cat out in front. At least he assumed she was still in front; he hadn’t spotted her beacon for over an hour and a half. She’d gone off at a speed he wasn’t going to try to match. Behind him, Doc Roberts was keeping a sensible kilometer separation distance. His beacon moved in and out of acquisition depending on the shape of the terrain.

Morton rounded a sharp vertical ridge of rock, and the Cat’s beacon was shining three hundred meters ahead.

“Where’ve you been, boys?”

“Taking care,” Morton said. “We’re not proving anything to each other here.”

“Touchy!”

He accelerated down the shallow incline to her bubble. She had stopped at the low point of a shallow saddle between a couple of peaks on the edge of the Regents range, about fifteen kilometers from where the navy detector station had been built. It was walled in on both sides by cliffs of sheer rock rising to vanish into the turbid clouds that occluded the peaks. The ground between them was a stratum of crumbling stones, scattered with fresh unsteady piles that had fallen from on high when the mountains were shaken by the nuclear blast.

Morton drove his bubble on a slow circuit of the area, matching up what they’d reviewed on the satellite imagery from CST’s original survey. It was a good location to adopt as a base camp. The cliffs were riddled with slim zigzag fissures and deeper crevices. He identified at least three where they could store the bubbles and equipment.

“This should do,” he announced as the Doc’s bubble came slithering down the incline.

“Well, as long as you think so, Morty darling,” Cat said.

Once everyone had arrived, they got out of the bubbles and started unpacking their equipment. Morton and Rob took a fast walk over to the edge of the saddle. Past the cliffs, the ground curved down sharply, though visibility was still only a few tens of meters. The clouds were moving faster here, scurrying along the southern edge of the Regents. Without them, Morton and the Doc would have had a clear view straight down to the Trine’ba two kilometers below. Randtown itself was away to the west.

“There’s a lot of activity down there,” the Doc said. He was using his suit’s electromagnetic spectrum sensors to scan the shoreline of the vast lake.

Morton switched on his own sensors. The clouds filled with a bright gold radiance, as if a small, intense star was rising from the Trine’ba. When he added analysis programs, the coronal hue changed to a serpentine mass of entwined emissions, bundled sinewaves thrashing in discord. As well as the strange Prime communications, there was the bolder background turquoise of powerful magnetic fields flexing in a slow cadence. Lavender sparks swarmed around the empire of light, flyers trailing their own wake of cadmium signals, their membranous force fields flickering like wasp wings. “What kind of important installation would you build in Randtown?” he asked out loud. “I don’t get it. There’s nothing here. Send your invasion force halfway across the galaxy so they can build a five-star ski resort? That’s crazy.”

“This whole invasion makes no sense,” the Doc said. “There must be something down there more valuable than we realized. They are alien, remember. Different values.”

“We understand their technology,” Morton countered. “They base everything on the same fundamental principles we do, they ain’t that different.”

“When you apply technology to a requirement it nearly always shakes down to a one-solution machine in the end: cars to travel over land, rockets to fly into space. But motivation, that’s a species variable, always has been.”

“Whatever,” Morton said. As well as his dodgy medical qualifications, the Doc had some obscure English degree dating back over a century; all that education made him want to overanalyze everything. “We’re not here to admire their psychology, we’re here to blow the shit out of them.”

“Eloquently put,” the Doc said.

Morton took out a type three sensor, a transparent disk five centimeters across, and stuck it on the side of a boulder where it could scan across the Trine’ba. “That’ll spot anything approaching us.”

“Unless they come from the other side.”

“We’ll place sensors all the way around our base camp. Obviously. It’s not like we’ve got a shortage of them.” Part of their mission procedure had them building up a comprehensive network of the optronic devices, allowing them to monitor all the alien activity in and around Randtown.

“Roger that,” the Doc said; he sounded amused.

They spent the next forty minutes scrambling over rocks and unstable shingle falls, planting the little sensors to provide early warning of any approaching flyers. Not once did they see sunlight; the cloud swirled and eddied as they clambered about, but it remained unbroken.

“Well done, boys,” Cat said as they arrived back at the base of the saddle.

“Great views you’ve given us; lots of rock and a big wet sky.”

“Let’s just hope it stays that interesting,” Rob said.

“That kind of depends on us,” Morton said. “We’re here to cause as much disruption as we can. I guess we’d better start by scouting out the neighborhood. We need two teams, and someone to stay up here to safeguard the equipment.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie, I must have missed that,” Cat said. “When did they pin a general’s star on you?”

“You don’t need to be a general to point out the bleeding obvious,” Parker said. “We know what’s on the mission plan. Establish a knowledge of the enemy and use it to hit them hard.”

“And the person staying behind ain’t going to be you, Cat,” Rob said.

“Darling! Why is that?”

“Don’t you know? I don’t trust you. None of us do. You’re a fucking psycho.”

“Ow, Bob, are you scared of little me? You’ve got your armor suit and a very big gun.”

“I’m not scared of you, I simply regard you as unprofessional. We can’t depend on you for backup and support, we don’t know if you’d provide it or not. You enjoyed playing the badass in training, screwing with our instructors. We all got a laugh out of that. Out here, nobody’s smiling, nobody thinks you’re clever. So you either take the front row all the time, or fuck off right now.”

“I’m disappointed, Bob, did the Doc fill your head with that speech?”

“Let’s just concentrate on what we’re here to achieve, shall we,” Morton said. “Cat, he’s right. You’re not dependable enough to be our cover.”

“General, and peacemaker. I like you, Morty.”

“And don’t call me that.”

“Mellanie does,” Parker said, laughing. “We all know that.”

“Morty, oh Morty, yes, yes please,” Rob warbled. “Oh, Morty, you’re the best.”

Morton knew his cheeks were red inside the helmet, despite it maintaining a perfect body-temperature environment.

The communications band was full of chuckles. Parker gave a long wolf’s moonhowl.

“Rob, you and I are one team,” Morton said, ignoring the gibes.

“That’s good for me, Morty. Real good.”

“Cat, you and the Doc can have a ball together. Parker, you keep everything secure up here.”

“Hey, fuck that,” Parker said. “I want to see some action here.”

“Then you partner Cat,” the Doc told him.

“He couldn’t handle that kind of action,” she said.

There was amusement in the voice, but it left Morton cold. Even over the communications link something in her personality that was fundamentally wrong made itself felt.

“We don’t really need to leave anyone back here,” the Doc said. “If the Primes can hack our sensors and secure links, we’re fucked anyway. Forget the navy way. We’re the ones on the ground. We’re the best judges how to fulfill our duty.”

“Duty!” Parker grunted. “Jesus Christ, Doc, you just love all this military crap, dontcha?”

“Roger that. So you want to stay here?”

“I fucking told you, I’m staying with you guys.”

“That’s cool,” The Cat said. “You come with me and the Doc.”

“Fine,” Morton said. “Rob, come on, we’ll take the east side of town. You guys, see what they’re doing farther over around Blackwater Crag. And remember, everybody, we’re not looking to engage the enemy yet. This foray is just to build up our sensor network, okay. We don’t want to alert them to our presence before we know how to make their lives truly miserable.”

“Do you think she’s going to be trouble?” Rob asked when they were halfway down the mountain. He’d switched to a short-range secure link between the two armor suits.

“Rob, I don’t know what the hell to make of her. All I know is, she’s never going to be my backup. I don’t trust her.”

“Amen to that.”

They’d left the cloud base behind an hour earlier. Even though nightfall wasn’t due for another three hours, the light was reduced to a somber gloaming underneath the cloud. The rain was threaded with sleet and surprisingly hard pellets of hail, all of which turned to slush as they began a slow melt. It made the slope very hard going, even with the boosted limbs of the armor suits. Unrelenting rain was steadily beating away the boltgrass tufts, which never had a deep hold at this altitude anyway. The disappearing vegetation left long tracts of mud and shingle striping the slope, which threatened to slide them down hundreds of meters if they lost their footing.

An entire squadron of sneekbots was deployed around them in protective concentric circles. They skittered over the rough terrain, their antenna buds probing for any sign of movement, warm bodies, or electronic activity. So far the ground ahead was clear of any ambush, booby trap, or sensor.

Morton’s virtual vision showed him Cat, Parker, and the Doc taking a slightly different route down from the saddle, keeping to the high ground until they were a lot closer to the town. “On the good side, we can always keep track of her.”

“Unless she goes truly native and ditches the armor.”

“I doubt she’d go that far. And the sensors would pick her up if she tried to take anything from base camp.” He stuck another of the little disks on an outcrop of rock that had withstood a small mudslide. As well as observing the vast open space above the Trine’ba, it acted as a communications relay across the Regents.

“Four more just launched,” Rob said.

Morton watched the alien flyers set off across the smooth waters of the Trine’ba, flying low, and keeping parallel to the shore. They all used broad fans of sensor radiation to sweep across the shallow ripples. Morton’s armor suit stealthed down, its chromometic skin melding into the tawny beige of the landscape, while its thermal emission matched the temperature of the mud. The sneekbots folded their crablike bodies to the ground and sent their main arrays into hibernation mode. The flyers didn’t even bother probing the hillside.

“Wonder what they’re looking for?” Rob asked as his suit returned to life.

“Mellanie said a few people stayed behind. They’re probably causing some trouble for the Primes.”

“Great, that’s all we need, enthusiastic amateurs stirring things up for us.”

Morton smiled. “So you think we qualify as professionals, do you?”

“Listen, I’ve been doing this kind of work for a while now. I know what I see, and you guys took on the basics in training. In any case, we’ve got the kind of equipment that can do some serious damage. If we find these farm boys we need to get them to back off.”

“Yeah, I figured that.”

“So how come Mellanie knows about the locals and where they’re at?”

“This was where she was when the Primes invaded, right here in Randtown.”

“No shit. And this is where you got sent. There’s a coincidence.”

“Yeah.” Morton wanted to grin, but it was something that had bothered him, too. Still, too late to worry about it now.

He was surprised by the scale of activity where Randtown had once stood. A vast block of machinery that resembled a human chemical refinery had been assembled along the shore, extending for a couple of kilometers on either side of the old quayside, and even standing on stilts to arch over some bays and inlets. Bright lights blazed from every point of the structure, illuminating exposed equipment buttressed by thick metal girders. Behind that, on the gentle slope leading up from the back of the town, boxy buildings and large cylindrical storage tanks had been set up on the old human road grid. Spaced between them were a number of large fusion power plants. The old highway leading back through the Dau’sings had been widened. It was carrying a lot of traffic out to Blackwater Crag, big slow vehicles spitting out black exhaust smoke as they lumbered along. Rows of long buildings were just visible at the foot of Blackwater Crag, stretching back along the valley. A string of flyers patrolled above the refurbished road, dipping in and out of the smothering clouds.

Outside the original town limits, six broad terraces had been bulldozed into the bumpy foothills, with a further two under construction. They seemed to be parking, or holding areas, covered with unopened pods of equipment, vehicles, and flyers; four vast open arenas were filled with aliens.

“Well now, finally!” Morton said as they wormed their way along the ruined tree line at the top of the foothills. The hardy pines were suffering badly in the sickly winter climate. Slushy water clung to every needle, turning them a dull unhealthy sepia. Many trunks had fallen, ripping out huge circular wedges of dripping soil as long mudslides undermined their roots. It was perfect cover. The sneekbots maintained their protective perimeter, crawling their way through the fungal muddle of broken twigs and mulched needles.

He used the suit’s sensors to zoom in on the naked creatures parading across the nearest arena below. They were quad-symmetric, with four thick legs at the flared base of a sallow-colored barrel body. When they moved, it was with a rocking motion as the legs bowed and flexed along their whole length. Four arms emerged just above the legs, almost as thick as the lower limbs and moving in the same long curving motions. Morton didn’t think they had joints like elbows and knees, the whole thing was elastic. The crown sprouted a further eight appendages, four stumpy trunks with an open mouth; while between them four tall slender tendrils that ended in bulbous lumps of flesh waved about like corn in the wind.

“Solid-looking brutes,” Rob said. “There must be thousands of them down there.”

Morton gave the arenas another scan with his suit’s optical sensors. “More like tens of thousands.” He was recording the scene for the navy. The first communications wormhole was due to open in another seventeen hours; he’d be able to send them the information then. It would be interesting to see what their analysts came up with.

“They’re all fitted with a transmitter gadget, look,” Rob was saying. “I just keep getting that analogue hash coming from them.”

“Right.” Morton was watching a pair touching their long upper limbs together. An alien kiss? A fuck? “I know we’ve only just seen them, but they all look identical to me.”

Rob snorted. “Very not politically correct.”

“I was wondering if they were clones. Some kind of disposable construction crew? Just a thought. Their army might be the same. A perfect soldier replicated a hundred million times. It would explain their dire lack of tactics, all they ever do is use numbers to overrun us. They don’t mind the slaughter because they’re not losing individuals the way we are.”

“Could be. It makes as much sense as any other idea. Let’s see if we can get a closer look.”

With the sneekbots prowling ahead and behind, they began to worm their way deeper through the decaying foliage of the fallen trees. Morton could see several hundred aliens working on the long refinery station by the shore. The giant machine was still being extended. Both ends were sheathed by a network of scaffolding that supported cranes and hoists. Aliens swarmed all over the new components that were being added. They must possess an excellent sense of balance, Morton thought; he couldn’t see anything equivalent to a human handrail on the narrow metal struts that they moved along.

“Ho, did you see that?” Rob asked.

“What?”

“One of those things just took a crap off the top of the refinery station.”

Morton tracked his optical sensors along the colossal structure. Now he knew what to look for, he could easily find evidence of more casual defecation. The pipes and girders were splashed with tacky brown patches. “So? They never got around to inventing a flushable pan. The Doc was saying we need to watch out for a different philosophy more than any other type of variation between us.”

“I’m not sure that’s a question of psychology or even bad plumbing. Leaving your own waste products around like that is a very counterproductive thing for a species to do. Everyone develops disposal mechanisms, both social and practical; it’s one of the first signs of civilization emerging. You don’t just wait for the rain to wash it away.”

“You have no idea what their digestive biochemistry is like,” Morton said.

“Face it, their crap could be the perfect fertilizer.”

“Then they’d collect it and transport it to a field. No, we’re missing something. You may have been on the right track with your clone army idea.” He paused, unhappy. “Though even they wouldn’t deliberately foul their own environment. Nothing would. This doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe the clone clean-up army is due to arrive next.”

Rob chuckled. “You want to put some money on that?”

“No way.”

After another half hour of cautious movement through the moldering forest, they had moved as far west as they could go before risking open ground. The fallen trees had also brought them to within six hundred meters of the force field protecting the alien town. They sent a trio of sneekbots on ahead, but stayed under cover of the sopping wood as the invisible sun finally fell below the horizon.

“Another difference,” Rob said.

“What?”

“There’s no color on anything they build, no finish or decoration. All the external material is raw.”

“They’re color blind as well.”

“And immune to esthetics?”

“Okay, then. You tell me.”

“I don’t know why, I’m just pointing it out. Their culture has no art.”

“Have you seen the crap flooding the unisphere these days?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, but don’t forget this is a military invasion base. It’s bound to be functional.”

“Could be. What do you make of the setup?”

Morton switched his attention back to the alien activities below him. The angle just allowed him a narrow view along the front of the refinery station. Machinery and tightly packed pipes produced a metal precipice fifty meters high. It was lined with wide orifices that were pumping out torrents of liquid. He counted sixteen of the big jets squirting bilious foaming water out into the lake shallows.

“I guess we know what resource they were after when they came here,” Rob said. “The lake itself.”

“What the hell is that stuff?” Morton wondered. Lights on the top of the refinery station cast a bright illumination across the shallows. The aliens had done a lot of work along the shoreline. Long concrete ramps now extended out into the water, reaching almost to the force field, a kilometer and a half away. In between them, the lake had been divided up into a number of pens by heavy netting. Morton realized there were a lot more ripples in the pens than there were out beyond the force field. Yet there couldn’t be any breeze inside the shielding. He zoomed in for a clearer look at whatever was stirring the water.

The pens were filled with some kind of living creatures. A lot of living creatures. It was their writhing forms thrashing about just below the surface that was causing all the disturbance.

“They’re bioforming the planet,” he said. “That’s what this station is, that’s why they wanted the lake. Jesus.”

“You might be right,” Rob said. “They’ve certainly got big-scale expansion plans. Access sneekbot three-oh-six.”

When 306’s sensor feed flipped up into Morton’s virtual vision he saw the little machine had crept right up to the force field. The first reading was the strength of the field. They didn’t have anything that could penetrate, it was even strong enough to withstand the tactical nukes they’d brought. He concentrated on the excavation that the aliens were making a hundred meters inside the boundary, clawing out a deep bunker that they were lining with concrete and metal. A tower of machinery was being assembled in the center. The Doc had been right: technological solutions did refine machines down to identical functions. Morton recognized some of the sections without having to reference his e-butler. The aliens were building a force field generator.

“Track right,” Rob said.

He swiveled 306’s antenna buds: six hundred meters away, another generator bunker was being dug out.

“Those generators are a lot more powerful than the ones they’re using now,” Rob said. “At this rate it’s only going to take a couple of days to finish them. After that, they’ll be truly impregnable, and we’ll be truly screwed.”

“Only the town has a force field so far,” Morton said. “We can play hell with everything else they’re doing.”

“Whose chain are you trying to jerk here? This is where it’s at, right here in town. We’ve got to hit that monster station. Don’t screw around; use the nukes.”

Morton risked raising his head slightly, looking directly at the force field and the town it enclosed. The vast chunk of alien machinery along the waterfront could have been a light-year away for all the chance he had of reaching it. “Fuck it, there’s no way in!”

“Maybe we could get in from the water side? Force fields don’t function so good in water, the denser the material the less effective they are.”

“Could do. Water’s not that dense, though. We’d have to scout around, test the field integrity on the lake bed.”

“These suits can handle a dive.”

“Yeah, but will the dump-webs work underwater?”

“I’m not sure, we could—Uh oh, what have we here?”

One of the sneekbots had registered movement several hundred meters deeper in the dead forest. It clambered up on top of a moldy log, looking along a line of stumps. A human shape crawled across the little open lane from one decaying canopy to the next.

“So Mellanie was right,” Rob said. “Not just a great ass, huh?”

“No,” Morton said absently. Two more humans were sneaking after the first. From what he could make out they were dressed in some kind of dark ski suits. They didn’t register on infrared. Somebody knew how to rig the thermal fibers, he acknowledged. “This can’t be good for us, they’re going to strike something.”

“Relax, man, our stealth is good.”

“Theirs isn’t.” His virtual hand touched the Cat’s icon. “We’ve found whatever’s left of the locals. Access our sneekbots.”

“I see them, Morty. Looks like they’ve developed a purpose in life.”

“It’s a damn stupid one,” the Doc said. “If they start shooting at the aliens they’re just going to get themselves killed.”

“They look like they know what they’re doing to me,” Rob said. “Let’s see where they’re going.” Five sneekbots set off through the forest, keeping parallel to the three humans. They soon overtook them, and began scanning ahead.

“Part of our mission is to rescue and assist any surviving humans,” the Doc said.

“I think that referred to noncombatants,” Rob told him.

“That’s what these idiots are, they just think they’re fighters.”

“They fooled me.”

“The Doc might be right,” the Cat said. “These bumpkins aren’t helping us by causing a fuss. You should stop them, Morton.”

Why me? he thought. Any other time, it might have been flattering.

“Uh oh,” Rob said. “We might be running out of time.” The sneekbots were picking up standard Prime electromagnetic emissions. Four armored aliens were patrolling the foothills along the top of the dead forest.

Morton pulled a detailed map out of his grid, and studied it. “If I was going to ambush them I’d do it there,” he said, and indicated a small, deep ravine that cut clean through the foothills to spill into the Trine’ba just east of the town. The aliens would have to cross it somewhere. “They’ll be out of sight from the town, and shielded. Perfect spot.”

“Yeah,” Rob said. “Not bad for a bunch of amateurs.”

“Get over there and talk to them,” the Doc said. “They should at least know we’re here.”

“If you ask me, these guys know what they’re doing,” Rob said. “I don’t think this is their first turkey shoot.”

“You’re making a mistake if you let them do this.”

“Doc’s right,” the Cat said. “Go break up the fight, boys.”

Morton knew she was right. Cat’s Claws couldn’t afford anyone interfering in their mission, no matter how well intended. “We’ll try.”

Rob carried on grumbling, but he followed Morton back through the thick layer of mildew-steeped needles, keeping under the lacy roof of decomposing bark. Even as they began, Morton knew they were cutting it close. The alien patrol was making good time out in the open, and the ambush team was almost in position.

“We’ll swing around your way,” the Cat said. “Just in case you screw up. I’m bored with dropping these sensors, anyway.”

“Fuck you,” the Doc said. “We can’t see anything past Blackwater Crag yet. We need to expand the network.”

“You’re becoming a bad pain-in-the-ass barracks-room lawyer. I don’t like that. You do what you do, and let me do what I know needs to be done.”

“This is not about you, bitch.”

“Temper temper.”

“Hey, heads up, people,” Rob exclaimed. “We have something interesting here.” The sneekbots were reporting some kind of electromagnetic interference inside the ravine. It wasn’t the kind of jamming effect that would cut the aliens off abruptly from the town, but a more subtle distortion, reducing their bandwidth and disrupting the remaining content. “Somebody knows what they’re doing.”

The ambush party spread out along the edge of the ravine. They unstrapped long, bulky cylinders from their backs, and aimed them down into the black gash in the landscape. Morton’s e-butler started running comparisons with known weapons types.

“Son of a bitch,” he said when it finally gave him an approximate match.

“They’re Prime guns.”

“Wonder where they got them from?” Parker said in amusement. “They are big beauts, aren’t they?”

“It’s what you do with them that counts,” the Cat retorted.

Morton was seriously considering walking a sneekbot up to one of the ambushers, and trying to talk with them that way. He didn’t because he was worried they’d simply shoot the little bot, which would blow everyone’s cover.

The aliens began their descent into the ravine. It was a steep V-shaped cleft leading down to a torrent of white water racing along a bed of gray-white stone. Lichen-covered boulders stuck up out of the soil on either side, forcing the aliens to take a slow zigzag path as they picked their way to the bottom. One of the sneekbots perched on the edge above them relayed the image as they sank below direct line of sight with the town.

The jamming increased dramatically just before the aliens reached the stream. The aliens stopped, bringing their weapons up, and began to spread out. Two ducked down beside some boulders, their infrared signature fading away as their suit’s skin turned black. Both were very difficult to see, even for the sneekbot’s sensors.

“Stop them,” the Doc pleaded. “Morton!”

A beam weapon fired down into the ravine, catching one of the more visible aliens. Its force field sizzled a bright violet, haloing its shape against the rock and foaming water. Another beam weapon stabbed out, punching the radiant force field. Steam began to hiss upward from the surrounding grass as little flames licked around the base of the suit’s shielding. It took a couple of seconds before the force field finally collapsed from the twin energy spikes impaling it. The alien’s armor suit exploded in a dazzling plasma mushroom as its energy cells and ammunition were vaporized.

Light flooded along the ravine, bringing a clarity that even daylight never managed. The two aliens that had gone for cover amid the crumbling boulders started to fire up at the ambush party.

“Shit, they’re losing it,” Morton yelled. He stood up and started to run hard. The suit’s electromuscles carried him easily, amplifying his every leap to send him flying effortlessly over the fallen trees.

“Fuck it!” Rob cried. He jumped after Morton, his pounding suit legs splintering the rotten trees apart as if they were polystyrene.

“I can see the fire from here,” Cat called. “You must be visible to half the aliens at Blackwater Crag.”

Morton winced. Up ahead of him, the ravine was a sharp crack of flickering pyrotechnics against the black foothill. With or without jammed communications, it would act like a beacon to any flyers. His suit deployed the hyper-rifle from its right forearm sheath.

A hefty plume of soil and flame shot up from the edge of the ravine where one of the ambushers was lying. Morton saw a human shape pinwheel through the air, backlit by the raw energy raging inside the ravine.

“Four flyers heading your way,” Parker called.

Morton saw the orange symbols creep into his virtual vision.

“Can you close it down?” The Cat shouted.

“Not a chance,” Morton said. “One of them’s dead, the other two are still shooting.”

“Stop them!” Parker demanded. “How difficult can it be?”

“We’re coming,” the Doc said. “Parker, with me.”

“Oh, Christ.”

One final eight-meter hurdle jump over a horizontal tree and Morton landed on the rim of the ravine, his boots thudding into spongy soil up to the ankles. He was already pointing his hyper-rifle. A simple circular targeting graphic materialized in the center of his virtual vision. The sneekbots were triangulating coordinates for him. An alien armor suit slid smoothly into the orange circle, which immediately flashed green. Morton fired.

The hyper-rifle was designed with one purpose: to puncture the force field projected by alien armor. Even so, Morton was slightly surprised when the small atom laser’s half-second burst drilled clean through the suit, sending the alien flying backward three meters through the air to splash into the stream. Water closed over the dark shape, hissing briefly as the heat produced a small cloud of steam. How about that, the military got something right.

Rob was crouching beside him—presenting a smaller target silhouette. He fired his hyper-rifle. Morton found the last alien and shot it. The ravine was abruptly plunged into darkness again. Just a few serpent shapes of grass embers glowed where the alien patrol had made their stand. The damp night air was extinguishing them quickly.

“Who the hell are you?” a voice challenged.

“The cavalry,” Rob told him. “Your lucky day, huh.”

“Flyer overhead,” the Doc said. His voice was strangely calm. “You’re going to need covering fire, Morton.”

“No!” Cat warned. “Don’t!”

Morton’s telemetry display showed him the Doc launching an HVvixen. The slim missile accelerated at fifteen gees, its plasma exhaust piercing the air behind it like a runaway solar flare. It slammed into the flyer’s force field, flash-releasing its remaining energy. The flyer detonated into an incandescent spherical shock wave that billowed out at supersonic velocity to envelop its three partners. They exploded in furious twisting gouts of sapphire vapor.

“Gotcha, you bastards,” the Doc crooned.

“You retard motherfucker,” the Cat screamed. “You’ve just killed us all.”

“Only these bodies, Cat,” the Doc said lightly. “Your essence will have continuity.”

The dazzling lightstorm began to drain out of the night sky, dissipating into a thousand sparkling contrails that sank slowly toward the ground. Morton’s suit sensors picked out the three armored humans standing in the middle of the scintillation blizzard.

“Nice shot, man,” Parker said admiringly.

“Run,” Morton whispered. “Run now. Get out of there!”

One figure was already moving. The Cat: using her armor suit boost function to its maximum, accelerating her helter-skelter sprint to over sixty kilometers an hour. She was heading up the slope toward the roof of writhing cloud.

“Four more,” Parker said. “Make that six.”

“You mean ten,” the Doc said. “Morton, Rob, get the civilians out of here.”

“Yeah,” Parker said. “Protect and serve.”

The one surviving ambusher was walking unsteadily toward Morton.

“What was that? What is happening?”

“They’re not going to make it,” Rob said.

Five HVvixens shrieked into the night.

Morton jumped toward the survivor as vivid white light silently washed across them. “Get down. Get into the ravine.” He didn’t give the man any opportunity to argue. His suit arms closed around him, picking him up effortlessly. They both tumbled over the edge. Behind them, the devil’s own fireworks display filled the sky with carnage.

“Bad guys falling,” Parker reported, laughing gleefully.

“They found us,” the Doc reported. “More incoming. Shit. Eighteen. Four of them are big. New flyer type for your catalogue, Morton.” His suit’s sensors were relaying a stream of information. The data faltered as several beam weapons locked on to him. “You guys had better go for deep cover. Make this relevant, Morton. I’m counting on you.” He fired another HVvixen. It never got ten meters from his suit’s force field before the deluge of energy from the alien beam weapons ruptured it.

Parker’s screaming was loud in Morton’s ears as he was hurled through the air by the explosion. Telemetry showed him the man’s suit start to falter from the punishing overload.

“Get down to the bottom of the ravine,” Rob was saying. “We’ll be safe there.”

Morton hauled the ambusher along at his side as the two of them hurried down the last few meters of the slope to the rampaging water. He switched to active sensors, confident no one would ever notice. The stream was deep, at least a couple of meters. As far as his radar could see downstream the flow was free from any obstruction.

“Over here,” Parker called. He was broadcasting on every frequency his armor suit was capable of transmitting on. “Here I am, you bastards, come and get me.” Seven of the large alien flyers were approaching him, their weapons lashing out. “Eat this shit, and die.”

Morton plunged into the stream, taking the survivor with him. He expanded his suit’s force field to envelop both of them.

Parker triggered the two tactical nukes he was carrying.

A stratum of violent white light streaked over the top of the ravine, obliterating every color as its thick nimbus irradiated the ground. The churning water of the stream began to steam. Then the air shook, agitating the boulders. Small stones began to bounce down the slopes to splash into the water.

Morton and Rob were already well on their way downstream, tumbling around and around in the swirling rapids. It was a fast and chaotic ride, with the pair of them grinding through shallows and banging into the sides only to ricochet back into the main current again. Morton kept hold of the ambush survivor, struggling to keep the man above the foaming surface the whole time they jolted about.

The dreadful sheen of light drained out of the sky, leaving the restless clouds seething with lightning flashes. Ground tremors faded away.

“You okay?” Rob asked. He was ten meters ahead of Morton, riding down on his back, using his arms as rudders.

“Just trying to keep this guy alive.”

“How’s he doing?”

“I think he’s had better days. Sensors show he’s still breathing.” It was more like choking, but at least his weak thrashing showed he was still alive.

“We’re getting goddamn close to the town.”

“I know. But we’re almost at the bottom.”

Another two hundred meters brought them to the end of the stream, where it broadened out to gurgle over a wide, flat bed of stones before emptying into the Trine’ba. Morton came racing out of the last curve to hit the stones on his ass; he plowed through them for a short way before coming to a complete halt.

“Holy fuck,” Rob said. “We made it.”

“Congratulations.” The Cat’s voice oozed sarcasm. “Landed on something soft, did you? That part that does all your thinking.”

“Piss off, bitch.”

Morton’s virtual vision showed him the working sensor disks that were relaying Cat’s signal. There weren’t many left. When he accessed their visual spectrum feeds, they showed him a small crater glowing a venomous maroon where Parker had made his stand. Above it, a hole had been ripped through the clouds, where violet air hazed the swirling gap. Forests and spinnies scattered on the hills above the town had ignited and were now surging into full-blown firestorms; between them the ruined grass was smoldering. Smoke was rising to choke the narrow band of air between the ground and the clouds. None of the sensors reported any flyer activity.

The Cat was sheltering in a gentle fold high above the blast zone. Telemetry showed her suit was intact; its force field had protected her from the blast.

Morton let go of the man he was holding and climbed to his feet. The force field around the alien town was five hundred meters away. There was no sign of any activity nearby.

“I think we’re safe for the moment,” Morton said. “This might be a good time to leave.”

“Amen to that,” Rob grunted.

Morton looked down at the man who was still sprawled on the stones, panting heavily. His black clothes had been ripped in several places; the ebony skin beneath was grazed and lacerated.

“You all right?” Morton asked.

The man turned his head to glare up. “What? Are you making a joke?”

“Sorry. I’ve got a decent medical kit, but if you can walk I’d like to build some distance with Randtown before we stop to patch you up.”

“Merciful heavens, forgive me for what I’ve done.”

“What have you done?”

“Led more good men to their death. I take it you are responsible for that explosion? It was nuclear, wasn’t it?”

“One of my squad mates triggered it. He was stopping the flyers you’d attracted.”

“I see.” The man bowed his head until it was almost in the water. “Even more deaths must be carried by my conscience, then. And it was already a terrible burden. Truly, the fates must hate me.”

“I don’t think any of this is personal. My name’s Morton, this is Rob.”

“Thank you, gentlemen, I appreciate you saving me. Much good it will do you.”

“Pleasure,” Rob grunted.

“Who are you?” Morton asked.

The man smiled, revealing bloody teeth. “Simon Rand. I founded this paradise.”

***

The cave was a good hideout, Morton admitted to himself. It had taken them an hour to reach it, scrambling along the rocks of the shoreline, sometimes wading across deep inlets where the mountain runoffs gushed into the rank lake water.

Three people were waiting for their leader, desperate to know what had happened when the bombs went off.

David Dunbavand had been badly injured in an earlier raid. One of his legs had been shattered, its flesh now an unhealthy blue-black mottling, with cuts weeping gray cheesy fluid. His toes already looked and smelled gangrenous. Several other bones had been broken during his brief moment of combat. He was sweating continuously, damp hair slicked back against his skull.

A girl called Mandy was nursing him; she looked tired and worn, prone to tears. There wasn’t much she could do except clean his dressings and feed him a weak broth they’d cooked up from salvaged food packets. She was wrapped up in several oversized woolen sweaters, and a pair of green semiorganic waterproof trousers. Curls of lank hair hung out of a black wool hat.

It was Georgia who had run out of the cave, splashing through the shallows to greet Simon as he limped painfully toward his refuge. “One of my earliest believers,” he said painfully as he introduced her to Morton and Rob. “Georgia was with me building the highway.” She smiled bravely at him, her arm going around his waist to help him over the last few meters of slippery rock. Her face was ruggedly beautiful, rejuvenated to adolescence, with a square jaw and sharp cheekbones. She wore an expensive designer suit on top of several T-shirts and thermal trousers; the semiorganic fabric was smeared with weeks’ worth of dirt, but still offered a degree of protection from the cave’s dank atmosphere and the chill air that seeped in from outside. Once stylish auburn hair had been cut short by scissors and was now covered by a silk scarf wrapped like a turban.

Morton followed Simon and Georgia as they clambered along a ledge that took them back to the main chamber. It was illuminated by a few solar-charged lightglobes, the kind you could buy at any camping shop. They badly needed recharging, producing only a wan yellow glow that didn’t even reach the cave roof. However, there was enough radiance to show him the three bodies sealed in plastic lying along the rear wall.

David pushed himself up onto his elbows, grimacing at the effort. “Where are the others?” He was giving the entrance a stricken look, already knowing the answer.

“I’m sorry,” Simon told him.

Mandy slumped down, and started crying.

“Tyrone?” David asked.

“No. He got one of the aliens, though. He stood his ground to the very end.”

“One!” the injured man exclaimed bitterly. “One out of a million. I should never have stayed here. I should have gone with Lydia and the kids. We’re not making any difference. We’re just being wiped out. Look at us! Four of us, that’s all that’s left. What was the point?” He lowered himself back onto the thin mattress, shaking at the pain, drawing sharp breaths.

“How many of you were there to start with?” Morton asked.

“Eighteen of us remained behind,” Simon said as he sat down heavily. A hand waved around the cave. “This is all that remains of us. I’d like to say that we have taken leagues of the aliens to hell with us, but alas our efforts have been mediocre at best. They are well equipped and excellent soldiers. In truth there’s not much we have achieved aside from our own deaths.” He began to scratch the healskin dressings that Rob had applied to his cuts during the journey back. Georgia sat beside him, her knees tucked up under her chin. Their arms went around each other.

“Eighteen,” Morton muttered. He didn’t want to ask for details; it all seemed such a waste. Not that Cat’s Claws had done a lot better. Not yet.

“Please,” Mandy asked; she looked up pleadingly, wiping her eyes. “Can you get us back to the Commonwealth?”

Morton was glad his helmet was on; she wouldn’t be able to see his expression. “I’m not sure. We weren’t scheduled to be lifted out for six months. I’ll inform the navy you’re here, of course. They’ll probably try and get a wormhole open for you.”

She lowered her head.

“Have you got communications?” David Dunbavand croaked.

“Sure. The navy is opening a wormhole on a regular basis to receive our messages. We can let your family know you’re okay.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.” He smiled, which turned into a cough.

“Let me take a look at you,” Rob said. He took his helmet off and knelt beside the injured man. He waved a diagnostic array over David’s leg and torso.

“We’ve got a decent supply of medical equipment stashed back at our base camp. There should be something that can help.”

“A painkiller would do to start with,” David said. “We’ve even run out of those. The hospital was shut away behind the first force field they generated. We’ve had to make do with whatever we can find in the farmhouses ever since. It never amounted to much, and it seemed selfish to keep what little we had from poor old Napo, even at the end.” He indicated one of the corpses.

“No problem,” Rob said. He took a small applicator pad from his pack.

David gave an audible sigh as it was pressed to his neck. “Damn, I never thought I’d enjoy feeling numb. That’s very kind of you, my friend.”

“My pleasure. Now just lie still and let my e-butler’s medical routine work out what to do with you.”

“How much bandwidth can your communications wormhole handle?” David asked. “We have the memories of our friends; can you at least get them to safety?”

“You’ve got a secure store in here?” Morton asked.

“Their security is our honor,” Simon said. “Every time one of us ventures outside, we transfer our last memories to an ordinary handheld array. Those who remain are sworn to get them to safety back in the Commonwealth. We trust each other, you see. Friendship in these terrible times has forged a bond strong enough to give us the strength to face bodyloss with confidence and conviction.”

Morton wasn’t sure there was anyone in Cat’s Claws he’d trust with his memories. “It would be a slow transfer,” he said carefully. “The wormhole isn’t open for very long. Just a few seconds.”

“I understand,” Simon said. “We have survived thus far, a few more months should pose no problem, especially with your weapons to help protect us.”

Morton lifted his helmet off. After the filtered air he’d been breathing, the smell in the cave seemed exceptionally strong. Something he couldn’t place: raw meat but with a sugary tang. It was strange. “What is that?”

“The smell?” Mandy said. “Whatever they’ve been polluting the Trine’ba with. It’s been getting worse for weeks now.”

“Any idea what it is? We saw the refinery they’ve built.”

“I took a few samples earlier on,” David said. “It’s like an algae of some kind. They’re bioforming the Trine’ba.”

“I believe it to be the first step in converting this planet to one that is host to their own biological heritage alone,” Simon said. “They certainly show no interest or respect for any existing organisms. It is an imperialism which seems to extend down to a cellular level.”

Rob took out a couple of vials from his medical kit, and slotted them into the applicator patch. “I’m going to put the leg into a healskin sheath after this,” he told David, and put the patch on the man’s discolored thigh. “I can’t set the bones properly, but the sheath and the biovirals should help stabilize you until we can get you back to a Commonwealth hospital.”

David coughed. Tiny flecks of blood settled on his lips. “Hope Lydia’s keeping up on my medical insurance payments.”

“You will survive, David, I promise you that,” Simon said calmly. “I will carry you to the wormhole on my own back if necessary.” He broke off at the sound of someone splashing their way along the entrance fissure.

The Cat waded up out of the water, and removed her helmet. Her purple-tipped hair was sweaty, rising in a multitude of tiny spikes. She grinned broadly, and her wide blue-gray eyes took in the cave with one easy glance. “Nice,” she observed. “Hello, boys, did you miss me?”

“Like stale vomit,” Rob said. He turned back to stripping the dressings off David’s leg.

The Cat strode into the middle of the cave. “Well, my dears, that was an impressive first six hours, wasn’t it. Two of us dead. We didn’t save two refugees. We set off some nukes that did no damage whatsoever. And most of our sensor disks are gone. Talk about making an impact.”

“And you were a big help,” Morton said.

“You heard what I said. You chose to ignore it.”

Even though it was a perfect fit, Morton relished taking off his armor suit. He rubbed at every part of himself he could reach, easing itchy skin and stiff muscles. The semiorganic fiber one-piece he wore underneath repelled the cave’s cold moisture, keeping him reasonably dry. There was nothing he could do to stop the smell.

After living on scavenged packets for weeks, the Randtown survivors welcomed the food Cat’s Claws had brought.

“Manufactured corporate pap full of sugar, badly modified genes, and toxic additives,” Georgia said as she stuffed a fishcake straight from its heating envelope into her mouth. “God, it tastes good.”

“Our way of life has truly ended,” Simon said. He accepted a vegetarian lasagne from Cat, inclining his head in gratitude.

“It’s not from a Big15 factory farm,” she told him. “I wouldn’t fill my body with that shit.”

Morton watched Rob open his mouth. Their eyes met, and Rob turned away.

“We have to decide what to do,” Morton said. “I think our first priority is to get you clear.”

“What about David?” Simon asked. Dunbavand had been wrapped in Morton’s lightweight sleeping bag, protecting the healskin from the cave’s rancid humidity. He was sleeping fitfully as the drugs and biovirals did what they could to assuage the damage.

“We can load him in one of our bubbles and remote drive it out of here,” Morton said. “You’ll be safer up in the Dau’sings.”

“Yes, the aliens seem to be centered around Randtown and the valleys immediately around Blackwater Crag,” Simon said. “We should be safe in the highlands.”

“What about our mission?” Rob asked. “We’re supposed to be making life intolerable for the aliens.”

“We will,” Morton said. “We’ve got six months.”

“I hate to disagree,” Simon said. “But you saw the new force field generators they were building. Once those are operational there is very little even you will be able to do to harm their primary installations, I suspect. This is the third expansion and protective upgrade they have made since they arrived. Each time the force fields are larger and stronger.”

“We tried to get inside at first,” Georgia said. “Five of us were caught going through the sewers. They didn’t stand a chance. The aliens must have been expecting us to try and infiltrate their station. They’re not stupid. And poor old Napo led a dive team that was going to use an underwater route through the old aquarium. Nothing works. They’ve got every route covered.”

“There are no routes, not anymore,” Mandy said. She was chewing listlessly at a bacon sandwich. “They’re already outside the old town boundaries. All the utility tunnels and storm drains are inside the force field now.”

“You boys aren’t thinking,” The Cat said. Her voice cut clean across the cave, ripe with mockery. Morton gave her an intolerant glance. She was doing her yoga, one foot tucked in behind her neck.

“You have a solution?” Morton asked.

“It’s obvious.”

“Want to share that?”

“Nuke them. That’s all we can do.”

“We can’t nuke them. We can’t get to them.”

She closed her eyes, put her hands into Dawn Sunlight position, and breathed in deeply.

“There has to be a way in,” Rob said. “What about caves?”

“No,” Simon said. “We performed a full seismic survey before we started building Randtown. I didn’t want us to suddenly come up against subsidence problems after we were established. That would have been too costly.”

“Do you have anything that could dig underneath the force field?” Georgia asked.

“Alamo Avenger,” Rob muttered with a small private smile.

“No,” Morton said. “We didn’t come equipped to mount a frontal assault. We’re supposed to harass and disrupt, to make them waste time and money looking over their shoulder the whole time.”

“A nice theory,” Simon said. “But they’re a very centralized species. The activity out in the valleys is susceptible to the kind of campaign you’re talking about, but I doubt it would ultimately have much effect on them. To hurt them, you must strike at the structures inside the force field.”

“It’ll have to be an underwater approach,” Rob said reluctantly. “Even if a dump-web doesn’t work underwater, there must be some route in. An arch in a reef, an inlet pipe. Something!”

“Oh, this is painful,” the Cat said. She slipped her foot out from behind her head. “I thought you were executive management class, Morty. What happened to that ‘don’t download glitches, upload fixes,’ corporate speak you’re so fond of?”

“Just tell us what your idea is, please,” he said wearily.

“The aliens keep expanding the area they’re developing around the refinery station, right? So what we do is put a nuke outside the existing force field, and inside the border where the new one is going to be. When they switch on the new force field, the nuke is now inside their defenses, and it goes off. Any questions?”

Morton wanted to kick himself it was so obvious. He put the lapse of clear thought down to the shock of losing Parker and the Doc. “Simon, do the aliens turn off the old internal force fields once the new ones are up and running?”

“Yes. They have so far.”

“Oh, gosh, boys, are we really going to use my little old idea?” The Cat batted her eyes.

“Yeah,” Rob said. “I don’t suppose you fancy staying with the nuke and detonating it once we’re sure everything is peachy in there?”

The blast from Parker’s last stand against the flyers made things difficult. There was virtually no cover left on the foothills above and behind the town. That left them with the eastern side, where the low ground had been slightly sheltered from the blast wave. Even there, the trees had been completely flattened and incinerated. Large patches of terrestrial GMgrass had smoldered away before the eternal sleet and drizzle extinguished their paltry flames.

A few large houses had been built there, nestled in their own secluded folds in the land. It was one of the areas where the more wealthy had settled, giving them a splendid view out along the Trine’ba. They’d all suffered from the original attack on the Regents, and the environmental aftermath of the invasion; with smashed lopsided roofs and walls lying askew. Once neat gardens were reduced to muddy swamps where plants had briefly run wild before the climate turned against them.

Morton and the Cat picked their way slowly through one such garden. Its owner had been an avid collector of bamboo varieties. There were clumps of the shoots laid out in long curving patterns; from the air it would have looked like a giant tiger orchid flower. Now the leaves were turning brown and soggy. New shoots were rotting in the mud.

“Another two hundred meters should do it,” Morton said. “That’ll take us to the overlook point.” The garden was a shallow depression, partly natural, that a small army of agribots had then worked to extend into the gentle hillside. They were due to place the tactical nuke right on the edge of the garden, where the bamboo gave way to dunes of roses, putting the device in direct line of sight of the giant refinery station along the shore. With the ever-present cloud blocking the starlight, and the sleet choking the air, it was as dark as interstellar space in the garden. Even on full amplification, his visual spectrum sensors had difficulty producing an image. He was heavily dependent on infrared, which gave the tall dying vegetation an ominous looming appearance.

“Okeydokey,” the Cat said. She was using her slightly contemptuous voice, the one full of false enthusiasm.

Morton didn’t care. He’d paired up with her because he didn’t trust her to undertake Rob’s placement. As backup they’d decided a second nuke should be placed on the lakebed. Their sensor disk and comrelays didn’t function underwater. That meant someone working alone. The Cat was a pain in the ass to have alongside, but he could at least keep an eye on her. He wondered what kind of progress Rob was making. They hadn’t done much underwater training.

The swarm of sneekbots scouting the surrounding area reached the house at the center of the garden. It was a long two-story clapboard affair with a three-door garage and a balcony running the length of the wall that faced the Trine’ba. The two nuclear blast waves had left it severely lopsided, with the splintered boards hanging loose at all angles. Solar roofing panels had half-melted in the heat, running like wax to wilt around the structural beams so that the rainwater was constantly tricking down inside, saturating the interior. All the windows were gone, leaving shards of glass to tear at the curtains as they fluttered about, reducing them to a few sodden tatters flapping indolently in the light sleet.

Sneekbot 411 detected an infrared source inside on the ground floor.

“Well, hello there,” the Cat murmured.

“Another survivor?” Morton speculated. The heat source was about the same strength as a human.

“Could be cattle, or a big sheep.”

“You keep telling yourself that.”

The Cat’s hyper-rifle deployed from her forearm, HVvixen missiles slipped into their launch tubes behind her shoulder blades. Ratmines scuttled down her legs, and darted into the thick cover of the bamboo.

Five sneekbots crept forward toward the house. They picked their way up the ramshackle walls and eased their way in over windowsills. The heat source never moved.

A range of neon-green symbols rose up into Morton’s virtual vision. “Electrical activity.”

“Not much. Looks like a handheld array on sleeper mode.”

A sneekbot hurried across an open doorway, its antenna buds tracking across the living room. An alien was standing in the middle of the big room. It wasn’t wearing an armor suit. Water trickled through cracks on the ceiling to splash on its pale skin. A Commonwealth handheld array was lying on a coffee table beside it. An optical cable was plugged into the little unit, snaking up to a compact electronic device that was fused to the bulbous end of one of the alien’s four upper stalks.

“Shit,” Morton gasped. “Where are the others? They always move in fours.” He ordered the sneekbots surrounding the house to extend their search. “What the hell is it doing?”

“One moment, I’ll switch on my suit’s psychic power booster circuit. Oh, dear, it doesn’t seem to be working. How the fuck do I know what it’s doing, you blockhead?”

“You’re not helping. Again.”

“I’m reviewing the available information. There’s none of the usual signal emission. And it’s not armed. Oh…wait.”

One of the alien’s slender crown stalks bent over to align on the sneekbot as it peered out from behind the door frame. The bud of flesh on the end was wearing a hemisphere of some electronically active plastic material, held in place by a couple of elasticated straps.

“Is that a nightsight goggle?” Cat asked curiously.

Morton never replied. The sneekbot reported it was picking up a transmission based on standard Commonwealth cybersphere protocol. It was a very weak signal; nobody outside the ruined house would be able to detect it. His e-butler printed it across his virtual vision.

I SURRENDER. PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT.

A nasty cold shiver rippled across Morton’s shoulders.

“Oh, my,” the Cat said. “Now what?”

“I have no goddamn idea.” He told his e-butler to use a matching protocol, and used his virtual hand to type out a reply that the sneekbot sent:

WHO ARE YOU?

A FRIEND. AFTER LAST NIGHT, I GUESSED YOU WOULD RETURN. THESE HOUSES OFFER CONSIDERABLE COVER AND ARE CLOSE TO RANDTOWN. IT WAS THE LOGICAL PLACE FOR YOU TO COME. I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU.

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

TO COME WITH YOU.

WHERE DO YOU THINK WE’RE GOING?

BACK TO THE COMMONWEALTH. I HAVE INFORMATION WHICH WILL ASSIST YOUR FIGHT AGAINST MORNINGLIGHTMOUNTAIN.

WHAT IS MORNINGLIGHTMOUNTAIN?

THE PRIME ALIEN.

YOU ARE ONE OF THE ALIENS WE ARE FIGHTING.

I AM NOT. MY MIND IS HUMAN. I AM DUDLEY BOSE.

***

Cressat was beautiful. Mark had been surprised. He’d been expecting something like Elan, a world where the natural landscape of sparse vegetation was slowly being tamed to the human norm of esthetics and practicality. The grand estates would be oases of lush verdure foliage, surrounded by agriculture and forests that were slowly spreading out across the plains, leaving mountains wild.

Instead, he was living in the most perfect manicured parkland. Nigel Sheldon had chosen Cressat for its botany. Its G-class star and lack of a big Earth-style moon gave the planet a passive meteorological environment. It had the standard climate zones and seasons, but storms were rare, and with such a stable atmospheric milieu evolution had produced some spectacular plants. Every tree grew tall, two or three times the size of Earth’s pines and oaks, sporting huge colorful flowers. In midsummer, the native grasses turned from their usual near-terrestrial green to a shimmering swan-white, vast prairies of milky rippling stalks releasing clouds of honey-scented spores that turned the air silvery over entire continents. Vines and creepers ran riot in the forests, their imposing flower cones swelling out to heavy berry clusters.

Biewn, the hurriedly built dormitory village where they were housed, was forty kilometers away from Illanum, the town where the CST wormhole emerged. Nestling in rolling meadowland, with the western horizon bordered by distant snowcapped mountains that reminded all the Vernons of the Dau’sings, it catered solely to the large influx of technicians and experts working on the project.

The forest that formed one side of the village towered over the clutter of single-story houses like arboreal skyscrapers. Streams wound through the undulating land, bridged in several places as the network of roads was steadily expanded. More houses arrived each day, brought in on the back of wide low-loader trucks. They might have been mobile homes, but Biewn hardly qualified as one of the employment-whore trailer parks that sprang up around the CST stations on all new worlds in their early years. It had its own schools, restaurants, bars, shops, and civic center; the pre-equipped unit blocks of the new hospital were locking into place like a wall of massive bricks. Everything was being done to give Biewn the same amenities that Illanum enjoyed.

It was spoiled only by the factories. Long rows of the simple, massive cube structures had been built on the opposite side of Biewn to the forest, their dull brown weather-resistant walls eating into the virgin countryside like an unstoppable mechanical cancer. Still more were being built, their assembly going on around the clock. The cybernetics that filled them were arriving at an equally impressive rate.

As soon as their bus drove around the edge of the forest and started down the last kilometer of the new highway to the village, Mark knew he was going to fit in. It was as if the second chance he’d been given financially had magically been extended to his lifestyle. He imagined Biewn being the kind of place that Randtown would ultimately have evolved into, wealthy and purposeful. It had industry instead of agriculture. And instead of the Trine’ba they had the forest, which the inhabitants were already calling Rainbow Wood after its astonishing flowers. But it retained that small-town community cohesion. Less than an hour after they moved into a house as big as the one in the Ulon Valley, three neighbors had dropped by to introduce themselves and ask if they needed help. Sandy and Barry rushed off with a bunch of other kids to explore.

His one regret was that he hadn’t seen any of the legendary fabulous mansions that the Sheldon Dynasty members had built for themselves. None of their country-sized estates were anywhere near Illanum.

That just left his job. He worked in factory 8. At his orientation class he learned it contained three assembly bays. He considered that ordinary enough. Then they told him their size: cylindrical chambers twenty-five meters in diameter and thirty-five high. They were lined by a hundred plyplastic tool arms, and twenty heavy lift manipulators; up to a hundred and fifty engineeringbots could be deployed inside at any one time. The construction operation was supervised by an array loaded with RI-level software.

“You’re building starships,” Liz told him when he got back home after his first exhausting twelve-hour shift. “Everyone in town says it.”

“Yeah, but they’re not for the navy. The assembly bays are putting together complete compartments; that’s why they’re so large and complex. These are like spheres that have six airlocks. All you have to do is stack them together on top of a hyperdrive section, and you can have any size ship you want. It’s the ultimate in modular design concept.”

“What’s in the compartments?”

“Factory eight is doing suspension tanks,” he said.

“Damnit. I bet they’re evacuation ships. I had the placement office call me today and ask if I’d like to work in a team designing state-of-the-art genetic agronomy laboratories. You know what that means?”

“Modifying terrestrial crops to grow in alien soil.”

Liz sucked on her lower lip. “Sheldon’s going to leave if we lose the war,” she said with grim admiration. “He’ll probably take most of his Dynasty with him. How many suspension tanks are in the compartments?”

“A hundred each. We’re receiving all the major subcomponents already integrated; with the exception of the hull and the life-support systems, most of it is standard commercially available hardware. The assembly bays just plug all the pieces together. There’s a lot of development gone into this. It would have taken a long time, even with advanced design software. I think he’s been planning this since before the invasion.”

“A hundred per compartment?” she mused. “That’s a big ship.”

“Very. Factory eight is churning out six completed compartments a week. Some of the other factories are just packaging industrial cybernetics for long-term storage. You’ve seen how many trucks are using the highway; they’re shipping all the completed compartments out somewhere.”

“Six a week, in one factory? That’s…” She half closed her eyes as she did some multiplication. “Jesus damn! How big are these ships? He must be planning on taking a whole planet with him.”

“If you’re intending to establish a high-technology civilization from scratch, you need a lot of equipment, and a decent population base.”

She put her arms around him. “Do we get to go, too?”

“I don’t know.”

“We need to find out, baby. We really do.”

“Hey, come on; this is just a rich man’s paranoia. The Commonwealth’s a long way from falling to the Primes.” Mark stroked her back, moving gently down her spine the way she liked.

“Then we should get paranoid, too. If we do lose, what would happen to Sandy and Barry? We’ve seen the Primes firsthand, Mark. They don’t give a fuck for humans; we’re lower than pond scum to them.”

“All right, I’ll ask around. Someone at the factory should know. Hey, did I tell you, old Burcombe is one of the managers. He’ll probably tell me.”

“Thanks, baby, I know I’m a pain to live with sometimes.”

“Never.” He held her closer. “I don’t know where they’re putting these ships together. It has to be in orbit, but I’ve not seen anything here. Not that I’ve really looked, but anything that large would show up like a small moon.”

“It could be anywhere within a hundred light-years. Hell, that asteroid of Ozzie’s was a perfect place to use as a shipyard, ultra top secret and habitable. You could house a cityful of people in there and barely notice them.”

***

The cloud had thickened up in the Regents, bringing with it a cloying sleet riddled with slender hailstones. Morton could hear them striking his armor suit, a constant tattoo of crackling to complement his feet as they squelched through tacky slush.

It was slow going back up the mountain to the saddle. The human survivors from Randtown were all riding in the bubbles, which could tackle the terrain easily, while the remaining members of Cat’s Claws simply walked up in their armor. That left the alien who claimed to be Dudley Bose. It didn’t have any kind of clothing to protect its pale skin. Bose said its body would work in the cold, but with difficulty. So they had to drape it in blankets and scraps of cloth, then hang sheets of plastic on top to protect it from the worst of the weather. Even so, the creature couldn’t move fast up the muddy slope.

It took most of the night just to reach the cloud level, and that was taking a direct route up from the cave. After that they had to follow the contour line along to the saddle where their equipment was stored.

They detected flyers patrolling the lake below, but none ventured close to the mountains and their treacherous downdrafts and microswirls.

When they finally reached the saddle, they took refuge in one of the deep crevices.

Rob opened some of the packs Parker and the Doc had brought with them. “Try these on,” he told the three standing refugees, handing around clothes. “A lot of it is semiorganic, it’ll shape itself to you.”

“Thank you,” Simon said gravely. “I am sorry we never got to know your friends.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Rob turned away and knelt down beside David Dunbavand. The man had improved considerably during the bubble ride: some color had returned to his skin, and his feverish sweating had subsided. “How’re you doing?”

“Okay. The drive up was kind of interesting, the bits I remember, anyway. Those biovirals: it’s like drinking a gallon of champagne cocktails.”

“Your leg’s stabilizing,” Rob said as he ran the diagnostic array up and down the man. “Looking good.”

“Thanks.”

“How about you?” Morton asked the Bose motile.

“This body is sluggish but functional. Prime motiles suffer some degradation in the cold, but they are more resistant than humans.” The polythene and blanket swaddling was covered in a thin layer of muddy slush. It was unwinding them one at a time, dropping them on the rocky floor. The array it was using to speak through was held in the pincers of one arm. “May I eat, please?”

“Sure.” All three of Cat’s Claws had carried plastic pouches full of lake water up the mountain. Bose said it was thick with base cells, the main food of the aliens. There were also containers full of cakelike vegetation, resembling shredded seaweed. It had built up quite a little stash in the ruined house in anticipation of repatriation.

They had all listened to Bose’s story on the climb. How he and Verbeke had been captured in the Watchtower; their imprisonment and death, the download of his personal store into an immotile unit. He provided a fascinating insight into the nature of the threat the Commonwealth was facing—one that Morton and the others found uniquely disturbing. They were being invaded purely with genocide in mind. That MorningLightMountain was psychologically unable to grasp the concept of compromise, let alone sharing a universe with any other life-form. Maybe Doc Roberts and Parker had the right of it, Morton thought. This is a fight to the death.

“Shouldn’t be long till we get you back to a hospital now,” Rob told David. “The navy will be opening a wormhole right away when they find out we’ve got Bose with us.”

Morton faced them all. “I’m not sure we should tell the navy,” he said.

The Cat laughed with delight.

“You’re kidding, right?” Rob said.

“No.”

“Okay, so you want to tell us why not?”

“Mellanie said the navy can’t be trusted. Apparently there’s some big political struggle going on in the Senate with the Dynasties and Grand Families.”

“What total bullshit,” Rob said.

“Are you talking about Mellanie Rescorai?” Simon asked. “The reporter?”

Mandy let out a snort of disbelief. “Her!”

“Yes,” Morton said.

“How is not telling the navy going to help the Commonwealth?” Simon asked.

“I’m not saying we don’t ever tell them,” Morton said. “I just want to know what the implications are before we do.”

“How do you propose finding out, exactly?” Rob asked. There was a dangerous edge to his voice.

“Mellanie arranged for encoded messages to be included in the recordings I send to the Michelangelo show. She’ll be able to tell us if it’s safe.”

“Safe!” Rob grunted. “Man, you are paranoid!”

“Look, one day isn’t going to make any difference,” Morton said reasonably. “We’re perfectly safe here. We have to wait until the Randtown force field is expanded anyway. So just humor me.”

“Shit!” Rob gave the Cat an angry stare. “What do you say?”

“Me? I think it’s hilarious, darling. Do it, Morty, screw the navy over. Gets my vote.”

“For what it’s worth,” Simon said, “I trust Mellanie.”

“How can you?” Mandy demanded. “The little bitch was wrecking our town and everything we stood for, your ideals. The whole Commonwealth hated us because of her.”

“She saved us, though, didn’t she?” Simon said gently. “Surely that is penance enough?”

“Something happened here,” the Bose motile said. Everybody turned to look at it. “This is where MorningLightMountain came up against the SI, the only time they clashed during the whole invasion. That is why I chose Randtown as my return point to the Commonwealth; the SI has some kind of presence here.”

“Had,” Morton said. “It had a presence here. Mellanie works for the SI.”

“Ah,” Simon said. For the first time in weeks, he actually smiled. “I always wondered how she achieved all she did.”

“Your girlfriend is some kind of agent for the SI?” an incredulous Rob asked. “That…that…bimbo?”

“Hey,” Morton growled.

The Cat was laughing again. “Oh, this is fabulous. Thank you so much, Morty.”

Morton gave Rob a level gaze. “So do I tell the navy or not?”

Rob glanced around at everyone, then gave the stationary motile a long stare. “What the fuck. Do what you like for now, Morton. But after we set off the nuke your girl had better provide one hell of a reason not to tell the navy what we’ve got. That’s how long she’s got.”

***

Mark and Liz spent the evening in their living room, sharing a bottle of wine and accessing the final moments of Randtown. It was Ulon Valley wine. His e-butler’s search program had found a supplier on Lyonna who had a few bottles left; it was an extortionate price, and then there was the premium same-day shipping charge to MoZ Express couriers on top of that. But what else could you drink while you watched a nuclear explosion obliterate your old hometown?

Mellanie had joined Michelangelo in his studio for the report. She marked the sobriety of the occasion by wearing a long black dress with a panel skirt that fell open to show off her beautiful legs. Her hair had been pulled back from her forehead into a thick, wavy tail. Michelangelo sat behind his desk like a minor Greek god in a sharp blue suit. The sexual tension between them was so strong that anyone using full-band TSI to access the show could almost smell the pheromones they were both pumping out into the studio air.

It certainly gave Mark some uncomfortable reminders of that day he’d encountered her up at the blockade in the Dau’sing Mountains.

“You were there during the evacuation,” Michelangelo was saying. “What’s your response to this?”

“It was inevitable. I really enjoyed my time in Randtown. The people were a bit quirky, we all know that, but seeing the images of what the Primes had done to the town and the Trine’ba was just devastating to me. They got what they deserved. I only hope the other navy squads are equally effective.”

“You say effective, but they lost two of their members on their first deployment. This remarkable recording, exclusive to our show, reveals the desperate odds our navy troops on the ground are facing.”

The picture changed from the studio to a grainy image of a mountainside in the middle of the night, a composite of various sensor feeds, producing a monochrome image. It was centered on Randtown, with the force field shining like a phosphorescent pearl above the familiar shoreline. The tactical nuclear bomb went off, flooding the interior with light. For a brief second the force field held, containing the explosion. Then it failed, and the mushroom cloud climbed up out of a seething pool of darkness.

“There really is no going back now,” Mark said solemnly.

Liz raised her glass. “To not looking back.”

“Amen.”

They stayed accessed for a while longer, while Mellanie eulogized about the squads that the navy had sent out. There were other recordings that Morton had made. Reconnoiter of Randtown and the aliens. The heroic last stand Doc Roberts and Parker made against the flyers. Simon Rand and the other refugees. She and Michelangelo discussed the navy strategy.

Mark’s e-butler told him someone was approaching the front door.

“At this hour?” Liz asked.

The house array showed them an image of Giselle Swinsol standing outside.

“Oh, Jesus,” Mark complained. “Now what?” He kept having guilty thoughts about all those insistent questions he’d been asking at work.

Giselle came straight into the living room, and refused the offer of a drink. She didn’t sit, either. “You’ve been asking a lot of questions, Mark,” she said. It was an accusation.

Mark was determined not to be intimidated by her tough-bitch personality. “I’m working on a fascinating project; obviously I’m curious. But I can appreciate that Nigel Sheldon doesn’t want the Commonwealth to know about it. You can rely on me.”

“Very good, Mark. The answer to your dreadfully unsubtle question is: yes, you and your family are entitled to a berth on the lifeboats should we face annihilation here.”

“Thank you.” It came out with such a heartfelt sigh he immediately felt ashamed. Once again she’d proved the strongest.

Her glossed lips curved up slightly, acknowledging her position. “So, you now advance to level two.”

“What does that mean?” Liz asked suspiciously.

“It means that Mark has done such a good job here that we feel his kind of expertise is better suited to other, more critical sections of the project.”

“What sections?” he blurted.

“Starship assembly. Pack your bags. The bus will pick you up tomorrow at eight o’clock.”

“We’re moving?” Liz said in alarm. “But the children have only just settled in school.”

“Their next school is just as good.”

“Where is it?” Mark asked. “Where are the evacuation starships being built?”

“Classified.” Giselle gave Liz a small smirk. “You’ll enjoy this next part. It’s right up your street.”

“Cow,” Liz hissed when she’d left.

Mark looked around the living room, the nearly empty bottle, the one big indentation on the couch where they’d snuggled up together. He had felt really comfortable in this house. “I don’t suppose they’ll move us again after this.”

“Only to the other side of the galaxy, baby.”

***

MORTY, DO NOT INFORM THE NAVY YOU HAVE THE MOTILE CONTAINING BOSE’S MEMORIES. ANY INFORMATION ON MORNINGLIGHTMOUNTAIN IS TOO IMPORTANT TO RISK TO POSSIBLE CORRUPTION.

I HAVE THE RE-LIFED BOSE WITH ME. HE SHOULD RECEIVE THE MEMORIES. THAT WAY HE WILL BE ABLE TO INTERPRET THEM IN THEIR CORRECT SEQUENCE. AFTER THAT WE CAN DECIDE HOW TO PROCEED.

I WILL MAKE ARRANGEMENTS TO EXTRACT YOU FROM ELAN. UNTIL THEN, KEEP THE BOSE MOTILE AND THE REFUGEES SAFE.

MELLANIE.

“I have been re-lifed?” the Bose motile asked.

“She will make arrangements to extract us?” Rob said disbelievingly.

“Mellanie had a wormhole opened to us once before,” Simon said. “She can probably do it again.”

“Probably ain’t good enough, friend.” Rob pointed at the Bose motile.

“This is our ticket out of here.”

“To what?” Morton asked. “If she’s right about the navy, we’re not going to help the Commonwealth by giving them this information.”

“Oh, listen to yourself. The Commonwealth navy is the Bad Guy? Get real. They’re the only hope we’ve got. Your girl is trying to build her career by chasing phantoms. She’s a goddamn reporter, one of the biggest turds in the galaxy. Tell the navy we’ve got Bose at the next wormhole opening. Get us out of here.”

“She works for the SI. She can do this. Trust her.”

“Bullshit.”

“Question,” the Cat said. She was sitting in Full Diamond position on the floor of the fissure, clad in a simple leotard, seemingly immune to the cold.

“Morton, when you sent your encrypted message, did you mention MorningLightMountain by name?”

“No.”

The Cat changed to King Cobra position with simple lithe movements. As she did she gave Rob a sly smile. “How did a conspiracy theorist nut find out its name all by herself?”

Rob’s defiant expression crumpled. “Oh, Jesus H. Christ; fuck-it-up Rob strikes again. I always get the shit assignments. Always. We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?”

“Yep.”

“I have been re-lifed?” the Bose motile repeated.

“Yes,” Morton said.

“And I am dating a beautiful young media reporter?”

“Apparently so, yes.”

“Tell him the rest of it, Morty, my dear,” the Cat said with a smirk. “Mellanie is a complete sex maniac.”

“I would very much like to meet me.”

***

The star system was on the border between phase one and two space, eight light-years from the Big15 world of Granada. CST had examined it once, and immediately moved on. The M-class star presided over a meager realm of two planets: one small solid world no larger than Earth’s moon, and a Saturn-size gas giant orbited by a dozen moons. As far as habitability was concerned it rated an easy zero. Nobody had ever returned.

The starship Moscow slipped out of hyperspace four hundred thousand kilometers above the gas giant. Its wormhole closed behind it with a short-lived glow of indigo radiance.

Strapped into his couch in the cabin’s cramped operations segment, Captain McClain Gilbert reviewed the data that the starship’s sensors were picking up. The gas giant’s third moon was twenty thousand kilometers away, a heavily cratered ball of rock, three thousand kilometers in diameter. There was no atmosphere. As the visual sensors scanned it, a profile of its surface built up. A recognizable topography of mare plains and hills was revealed, dating back to the moon’s origin. Lusterless peat-brown regolith was scattered thinly over rock strata of dark gray and black. Thousands of craters had mangled the smooth hills, ripping out vast slabs of jagged rock to form vertical cliff ramparts.

There had been no change in the two hundred years since CST’s exploratory division had performed its quick scan.

“Our survey records check out, such as they are,” Mac said; he turned to look at Natasha Kersley in the couch next to him. “There’s nothing alive around here. Is that what you wanted, Doc?”

“Looks good,” she said.

“Can I begin the satellite launch?”

“Yes, please.”

Mac sent a flurry of commands into the ship’s RI. Modified missile launch tubes in the Moscow’s forward section opened and spat out eighteen sensor satellites. Their ion rockets pushed them into a bracelet formation orbiting the nameless moon, allowing them to cover the entire surface simultaneously. Once their coverage was established they’d be able to determine the exact power of the quantumbuster they were here to test.

“So far so good,” he muttered.

“Absolutely. Here’s hoping we don’t have a Fermi moment.”

“A what?” Mac really didn’t like the uncertainty in her voice.

“During the Trinity test of the very first atom bomb, Fermi wondered if the detonation would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. They just didn’t know, you see. We think the quantum disruption won’t propagate. If it does, then the whole universe gets converted into energy.”

“Oh, great, thanks for sharing.” He gave the doomed moon a deeply troubled glance.

“It’s really not very likely,” Natasha said.

It took two hours until Mac was satisfied the satellites were correctly placed, and their communications relay systems were locked together. “Okay, Doc, you’re on.”

Natasha drew a quick breath, and fed her launch code into the prototype quantumbuster warhead. The missile was hurled out of its launch tube by a powerful magnetic pulse. When it was ten kilometers from the starship, its fusion drive ignited, accelerating it hard toward the moon.

“All systems functional,” Natasha reported. “Target acquired. I’m authorizing activation.” She sent another code to the weapon, and received confirmation. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Amen to that,” Mac muttered.

The Moscow opened a wormhole and quickly slipped inside. Five seconds later, and two million kilometers out from the moon, the starship slid back out into real space.

“Receiving satellite data,” Mac said as the communications dish picked up the signal. “Switching to high capacity recording.”

“Two minutes to impact,” Natasha said. “All systems operational.”

“We’re going to see it from here, right?” He was aligning the starship’s sensors back on the moon.

“Oh, heavens, yes. The quantumbuster field will initialize just before the missile hits the surface. That should give us an intersection over several hundred meters of the moon’s mass. It works out to quite a substantial volume.”

“And the whole thing just turns to energy?”

“Any piece of matter inside the field, yes. That’s the theory: the effect completely breaks down quantum-level cohesion. The discharge radiance will be on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

“Discharge radiance,” Mac said with a smile. “You mean explosion.”

She gave him a nervous grin. “Yeah.”

Mac turned his whole attention to the visual spectrum image that was being projected in front of his face. The moon was a simple dark circle framed by stars. All the sensor satellites were watching eagerly. They showed a tiny purple-white spark sinking toward the surface.

Mac had brought the Moscow out of hyperspace on the other side of the moon from the target zone. If the Seattle Project weapon worked as advertised, the radiation blast would be lethal even at two million kilometers. The Commonwealth would have a decisive weapon to use against the Primes.

“Do you think they’ll negotiate?” he asked.

“If they see this in action, they’d be truly crazy not to,” Natasha said. “I don’t care how bizarre their motives are, they face extinction if we use this against them. They’ll talk.”

Mac desperately wanted her to be right. The way he’d worked his way to the navy’s vanguard, he was pretty sure he’d wind up with the mission to take a quantumbuster to Dyson Alpha.

He checked the moon again, worrying about the whole Fermi moment idea. The missile was seconds away from its brown and black mottled surface. I should have positioned the Moscow on the other side of the gas giant.

The quantumbuster activated its effect field. Light flared around the moon, creating a perfect white halo. It was as if the ancient sphere of rock was eclipsing a white dwarf star. The edges began to dissolve as the glare poured across the cratered surface like an advancing tsunami. Dazzling cracks appeared, opening deep into the moon’s interior. Low rolling hills heaved, transforming into volcanoes that jetted debris hundreds of kilometers out into space. Dusty plains crumbled as they separated ponderously from the highlands surrounding them.

Slowly and inexorably, the moon disintegrated inside its cocoon of lurid stellar light.

“Jesus, Doc,” Mac barked. “You were just supposed to blow the bloody thing out of orbit.”

***

Giselle Swinsol herself was sitting at the front of the bus when it arrived to collect them. It was a fifty-seater Ford Landhound, with luxury seats and a small canteen in front of the washroom cubicles. Two other families were sitting in it, looking lost and vaguely apprehensive. Mark recognized the expression. He’d seen it in the bathroom mirror that morning.

Giselle waited until the porterbots had loaded all the Vernons’ bags and boxes into the luggage compartment at the back. “Don’t look so worried; this isn’t a long trip.”

Mark and Liz swapped a glance, then tried to settle the excited kids.

The bus drove back down the highway toward Illanum. It joined a convoy of vehicles, slotting in behind a forty-wheel transporter carrying one of the completed starship compartments, and in front of three standard container trucks, empty after dropping their loads at a factory. Once they had passed the back of Rainbow Wood the compartment transporter turned off along a long curving slip road; the bus followed it. The slip road fed onto another three-lane highway wide enough to handle the transporters. After another eight kilometers, another slip road joined it, bringing more of the giant transporters.

“I didn’t know there were any other towns on Cressat,” Mark said.

“There are five assembly centers here,” Giselle said. “Biewn and two others are responsible for life support and cargo; one is fabricating the hyperdrives; and the last provides general systems, the starship’s spine if you like.”

Mark began to reevaluate the project yet again. The scale was larger than he’d imagined. So was the timescale; this had to have been going on for a long time prior to the Prime invasion. As for the cost…

The highway was heading directly for the base of a low hill where a circle of warm pink light was shining at them. Mark felt the slight tingle of a pressure membrane as the bus passed through. Then he, Liz, and the kids were pressed against the window, anxious to see the new world.

They’d emerged high up in some mountains, giving them a view out over a flat plain that must have been hundreds of kilometers wide. It had strange yellow rock outcrops, and a jagged volcanic canyon running away diagonally from the mountains. The ground was completely bare, with a thin covering of gray-brown sand scattered over dark rock. Right away on the far horizon were some rumpled dark specks that might have been more mountains; the planet’s lavender-shaded sky made it difficult to tell.

They were on a broad ring road that curved around the human settlement, whose clean new buildings stood out against the mottled brown landscape like silver warts. The town had an outer band of factories, similar to those that Mark had worked in back in Biewn, several condo-style accommodation blocks, and five sprawling housing estates. Construction sites made up a good third of the area, swarming with bots. A wormhole generator and four modern fusion stations dominated the skyline opposite the gateway back to Cressat.

Mark couldn’t see any vegetation at all on the ground alongside the ring road; the land was a desert. Then he looked again at the topaz patches daubed on the plain below. At first he’d assumed they were unusual rock formations. Each one was circular—perfectly circular, now that he was paying attention. They had steep radial undulations, like the folds in an origami flower. His retinal inserts zoomed in, allowing his e-butler to do some calculations. They measured over twenty-four kilometers wide. A triple spike rose out of the center of each one, reaching a kilometer into the air.

“What the hell are those?” he asked.

“We call them the gigalife,” Giselle said. “This planet is covered in the groundplants. They come in many colors, but they all grow to about this size. I’ve seen bigger ones in the tropical zones. And there’s a waterplant variety which floats on the sea, though they are made up from a mesh of tendrils rather than the single sheets you can see here. There’s nothing else alive on this world.”

“Nothing?” Liz queried. “That’s an unusual evolutionary route.”

“Told you this would be right up your street,” Giselle said with gratification. “The gigalife has nothing to do with evolution. I wasn’t joking when I said there was nothing else here. We haven’t found any bacteriological or microbial traces other than the ones we brought with us. This planet was technoformed with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and freshwater oceans specifically to provide a place for them to grow. Up until about twenty thousand years ago it was just a lump of inert rock naked to space. Someone dumped the atmosphere and oceanic water here, presumably through gigantic wormholes; we found evidence of a local gas giant’s moons being strata mined for its crustal ice.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“No. We named them the Planters, because the only thing they left behind was the gigalife. Presumably they are some kind of artwork, though we can’t be sure of that, either. It’s the lead theory because we haven’t found a practical application for them, and the Dynasty has been researching them for over a century now.”

“Why?” Liz asked. “This is a fabulous discovery. They are the most extraordinary organisms I’ve ever seen. Why not share it with the Commonwealth?”

“Commercial application. Gigalife isn’t quite genuine biological life. Whoever produced them has overcome Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; there is some kind of nanonic fabrication system operating inside the cells. Look at those central spires. They’re made up from a conical mast of super-strength carbon strands which the cells extrude. The leaf-sheet is simply draped over it. Gigalife is a fusion of ordinary biological processes and molecular mechanics, which we’ve so far been completely unable to duplicate. The implication if we can crack the nanonic properties is incalculable. We’d get everything from true Von Neumannism to bodies which can self-repair. Human immortality would become integral rather than dependent on the crudity of today’s rejuvenation techniques.”

Liz wrinkled her nose in disapproval. “How long do the groundplants take to grow?”

“We’re not sure. The current structures are about five thousand years old, and just maintain themselves. We’ve never seen one in its growth stage. Several are decaying faster than their regeneration process can cope with. Again, we don’t know if they’re actually dying, or if they’re in a cycle. They could be like terrestrial bulbs and simply recharge their kernels for the next time around.”

“You mean they don’t produce seeds?”

“Who knows? They have a kernel which is the size of a twenty-story skyscraper. Best guess is that they were manufactured and placed in position by the Planters. If they were produced as seeds, how would they ever spread? They’d either need wheels or rockets.”

“Good point,” Liz admitted.

“Can you eat them?” Barry piped up.

“No. We haven’t found one with proteins that a human can consume. Of course, we haven’t sampled more than a tiny percentage so far. We use noninvasive investigatory techniques, which is why our progress is slower than some in the Dynasty would like. But Nigel and Ozzie both agreed we didn’t want the Planters to return and find we’d damaged anything. Any species possessing this kind of knowledge base is best left unannoyed.”

“You’re very knowledgeable about this,” Liz said.

“I used to be director of the gigalife research office.”

“Ah.”

Giselle gave Mark a taunting smile. “Here comes the good bit. Look out over there. Up in the sky. The first one will be rising into view any moment now.” She pointed over the plain to the west.

Mark didn’t like the tone—it was too smug—but he looked anyway. He thought he would be seeing a starship assembly platform, which he was actually looking forward to. The prospect of working in orbit was one that fired him.

It wasn’t an assembly platform. Mark watched in utter disbelief as a moon slid up over the horizon. It moved fast, and it was huge. “That’s not possible,” he whispered. All the kids in the bus were shrieking and pointing with excitement.

The moon was a stippled magenta globe, with a profusion of slender jet-black creases snaking across its surface. It was several times the size of Earth’s moon. Too big, Mark knew instinctively: anything that big that close would produce tidal forces that would rip continents apart and haul a permanent tsunami around the globe in its wake. This wasn’t even disturbing the few wispy high-altitude clouds. Then he began to understand its texture. The multitude of black creases were actually fissures, walled by the same magenta material that colored the surface. It was only in the deeps where the sunlight couldn’t reach that they actually turned black. The moon wasn’t big, just in a low orbit, neither was it solid; it was a gigantic spherical ruff, sheets of thin purple fabric crumpled up against each other.

“Oh, no,” Mark said. He looked from the purple moon down to the topaz groundplant gigalife, then back again. “No way.”

“Yes,” Giselle said. “The third variety of gigalife, the spaceflower. The Planters put fifteen asteroids into a two-thousand-kilometer orbit, and dropped a kernel on each one. They don’t mass more than about a hundred million tons each. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the kernel runs out of raw material to convert. Some of us think that will be when the Planters come back.”

“They sculpted moons,” Mark said in astonishment.

“Grew them,” Giselle corrected. “Essentially we have a planet which has giant cabbages for moons. Who said aliens don’t have a sense of humor?”

***

As soon as the committee room doors opened, Justine rushed out. Surprised expressions followed her. It wasn’t quite seemly for a senator to run.

She just made it to the lady’s washroom, and threw up into the porcelain bowl. There was a discreet cough outside the cubical. “Are you all right, ma’am?” the attendant asked.

“Fine, thank you. Bad food this morning.” She heaved again. Her forehead was damp with sweat, and she felt inordinately hot. The tension that had racked up during the committee meeting hadn’t helped her delicate stomach.

Ramon was waiting for her outside when she finally emerged. “Something we said?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Something I ate,” she told him around yet another antacid tablet.

“I hope not. With all the paranoia around here, people will think assassins are trying to poison you.”

“Not a bad thing. It would get our fellow senators to cut down on the dining-room food.”

“Now that is pure wishful thinking.”

She glanced down at his chest. Ramon was wearing a very modern business suit, tailored to deemphasize his stomach. Normally when he was in the Senate Hall he was careful to wear tribal robes. But then the Security Oversight Committee was not one that permitted any media coverage. “I see you’re really sticking to your diet.”

Ramon let out a sigh. “Don’t start.”

“I’m sorry,” she said contritely.

“Now I know something’s wrong.”

“No there isn’t. I’ll survive. And thanks for supporting me in there this morning.”

“The African caucus does not automatically do as the Halgarths wish, nor any other Dynasty for that matter.”

“What about Grand Families?”

He smiled broadly. “It depends on the deal which is offered.”

“Rammy, I need to ask you something.”

“Personal or business?”

“Business,” she said with a sigh. “Always business these days.”

He reached out and gave her cheek an affectionate stroke. “Thompson will be back soon.”

“Not soon enough.” She finished the antacid tablet, and they walked down the broad deserted corridor toward the Senate Hall’s main lobby. “That weekend at Sorbonne Wood, who exactly came up with the idea for parallel development shared between Anshun and High Angel?”

Ramon stopped to stare at her. “Why do you need to know?”

“There are certain aspects about the navy formation that we have to clarify.”

“What aspects?”

“The groupings, Rammy, come on. You have to admit, for a venture that size it all came together remarkably smoothly.”

“Thanks to you. It was a Burnelli weekend if I remember rightly.”

“We’re worried we might have been outmaneuvered.”

“Ha! That would be a first. I know how Gore operates. Nothing is left to chance.”

“Someone else was manipulating that weekend. We’re sure of it.”

“What’s happened? Have you missed out on a big contract?”

“No. But High Angel was a massive beneficiary, and through that the African Caucus. You owe us for that.”

“I suppose I might. I believe the idea came from Kantil. She was very eager to gain support for Doi at the time.”

“Did Patricia tell you herself, or was it Isabella?”

“Justine”—he grinned down at her—“are you jealous?”

“Please! This is important. Did Isabella tell you it came direct from Kantil, that Doi would sanction the spending?”

“I honestly don’t recall exactly. Isabella made the suggestion, so naturally I assumed it came from Kantil. Lovely though Isabella is, she’s only a first-life girl. Why, who else do you think would make it?”

“Isabella’s a Halgarth,” Justine said.

“Oh, no.” He threw his hands into the air with exasperation. “We’re back to the motion for a vote on Myo again.”

“It’s not the vote.”

“It’s looking that way to me. You took it personally. Admit it.”

“I know Valetta caught me off guard in there; Thompson would never have let that sneak up on him. It’s beginning to look as though I just don’t have his aptitude for this job.”

“Nonsense. You’re more than capable. You outmaneuvered Valetta beautifully, and gave yourself time to build support for the vote. You’re a natural.”

“It doesn’t seem that way. Damn that Columbia for forcing my hand like this. It’ll be a real show of strength in the next committee. I’m not even sure I can win.”

“You have my vote.”

“Yeah, right, thanks.”

“This really bugs you; and it’s not the first time you’ve clashed with the Halgarths and their allies. Why don’t you just declare open warfare, and have the fleet attack Solidade.”

“Because it’s their fleet, Rammy.”

“So that’s it! Gore’s pissed that they hijacked his pet project.”

“The navy isn’t a project, it’s essential to our survival. We’re at war, fighting for our very existence as a species, and the Halgarths are taking over the Commonwealth’s entire defense policy. That’s not healthy.”

“Don’t let this Senate spat blind you. Sheldon remains in ultimate command. Thanks to CST his Dynasty will always have the final say. And Kime is still Admiral; he’s Sheldon’s man, in alliance with Los Vada. With Columbia, the Halgarths only have control of planetary defense. It’s a classic Dynasty carve-up. The power structures balance out.”

“All right.” She tried to put on a convinced expression for his benefit.

“That’s better. So how about lunch? Just you and me, and no business.”

“Old times,” she said mournfully. “Sorry, Rammy, I’ve got to get back to the office. I need to start making calls.”

His hopeful expression gave way to something more melancholic. “I understand. My advice: call Crispin. He was never a Halgarth man.”

She gave him a quick kiss on the lips. “Thanks. See you soon.”

It was Thompson’s office. The taste was his, all lush reds and gold-brown wood furniture. She hadn’t made a single change, she didn’t have the right. When he came back, he could sit down behind his vast desk and carry on as if nothing had happened.

If the world still exists then.

Justine dismissed her aides, and ignored the urgent briefing files as she settled into her brother’s chair.

So Isabella hadn’t specifically said it was Patricia’s suggestion. That wasn’t a lot to go on, although it deepened her own suspicions that Patricia was being played like the rest of them.

“Could really do with your advice, Tommy,” she told the room. The rejuvenation clinic their family owned and used was just on the outskirts of Washington, not quite twenty-five kilometers from Senate Hall as the crow flies. Right now his clone fetus was there, about ten centimeters long, growing inside a womb tank.

She looked down at her own abdomen, resting her hand lightly against it. Her stomach was still perfectly flat, not that she’d been to the gym for weeks now. “You’re going to be born before your uncle,” she said softly. “He’s going to be surprised about that.” Along with an awful lot of other people.

With her real hand resting contentedly above the baby, her virtual hand touched Paula Myo’s icon.

“Yes, Senator?”

Does she ever sleep? “I have some unpleasant news you should be aware of. I was just ambushed in the Security Oversight Committee. Senator Valetta Halgarth asked for your immediate withdrawal from Senate Security.”

“On what grounds?”

“Very shaky ones. Fortunately. She cited interference in navy intelligence operations, claimed you were misusing government resource to pursue personal goals.”

“The observation on Alessandra Baron.”

“Precisely. I managed to delay the vote on a procedural point about the agenda. But it is only a delay. It looks like Columbia really has got it in for you.”

“I know that. Thank you for covering for me.”

“I’ll talk to the other senators, rebuild my strategic support in that committee. I should be able to pull a majority onto my side. Right now there are several people who are unhappy with the Halgarths. They’re not my family’s natural allies, but I should be able to swing them around.”

“I understand. This could be very revealing.”

“How so?”

“Do you have any indication which way the Sheldons intend to vote? It goes against the Starflyer’s interests to have me remain in Senate Security.”

“Good point. I’ll try and find out.”

***

MorningLightMountain was annoyed with humans. It had known they would strike back after its preliminary incursion into the Commonwealth; such a move was inevitable. What was less welcome was the manner of the response. It had been expecting wormholes to open above the captured planets, disgorging quantities of ships and missiles to assault its new installations. So it had dutifully prepared for that scenario, building the strongest force field generators it had over the factories and refineries it was constructing on the new worlds, placing thousands of ships in orbit armed with powerful weaponry.

With all the knowledge it had gathered about the Commonwealth and its abilities, MorningLightMountain was certain this would be enough to ward off the human attack. There was an astonishing amount of information left behind amid the wreckage of the abandoned human cities; storage crystals that contained entire encyclopedias, scientific theories and research, engineering designs, economic and industrial statistics on each of the Commonwealth worlds, and a truly endless supply of “entertainment.” For the first time MorningLightMountain was grateful it had animated the Bose memories; without that small insight into human thinking it would have been extremely difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. And humans produced an astonishing amount of fiction to amuse themselves.

To its disappointment, there was little information available on the SI. There was no verifiable record on any of its new twenty-three worlds as to the exact location of Vinmar. Once the Commonwealth worlds were converted to Prime life, it would have to search all the star systems within two hundred light-years of Earth. Some files speculated that the SI was no longer physically based, but had transformed itself to an energy-based entity. MorningLightMountain could not decide if these, too, were works of fiction.

It also had humans to extract information from. There were tens of thousands of discarded bodies lying buried in the rubble or trapped in smashed vehicles. Removing their memorycells was an easy operation. Living humans presented more trouble; they struggled and fought the soldier motiles. In the end MorningLightMountain simply shot them all, and recovered their memorycells that way. It learned that there was very little useful information recorded in these personal units; they only ever held memories, and human minds were not reliable. After animating a few inside isolated immotiles, it found that most were even more unstable than Bose. Even more surprising, few were as knowledgeable. MorningLightMountain had always assumed Bose was an inferior human specimen.

As it tapped into more and more databases, so its picture of the Commonwealth strengthened, building on the original loose interpretation that came from the Bose memories. It began to reclaim and modify human cybernetic fabrication systems, turning the machinery to producing components and machines of its own design. Buildings were modified to house its facilities, roads were used for vehicles. Bridges rebuilt.

The one segment of human technology it discarded was the electronics. MorningLightMountain simply did not trust the processors and programs that were available to it. There were hundreds of thousands of files detailing hidden subversive applications built into arrays and software. Ever since the first communications net was commissioned on Earth, humans seemed to have devoted a colossal amount of time and effort to conduct seditious assaults against each other inside its virtual boundaries. They disrupted the activities of their rivals, renegades launched viral attacks for the fun of it, and criminal elements stole from anyone with weaker encryption defenses in a massive electronic version of the territorial struggles that the immotile Primes used to wage constantly. After centuries of development, their skill in this arena was deadly. Their electronic warfare attacks against MorningLightMountain’s soldier motiles during the original incursion were proof of their digital superiority. It did not have the experience nor ability to uncover and guard against such digital deceit. Consequentially, it simply removed the arrays from human equipment, and inserted itself into the control circuits. Such substitution absorbed a great deal of thought capacity. One of its priorities on its new worlds was to establish immotile groups that were used to manage and exploit human engineering.

Progress in this and other areas was advancing well. Then the Commonwealth made its counterstrike. Wormholes opened above all the new twenty-three worlds. Sure enough, missiles flooded through. MorningLightMountain sent its ships to intercept. It had a huge advantage: humans were reluctant to use fusion bombs, fearing their collateral environmental damage, a trait it had learned from both Bose and subsequent human personality animation, as well as datamining political proclamations. All of the weapons it directed to repel the attack were nuclear.

Then more wormholes appeared, this time on the ground, flashing in and out of existence. MorningLightMountain struggled to keep up with plotting their emergence. Once more, humans were successfully disrupting its internal communications. Flyers were sent out to each location, encountering some resistance as aerobots zoomed out to confront them. The automatic machines were nimble, but not strong enough to defeat superior numbers of flyers. And superior numbers was MorningLightMountain’s specific advantage.

After seventeen hours, the attack ended. MorningLightMountain was victorious. It had sustained some damage, but there had been no strategic defeat. Motiles and machinery were directed to repair the broken systems. After studying the attack pattern, it began to strengthen and modify its defenses accordingly. The Commonwealth was weaker than it had predicted.

Many hours later, the disturbances began. There had always been brief clashes with armed humans on its new twenty-three worlds. Several hundred motiles had been killed, a number so small it barely registered with MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines. Defenses strong enough to withstand strategic bombardment from space were more than adequate to cope with anything wild humans could strike them with.

Bridges fell as convoys were driving over them, their support pillars blown apart by explosives.

Soldier motiles on patrol dropped out of communication and never returned.

Fires broke out in factories.

Fusion generators suffered unexplained confinement field instabilities. Their MHD chambers ruptured to shoot out spears of plasma that incinerated anything in their path.

Armored humans were detected around force fields, only to inexplicably vanish again.

Equipment outside the force fields failed. Investigation showed deliberately damaged parts, or small explosive charges.

A fusion bomb detonated outside the Randtown force field, wiping out fifteen flyers.

Farmer motiles were killed on a continuing basis, shot from long range. Farm equipment was sabotaged. Whole crops were lost.

A fusion bomb went off inside the Randtown force field, destroying the entire installation.

Armored humans had now been spotted on every world. They were impossible to catch. When cornered they fought until they died, usually by triggering fusion bombs.

Microscopic wormholes began to appear above all of the new worlds, emerging for a few seconds only. They were no threat.

Fusion bombs went off on Olivenza, Sligo, Whalton, Nattavaara, and Anshun.

New strip mines were vaporized.

The sabotage was not causing enough damage to halt MorningLightMountain’s expansion across its new twenty-three worlds. But the ruined installations all had to be rebuilt. Motiles replaced. Roads repaired. Crops replanted.

Then the armored humans would reappear from nowhere and wreck them all over again. MorningLightMountain rebuilt each time, incorporating stronger defenses, which took longer to construct. It brought in tens of thousands of additional soldier motiles from its homeworld, all of which had to be fed and supported, stretching its resources on the new twenty-three worlds. The disruption tactics that the humans were employing were extremely irritating. MorningLightMountain didn’t know how to stop them. Back on its homeworld, conflicts had been fought out in the open with both sides trying to inflict maximum damage. This was different. MorningLightMountain knew from human personality animation that they would never stop this guerrilla warfare harassment. Their history was heavy with such actions. Fanatical freedom fighters had successfully defeated conventional armies time and again.

It would only stop when there were no more free humans. MorningLightMountain began to commit more resources toward achieving that task.

The staging post detected superluminal quantum distortion waves sweeping through the star system. Their origin point was a distortion signature that corresponded to a human starship engine, three light-years distant. The starship was already heading away from the staging post.

MorningLightMountain knew what the Commonwealth navy would do now it had discovered the location of the staging post: attack with every weapon it possessed.

Thousands of immotile groups had considered what defense could be used against the kind of relativistic attack the humans had used at Anshun. The complex machinery that would modify its wormhole generators was already under construction. MorningLightMountain prioritized its completion, and began transferring the first components to the staging post. It also began to assemble its new fleet of warships. When the navy starships arrived, weakening the Commonwealth defenses, it would begin its second expansion stage into Commonwealth space, invading a further forty-eight worlds.