Judas Unchained

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The quantumbuster would not load into its launch tube. There was nothing Ozzie or the SIsubroutine could do to make the fat missile slide out of its magazine rack into the tube. Not one goddamn thing. He’d tried every trick he could think of. Forcing power into the electromuscle handling arms. That just made them spasm and flash up burnout overload warnings in his virtual vision. Getting the SIsubroutine to review the code for the whole magazine management program. Its analysis proved that the software was effective. Running diagnostic after diagnostic on the physical mechanism. The scrutiny showed every component was fully functional.

It still didn’t work.

Ozzie let out a furious snarl. There was a dark pressure inside his head that was growing with each passing hour. He’d never known frustration like it. To have got to this point only to be blocked by some kind of glitch was the kind of irony that only a truly badass god would practice.

There is a logical reason why this machine does not work; therefore I will find the fault.

When he looked around his virtual vision at the appallingly complex architecture of the launch mechanism all he could think to do was beat his virtual fists against it. His inability to concentrate wasn’t helped by lack of food. Two days now. He hadn’t slept much during that time, either.

There was an unexpected yet familiar rustling sound in the cabin that drew Ozzie’s attention back through the virtual structure. On the right-hand couch Mark was floating a couple of centimeters above the cushioning with his back toward Ozzie. The rustling came again.

“Yo, Mark what’s…Hey. Wait a goddamn minute! Is that CHOCOLATE?”

Mark rotated lazily, his cheeks bulging as he munched away contentedly. One hand held the torn and crumpled wrappings of a Cadbury’s milk chocolate bar. He peeled the purple foil away from the last four squares and popped them defiantly into his mouth.

“You bastard!” an outraged Ozzie yelled. “I’m like fucking starving here and you’ve had a secret supply of food all along.”

“Lunch box,” Mark mumbled through his clogged mouth. “Mine.”

“We’re in this together! Son of a bitch, where’s your humanity? The only thing I’ve had in the last two days is water. And we both know where that comes from.”

Mark finished the chocolate with a big swallow. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did you forget to steal sandwiches from the kindergarten before you kidnapped me on a hijacked starship?”

“This is my ship! I paid for half of it.”

“Fine, so just open the TD channel and explain that to Nigel Sheldon.”

Ozzie wanted to thump the arrays in front of him. “What the fuck were you in an earlier life, a lawyer?”

“You’ve killed me!” Mark bellowed back. “What in that twisted-up piece of wreckage you call a brain made you think I’d be grateful? Please, I’m interested. Do tell.”

“If you’d actually close your mouth and listen to me then maybe your low-achiever IQ could just get a handle on what I’m telling you.”

“At least I’ve got an IQ larger than my shoe size.”

“Dickhead!”

“Wanker!” Mark tossed the empty wrapper at Ozzie. “Oh, and traitor, too.”

“I am not a fucking Starflyer agent. Man, why will no one ever pay attention to me?”

“Was that another rhetorical question from the giddy heights of your intellect?”

“I am not a violent person, but if you don’t stop that right now I swear I am going to kick your ass through the cabin wall.”

“Would that be the insults or the shouting I’m to stop?”

Ozzie clenched his fists. Ready to—Just about going to—“Jeez! How did you ever get through our personnel screening program? Nobody in this galaxy could stand working next to you. You are the most goddamn irritating person I have ever met.”

“Was it your charm which impressed Giselle? Or did she just feel sorry for you because of your hairstyle?”

Ozzie’s hand automatically went up to pat at his hair that was floating around like an agitated jellyfish in the cabin’s freefall environment. “This is fashionable, man,” he said in an icy voice.

“Where?”

Mark sounded so genuinely curious it threw Ozzie’s thought processes, preventing him from coming out with a reply. Besides…“Look, we’re getting off track here, man. I’ve apologized like thirty billion times for what happened back there in the dock. I never meant for you to be dragged along.”

“How do you think my kids will cope without me? They’re both under ten, for Christ’s sake. You’ve taken me from them to die alone in interstellar space, and now the Commonwealth is going to lose the war because of your treachery. They’ll have to take flight on the lifeboats. Chased across the galaxy by an alien fiend never knowing if they’ve truly escaped while the rest of their species is systematically hunted down and wiped out. Don’t you have children? Try to remember your feelings for them from before it took over your mind.”

“I am not a fucking Starflyer agent!” Ozzie screamed. He took a moment to calm down. When he glanced over at Mark, he saw a smug grin on the man’s face. “All right, put your superior logical IQ to work on this: What’s the point in me stealing the Charybdis?”

“Is that a Starflyer joke?”

“I’m serious. We’re going to get to Dyson Alpha, what? Six hours before Nigel arrives and turns their star nova. So what exactly is this Starflyer agent going to achieve with that? Is six hours enough time for MorningLightMountain to build a fleet of frigates like this? Tell me, come on, you’re the frigging expert on assembling these babies. Can it be done in six hours?”

“I’m not playing this game.”

“Scared I’m right?”

“You’re such a child.”

The kind of willpower that could only arise from living for three hundred sixty years managed to keep Ozzie’s voice calm and clear. “I am Ozzie Fernandez Isaac; I built the first wormhole generator and I was a midwife to the Commonwealth society that you and your children enjoy. Even if you really believe that part of me is buried under Starflyer conditioning it is still entitled to some respect. And Ozzie Fernandez Isaac is pretty fucking sure that you cannot duplicate this frigate in six hours.”

Mark sighed with reluctance. “No, you can’t.”

“Thank you. And if you can’t do that, you can’t figure out a nova bomb either.”

“You might get a handle on the principles.”

“You might indeed. Good point. The physics is all derivative of existing theories, so yes. You understand how the theory works, like knowing e-equals-m-c-squared is what makes an atom bomb work, not that it tells you how to build one. But you have the notion, and then half an hour later you get to see one in action as good old Nigel turns your star into an expanding sphere of ultra-hard radiation and plasma. So I repeat: What’s the point?”

“MorningLightMountain has other outposts.”

“Which are currently being targeted by the remaining frigates in the firewall operation.” Ozzie took a breath. He was almost in pain from the way Mark was slowly mellowing. “Nigel is going to commit genocide on behalf of our species, and the terrible thing is most of us are going to be cheering him on. We’ll still be alive; well, whoopee-do on that front, but the human race will no longer have a soul. That dies along with MorningLightMountain. Mark, this flight is the only chance we have to retain our humanity. It is hugely risky. Crazy even: I admit that. I’m gambling my life on it because I have that right, and once again I apologize for making you personally part of that gamble. The thing is this is such a gamble that Nigel is totally opposed to it, and I even respect him for that. These are very frightening times, Mark. But I cannot let this tiny little chance slip away from us. I have to try and get the barrier generator up and running again.”

“I see that, sure, but…”

“If I’m a traitor, it doesn’t matter because the human race will survive thanks to Nigel and the ships following us. But, man, think on this: if I’m not a traitor and we reestablish the barrier, then we win, too, and win the right way. Isn’t that worth something to you? Anything?”

The answer was a long time coming; and when Mark did finally speak the words sounded like they were being ripped out painfully. “I dunno. This restarting the generator idea, it sounds like a long shot.”

“Longest in human history. That’s why I’m the one doing it. Come on, dude, you don’t think anybody with a grain of sense is gonna be busting his balls like this, do you?”

“Guess not.” There was the faintest grin on Mark’s face.

“My man.” Ozzie put his hand out for a high-five. Mark stared at it mystified. “Okay,” Ozzie said. “So, like please tell me how I get the quantumbuster launch mechanism to work? Goddamn, it’s been killing me.”

“You mean you couldn’t launch the missile anyway?”

“No,” Ozzie admitted.

There was another long pause, then Mark gave a confident chuckle. “Well well. That makes me captain, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“Okay, maybe not captain. We split the duty. You keep control of the drive. Give me control of the missiles.”

“What?”

“I can fix the launch mechanism, but if you want me to do it, you first have to give me fire authority.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“If you take us to the Dark Fortress and find a target inside it, I’ll launch a quantumbuster at it, and I’ll even cheer it on. If you try to deliver this ship and its technology to MorningLightMountain I blow us up. That’s the deal. You trust me, don’t you?”

“Son of a bitch. How close are you to Nigel, a genetic doppelgänger?”

“Do you want your chance at the barrier generator or not?”

Ozzie couldn’t see a way out. “Have you found a solution to the launch system problem?” he asked the SIsubroutine.

“No. According to my analysis routines the system should function. It does not. This is a paradox beyond available processing power to resolve.”

“All right, Mark, you can have access to the weapons systems.”

“You mean control of the weapons systems.”

“Whatever, yeah.” Ozzie’s virtual hands moved across symbols, granting Mark access to the weapons. He watched Mark establish connections into the network, then encrypt the whole weapons section.

“Can you break that?” he asked the SIsubroutine.

“No. It would require more processing power than the ship possesses.”

“Figures,” Ozzie muttered. Data was flowing out of the magazine mechanism control arrays to Mark’s insert.

“What’s that?” Mark queried.

“Just figuring out how you’re going to fix the launcher.”

“It was at an angle.”

“Excuse me?” Ozzie’s virtual vision followed a few small files Mark was now downloading into the array governing the electromuscle arms.

“Everyone thinks electromuscle segments are the same,” Mark said. “They’re not. Two identical lengths nearly always have different traction ratings. It’s down to minor instabilities in the manufacturing processes. Some batches come out weak, some strong, so the producers always build in a five percent traction overcapacity. That means they have to be balanced, especially in cases like this when you’ve got a missile being gripped by seven different arms. There, see? When they latched on to the missile in the magazine at different strengths they were actually tilting it.”

“Uh huh,” Ozzie said weakly.

“No wonder it wouldn’t slide into the launch tube, it was at a hell of a slant. There we go, that fix should recalibrate and equalize the traction. I wrote it years ago to balance the hoist arms on a friend’s tow truck.”

Ozzie’s virtual vision showed the quantumbuster missile slide into the launch tube amid a flood of green symbols. “Son of a bitch.” A patch for a tow truck! “It works.”

Mark gave him a slightly apologetic grin. “It’s what I do.”

The timer in Ozzie’s virtual vision had counted off forty-two seconds since Mark took command of the weapons. Two days smashing my head against a rock and I got nowhere; and I’m supposed to be a fucking genius. “Mark, thank you, man. You do realize we’ll have to go through with the flight into the Dark Fortress now?”

“Yeah, I know. But my survival chances haven’t been terribly high for a while now, have they?”

“I guess not. Uh, is there any of that lunch box left?”

“No. But there’s all the meals in the emergency survival lockers. They taste quite good, actually.”

Ozzie smiled. It was a good way of preventing the stressed whimper rushing out of his throat.

***

Oscar came out of the memory implant the way he shook off his nightly bad dream. Head rocking from side to side, trying to rise up off the couch, not quite certain where he was and what was real. He was sure his hand was still closed around a joystick while long flexible white wings curved up on either side of him as the wind raged outside. He blinked against the strong light, making out blurred figures standing at the end of the couch. Faces came into focus.

Something wrong.

Jamas and Kieran looked both scared and angry, never a good combination especially as they had their ion carbines jabbed into Wilson and Anna. Wilson’s emotions were under complete control, allowing him to put out just the right amount of tolerant dismay. Anna was quietly furious, her OCtattoos flexing in and out of visibility like a carnivore’s fangs in the prelude to a kill. If Kieran’s carbine muzzle ever slipped away from her ribs he’d probably wind up very dead very fast. By the look of him, he knew that, too.

“What’s happened?” Oscar asked. The feeling of flying was smoothing out, leaving him with a bad headache.

“Adam’s dead,” Wilson said flatly.

“And one of you Starflyer fucks killed him,” Kieran shouted; the carbine was shoved harder into Anna’s side.

The falling sensation returned to Oscar’s limbs with a rush. He gave Wilson a dumbfounded stare. “No.”

“You were here in the hangar with him,” Jamas said.

Bring the joystick back carefully, allow the wings time to respond as you plummet down helplessly in a microburst. Airflow around the fuselage changes as the plyplastic adjusts in long twists. “Where is he?” Oscar demanded hoarsely.

Jamas jerked his head toward the door into the hangar office. “You saying you didn’t hear it?”

“It was a knife,” Wilson said in undisguised contempt. “There was nothing to hear.”

“I couldn’t hear a thing,” Oscar said. “I was having the memory implant.”

“Yeah, right,” Kieran sneered.

Oscar ignored him and swung his legs around off the couch. He was unsteady on his feet.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Jamas asked.

“To see him.”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

Oscar straightened, one hand holding the side of the couch. Lights throbbed in time with his headache.

“Careful,” Anna said. “Memory implants affect neuron function for several minutes afterward.”

“I have to see him.” Because I don’t believe you. Not Adam. It can’t be.

Jamas and Kieran exchanged a glance, then Kieran nodded. “Okay, Rosamund will be here in a minute.”

With the others following, Oscar walked through into the office, then out into the hangar. It wasn’t just the effects of the implant that made his movements unsteady. He could see a pair of legs sticking out from behind one of the gliders, and slowed, not wanting to see.

Adam lay on the dark composite floor, legs and arms akimbo, the handle of a harmonic blade sticking out from the nape of his neck. A small puddle of blood had pooled around his head.

Oscar’s legs very nearly gave way. He clung to the fuselage to support himself. All he could think of was the look on Adam’s face when they saw the Abadan crash. The ghosts will be happy tonight.

“You okay?” Anna asked. She’d come up beside him.

“This can’t be right,” he said in a hushed croak. “Not here. Not like that. It’s not right. It can’t happen like this.”

“Well, it did fucking happen,” Jamas spat. “And one of you traitors did it.”

“Just kill them all,” Kieran said. He moved back from Anna to stand beside Jamas, his carbine covering Oscar and Anna. “That way we’ll be sure we got the bastard.”

“Where were you when it happened?” Anna asked.

“Shut the fuck up, bitch.”

“I mean it,” she said, her eyes alight with cold wrath. Her gaze flicked over to Jamas. “Was he with you?”

Jamas shifted uncomfortably. “No.”

“Jamas!” Kieran protested.

“That means neither of you can vouch for the other,” Wilson said. He walked over to stand with Anna and Oscar.

“We were only apart for a couple of minutes, that’s all,” Jamas said.

Wilson gazed down at Adam’s corpse. “And how long did that take?”

“Are you saying we did it?” Kieran asked.

“Can you prove you didn’t?”

Kieran snarled at him, shifting the muzzle of his ion carbine around. Jamas’s hand slowly pushed the weapon down. “He’s right.”

“What? You can’t be serious!”

Jamas looked even more unhappy.

Rosamund barged in through the hangar door, dragging Paula Myo along. The Investigator was still wearing Adam’s cherry-red woolen sweater, her face was beaded with perspiration, while her lips had turned almost black. Oscar and Wilson automatically went to help carry her. Paula groaned as they took her weight; she was barely conscious. They lowered her to the floor with her back resting against the hyperglider’s cradle. She shuddered violently, her head lolling about. Then she saw Adam’s body and gasped. Her hands came up to rub at her eyes; she was blinking almost continuously. “Is he dead?” she asked.

“It pretty much fucking looks like it to me,” Kieran shouted.

“Shut up,” Wilson snapped. He was kneeling beside Paula, hand feeling her forehead. “Paula, can you understand me? Do you know where we are?”

Her eyes closed for a long blink as she switched her attention from Adam to Wilson. “Far Away, we’re on Far Away.”

“Do you remember the sabotaged crates?”

“Yes.”

“We need your help. Whoever did that has now killed Adam.”

“What if it’s her?” Kieran asked.

“Well?” Wilson asked Rosamund, who was staring down at Adam’s corpse.

The Guardian woman stirred herself. “We were in the Volvo the whole time.”

“So you say,” Oscar barked. He knew he shouldn’t have said it, they were already drowning in hostility, but he still couldn’t believe it was either Wilson or Anna, and that sounded way too much like a convenient alibi for comfort.

Rosamund’s hand went straight to her holster. She was glaring at Oscar.

Paula coughed feebly, and brought her hand up to her throat. “I can’t confirm Rosamund was there with me.”

“You bitch.”

Paula waved her silent. “But she can for me.”

Rosamund gave the Investigator a suspicious glare. “What do you mean?”

“There is only one door to the Volvo rest cabin. If I was the Starflyer agent, I couldn’t have got out to do this without Rosamund knowing. She says I didn’t. It wasn’t me. It also makes it unlikely that it was her, but not impossible.”

“Okay,” Jamas said. “So who did murder him?”

“I don’t know. Yet.” Paula tipped her head back. “Wilson, where were you?”

“I went over to the generator building. I managed to start it up, as you can see. The town has power, the hypergliders are charging up.”

“It is not far to any building. Is the generator difficult to start?”

“No, it isn’t. It was primed ready. I had to physically press three buttons. It started straightaway.”

“Did anyone go with you?”

“No.”

“We left the hangar together,” Anna said. “I went to find the tether cables for the hypergliders.”

“Did you find them?”

“Yes. There’s a stores building at the end of the hangars. They’re kept in there.”

“Oscar?”

“Memory implant. The induction systems are at the back of this hangar. I didn’t know anything going on outside. In fact, the killer could have been in there with me, I wouldn’t have known.” The thought made him clammy with nerves.

“I see. Jamas?”

“Kieran and I went to find the jeeps to tow the hypergliders.”

“I called Adam and told him we found them,” Kieran said. “Their tanks were just about empty, so Jamas went and found the main tank. I stayed with the jeeps to take a look at their radio modules. We need them for the observation. I was going to look for the tether anchor drill, but I hadn’t heard from Adam for a while. Jamas came back, we headed right over here and found him.”

“And then the others arrived,” Paula said.

“Yeah, these two came in together.” His carbine pointed out Wilson and Anna.

“Is there any sign of anyone else here?” Paula asked.

“No,” Kieran said. “I’ve not seen anyone.”

“Me neither,” Wilson said.

“You and Adam were talking together in the Volvo after we found the sabotage,” Rosamund said to Paula. “Did you have any idea who the traitor was?”

“No.” The Investigator seemed to be losing interest.

“Adam was only going to take two gliders,” Kieran said; he gave Oscar a strange look. “That’s what he told me.”

“When?” Paula asked.

“It was just about the last thing he said. I’d told him we’d found the jeeps, and he said we only needed two.”

Jamas smiled brutally. “He knew it was one of you.”

Oscar held back from saying anything. The Guardian trio were so hyped up and trigger-happy they probably would shoot someone if they had half an excuse.

“He didn’t say that to me,” Paula said. “We were still trying to work it out.”

“Then there’s nothing else we can do right now,” Wilson said. “We need to get the hypergliders over to Stakeout Canyon. There’s not much time left.”

“Are you fucking insane?” Jamas cried. His carbine swung around to point at Wilson, finger tight on the trigger.

“This changes nothing,” Wilson retorted. “We kept going after the crates were sabotaged, we keep going now. Only this time we do not split up again. From now on we do everything in groups of at least three. Everything.”

“You’re not flying up that mountain,” Kieran snarled. “You’ll wreck the planet’s revenge.”

“There won’t be any planet’s revenge without the observation from Aphrodite’s Seat. All three of us will fly. That way the odds protect us.”

“Dreaming heavens!” Kieran appealed desperately to Jamas and Rosamund. “What do we do?”

“He’s right,” Rosamund said bitterly. “They have to fly.”

***

The control center for the planet’s revenge was huddled at the back of a cave in Mount Idle, named so because it was a lot smaller than the surrounding peaks. It had slumped over the millennia since the Dessault range had been formed, its rocky pinnacle crumbling away into a lackluster mound, while its sides were liberally smeared with long swathes of loose scree. Even the cave wasn’t worth the Guardians using as one of their forts: too small, too visible with its yawning mouth.

Samantha’s Vauxhall jeep reached the entrance long after dark, its headlights revealing a slight shimmer in the air caused by the force field the Guardians had established a couple of meters inside. Three sentries greeted her, and the force field reduced to allow her to drive right in.

There were a number of Charlemagnes stabled inside, along with a variety of battered four-by-four vehicles she knew only too well. Two huge dapple gray horses were also standing next to the Charlemagnes; the saddles on the posts beside them were beautifully sculpted black leather with embossed gold patterns of DNA.

“Barsoomians,” Valentine said in a respectful tone.

The control center itself was right at the back of the cave, which was illuminated in a soft green light. Ten wooden tables were arranged in a circle around the large array, covered in consoles, screens, and supplementary electronic modules. Three or four Guardians were sitting at each one, engrossed with the schematics and data flowing across the screens. The array itself was a black cylinder two meters high with a couple of small red LEDs glowing on the top. Samantha gave it a solicitous glance; she’d been part of the assembly team, which made it her baby. And a troublesome one it had been. It had taken them over a year to integrate the bioprocessors and get the software running smoothly as they ran innumerable simulations.

She went over to Andria McNowak, who was in charge of the control center. Heavily pregnant, she sat at the head table directing all the other operators as they gradually brought the network of manipulator stations up to their pre-storm readiness status. There was a constant background mutter as they talked to the array. Not for the first time, Samantha wished OCtattoos and inserts were as common here as they were in the Commonwealth.

The Barsoomians were standing behind them, monitoring the performance of the large array’s bioprocessors. In the gloomy light of the cave their gray robes of semiorganic fabric gave them a spectral presence, enhanced by the impenetrable shadows that filled their hoods.

Samantha gave them a slight bow.

“Greetings to you, Samantha McFoster,” one said.

She recognized the deep whispering voice from the faint reverberation it always carried. “Dr. Friland, thank you for coming.”

“These are fascinating times. We are pleased to help remove this blight from our planet.”

“There is a rumor your people will help Bradley Johansson on Highway One. Is that true?”

For a moment Samantha wondered if she’d been too abrupt. People always skated around issues with Barsoomians, fearful to give offense; but today was too important for that kind of political nicety crap. She was aware of Valentine holding his breath beside her.

“We are watching events along Highway One,” Dr. Friland said. “We will offer assistance where practical.”

“I’m sure Johansson will be grateful for any support.” She smiled awkwardly at the fluid shadows inside his hood, and turned to Andria, who was giving her a reproachful look. “Have you loaded in the Martian data?”

“Yeah,” Andria said. She faced the front again, and gestured at the portal that was projecting a topographic map of the Dessault range from the Grand Triad in the west across to the Institute valley in the east. It looked like the cloudscape of some gas giant, with the tips of the mountains poking through as various fast-moving stormbands streamed past them. “We’re running the fifth simulation now. The genuine meteorological patterns allowed us to refine the behavioral algorithms. I don’t think the old software would have coped with the real thing. Even now, I’ve still got doubts. This is a lot more complex than we ever thought.”

“All we can do is give it our best shot. Have you got all the manipulator stations on-line?”

“Yeah.” Andria’s hand tapped at one of the screens on her table. It showed the stations scattered across the Dessault range linked together by thin red lines. The main communications relays were handled by masers, set up at high altitude on remote pinnacles, and protected by force fields. Samantha had always been skeptical about how they would hold together in the midst of the superstorm, but short of laying armored cables right across the range they had no choice. It was one of the reasons they’d established the control center on Mount Idle, where they had direct line of sight with Mount Herculaneum. They were also far enough south to escape the direct blast of the storm when it came.

“How’s Zuggenhim Ridge?” Samantha asked.

Andria grinned knowingly, and pulled up the telemetry. “Sweet. You did a good job.”

“Thanks. And the observation team?”

“Ours? They’re not going to make it; they’re still a couple of hours from the glacier ring. It’s down to the navy people now. Do you think they can land up there?”

“I don’t know. They think they can. We just have to wait and see.”

“There’s no way we can do this blind.”

“You’re going to have to draw up a contingency for that just the same.”

“Yeah right,” Andria declared sarcastically.

“Shame Qatux stayed with Bradley. We could do with that kind of brain-power to help us out right now.”

“I don’t think even a Raiel would be any use to us now,” Andria said.

Both the Barsoomians turned to face them. The shadows thinned out inside Dr. Friland’s hood, allowing green eyes to gaze down on Samantha. “Did you say a Raiel is on Far Away?”

Samantha looked up to the tall Barsoomian; for some inexplicable reason she felt guilty, as if she’d been concealing the fact from them. “Yes. It’s traveling with Bradley Johansson. I don’t know much about it; this is all secondhand gossip from Adam’s team.”

“It must not come to harm.”

Samantha took in the control center with an impatient gesture. “We’re doing our best.”

“Short-wave signal,” Andria announced. “Strong one. Coming from the west.”

“Adam’s team,” Samantha said. “Is it for us?”

“Hang on.” Andria touched several icons on her screen.

***

They turned into Stakeout Canyon just after midnight. It had been a long smooth run from Stonewave, directly south across the wet desert, then around the western flank of Mount Zeus. The massive volcano had become visible in the late afternoon as the layer of fog finally began to dissipate. Bright sunlight shining in level from the horizon had illuminated the vast naked lava fields as they rose out of the flat glistening landscape. They were too close to catch a glimpse of the summit seventeen kilometers above, although they did catch the occasional sparkle along the crest as its fractured ice band reflected the dying sun. The flashes faded away soon enough as the sapphire sky bled down to violet before quickly turning black.

Rosamund turned on the jeep’s headlights, creating long shimmering strips of light across the bare rock. The vehicle had been custom made in Armstrong City, fitting a smooth composite ellipse over a standard Toyota four-by-four pickup chassis. Air flowed unbroken over its low-friction paintwork, making it virtually imperious to the winds. It was designed to anchor itself to the ground if it was caught in the open when the morning storm arrived, with four big screws underneath that could wind themselves deep into the hard sands of the wet desert.

Paula sat on the bench seat in the back. If she hunched right down she could see between Rosamund and Oscar and out through the narrow band of windshield. She’d slept away most of the journey through the afternoon, coming awake in sudden bursts to witness a near identical landscape each time. As they progressed, the slope of Mount Zeus had grown larger along the horizon until it became a barrier across the world. Now in the dark it was completely invisible while the stars twinkled directly overhead. The drone of the diesel engine filled the interior along with the metallic clanking of the hyperglider trailer they were hauling along, making conversation difficult. Not, she imagined, that Oscar and Rosamund had been trying to say much to each other. The two other jeeps were following them across the wet desert; Wilson and Jamas in one, while Anna and Kieran brought up the rear.

She fumbled around on the cushioning to find the bottle, and sipped at the mineral water. For once it didn’t make her want to gag. In fact, she realized just how thirsty she was. She finished the bottle and sat up a little straighter. Just about every muscle in her body was aching and debilitated; it was all she could do to hold herself upright. Her headache translated every slight jolt into a flash of burning light somewhere behind her eyes. She shivered, though she didn’t feel quite as cold as before.

“Where are we?” she asked. The weak croak of her own voice surprised her.

“Hey!” Oscar turned around, a big smile on his face. “How are you feeling?”

“Not good.”

“Oh.” The smile faded. “We’ve just started to turn into Stakeout Canyon.”

“Right.”

Paula woke up when the jeep braked to a halt. She hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep again.

“This is it,” Rosamund announced. “Midway between Zeus and Titan. We tether them here.” She twisted around in the seat to give Paula an entreating look. “I know you didn’t leave the cab to kill Adam. Have you got any idea which of them it was?”

Paula could barely remember their names. “No. Sorry, not yet.”

Rosamund gave a disgruntled sigh, and opened the door. “Let’s go.”

Oscar looked at her for a long moment, then pulled a penitent face and followed Rosamund out into the calm night.

Paula stayed in the back of the jeep for a while. It rocked about as the hyperglider trailer was unhooked; there was a lot of loud talk outside punctuated by the occasional curse as they prepared the drill for the tether cable anchor. She drank some more water, mildly pleased that she no longer felt cold. Warm humid air was gusting in through the open door, but that wasn’t it. The icy claws gripping her bones had relinquished their grip. She still coughed from time to time, but she really didn’t feel as though death was so close. Best yet, her headache was easing. There was a medical kit lying on the backseat next to her. She recognized it as the one Adam had been using in the Volvo. There were plenty of pills and applicator refills that would deal with her headache, but she chose a packet of rehydration salts and mixed them into a bottle of plain water, taking her time to swirl the powder around until it was all dissolved. It tasted foul, but she forced it down.

That simple action just about exhausted her. When she heard the loud grinding whine of the drill she shuffled up into the driver’s seat and took a look out into Stakeout Canyon. The ubiquitous sand and gravel of the wet desert had been scoured away here, revealing the solid lava foundation. Their three unique wind-resistant jeeps had parked in a simple triangle, their headlights shining on the hyperglider that had been rolled out of its trailer. Its cockpit canopy was open, and a faint glow shone up from its small console. Oscar was standing at the side of it, peering in as he ran the last set of diagnostics. Wilson, Jamas, and Rosamund were all clustered around the big harmonicblade drill as it sank another five-meter-long segment of carbon-reinforced titanium into the ground; the fourth of ten. The anchor pole sprouted slim horizontal malmetal blades of its own; once all the segments were locked together they’d telescope outward, helping to embed it farther. It was the second of three anchor struts that together would secure the tether cables against the phenomenal force exerted by the storm. In theory, they could hold the hyperglider on the ground in case the pilot underwent any last-minute surge of doubts. A common enough occurrence, apparently. Watching the three men trying to be civil to each other as the pole was spun down into the dark lava, she was very glad she wasn’t going to be flying in the morning. Anna and Rosamund were securing the tether drum into its recess in the nose of the glider.

They could all see each other. Paula almost laughed at the way each of them looked around to check everyone else’s whereabouts on a regular basis. The comedy police were in town, and in force.

Leaning hard against the jeep’s door frame she told her e-butler to link her with the jeep’s array. One of its files contained a map of Stonewave’s layout. She began to feed in routes from the Grand Triad Adventures hangar, Jamas and Kieran to the garage, Anna to the store, Wilson out to the generator. Average times were easy to fill in. She then began to work out which of them could have run back to murder Adam and still completed their own job. It would be very tight, especially for Kieran and Jamas, who were only separated for a few minutes. On practicality alone, that made Oscar the main suspect.

“We’re done here,” Rosamund said.

Paula shunted the virtual vision map aside and looked up at the Guardian woman. Oscar was standing behind her, wearing a silver-blue flight suit that doubled as an emergency pressure suit. There was an understandably anxious expression on his face as he held the helmet under his arm. “Good luck,” Paula said, and held her hand out. It wasn’t the kind of garment she’d want to wear anywhere near a vacuum, but the armor suits they’d brought with them were far too heavy and bulky for the hypergliders.

“Thanks,” Oscar said. His grip was warm and firm, making her conscious of how clammy her own skin remained.

“Not him then, huh?” Rosamund said as she closed the door.

“I still don’t know,” Paula said. She’d shuffled over into the passenger seat. In front of her, the headlights swept across Oscar as he walked back to the ghostly white fuselage of the hyperglider.

“You’re looking better, you know. Not good, mind, but I can see you’re recovering. Some bug, huh?”

“Yeah, some bug.”

They drove south for five kilometers, then began tethering Anna’s hyperglider. Paula sat in the open doorway again. Visible. Dawn was another three hours away.

Wilson and Jamas eased the hyperglider down out of its trailer while Kieran wheeled the drill rig out. It turned out they’d chosen a patch of lava that had a high metallic content. The drill had a lot of trouble cutting through.

Paula ran the digital model of Stonewave a further two times, trying to draw up an order of probability. It couldn’t determine one effectively, there were far too many variables, especially if Wilson or Anna had run the whole time.

When the third anchor pole was finally sunk, Wilson and Anna embraced in front of the hyperglider. He checked over her silver-blue flight suit one last time. A final kiss and she climbed into the cockpit.

“I don’t know what the odds are of them all getting up there,” Rosamund said as they drove away south.

“Not good,” Paula said. She took another drink of rehydration mix and reviewed what she knew. She still stood by what she and Adam had decided earlier. Just thinking back to the time they’d spent together made her light-headed again. The whole time since she joined the train at Narrabri station she’d wanted to clamp his arms together behind his back and cuff his wrists. It was the kind of reflex that came easier than breathing. She supposed other people would feel some kind of guilt at Adam’s death; she didn’t. The closest right now to any real feeling was regretting he couldn’t give her any input on her current problem. He’d been her only true source of information on the three remaining Guardians.

No, she told herself. That’s not right. I need to prioritize. The most important thing now was to ensure the flight to the top of Mount Herculaneum was a success. She had to concentrate on Wilson, Oscar, and Anna.

Rosamund braked again. “Let’s hope this is a better rock than that shit we were on last time,” she said as she jumped out of the jeep to help tether the last hyperglider.

Paula didn’t move from the passenger seat. She found a bar of chocolate and toffee, and started chewing it very slowly, giving her stomach time to get used to solids again. It was no use trying to figure out which of the three had the opportunity to sabotage equipment in the Carbon Goose; that would be even worse than Stonewave. She had to concentrate on evidence from before, from their behavior prior to Far Away, and hope that could narrow it down. The most damning she could think of was Wilson’s relative failure in commanding the navy. If he’d just been a bit tougher…but that was so easily ascribed to politics. Circumstantial.

She thought back to the meeting she’d had with him and Oscar in Pentagon II. Both of them had been startled and deeply worried that the records had been tampered with and the implication of the Starflyer’s reach. Nothing abnormal there. There had been something else at that meeting, though, not relevant at the time. Oscar had claimed he had been contacted by the Guardians, quickly clarified as someone who claimed to be a Guardian. Why Oscar? Why did the Guardians think he would be sympathetic to their cause?

“Investigator,” Wilson said.

Paula turned gradually. Movement was still difficult; her muscles ached. He was standing in the jeep’s doorway, dressed in the same silver-blue flight suit as the others. The three Guardians stood around him. Their anger seemed to have toned down to something close to embarrassment. Working hard as a team would do that; it wasn’t an adjustment she could allow herself.

“I’m afraid I haven’t worked it out yet,” she said.

“Yes, well, we’ll stay in touch via normal communications bands now. Until the storm takes them out, anyway.”

“Very well.”

“I hope…Ah well.” His lips compressed in something like disappointment.

“Bon voyage, Admiral.”

Wilson turned and walked over toward his hyperglider.

“We’ve got an hour until the storm hits,” Rosamund said tightly as she clambered into the driver’s seat. “The tourist company crews don’t normally leave it this late to set up. According to the emergency file in the jeep’s array there’s a shelter spot at the base of Mount Zeus which we can reach in time.” She was already gunning the engine, racing around the tethered hyperglider in a fast curve. Its cockpit canopy was lowering. They roared away across the barren lava of the canyon floor. Paula leaned sideways, watching the hyperglider and the three abandoned trailers dwindle away quickly.

“We did it,” Rosamund said in a relieved voice.

“What do you mean?”

“I was talking to Kieran and Jamas. We reckon the odds are in our favor now. If two of them make it to Aphrodite’s Seat, and one of them is the Starflyer agent, what can they actually do? None of them have any weapons. And if all three of them make it, then the problem’s solved.”

“Tell that to Adam,” Paula said harshly.

Rosamund glowered at her, but said nothing.

Paula tried to review the background to the navy three again. She’d done that once before with Adam. There had been something then, some little flash of knowledge that he’d tried to hide from her. As if anyone could do that. She’d seen it quite plainly on his face.

He knew one of them was innocent. So why not tell me? It must have implicated them in another crime? What? What could possibly make him shield them at a time like this?

“Do we have all the short-wave transmitters?” Paula asked.

“Yes.”

“So the hypergliders can’t pick up anything we transmit on them?”

“No.”

“I need to ask Johansson something.”

Rosamund kept one hand on the wheel, and pulled out the array with the short-wave function built in. “Here you go. It’s a hell of a distance. Don’t count on them picking it up.”

“It’s night, that’ll help.” She switched on the set, and set it to infinite repeat. “Johansson, this is Paula Myo. Adam was murdered at Stonewave. I need to know who contacted Oscar to ask him to review the Second Chance logs, and why you picked him. Please reply with a guarantee identity information from Alic Hogan.” She listened to it start its first cycle.

“How’s that going to reveal the traitor?” Rosamund asked.

“I’ll tell you if we get an answer.” She glanced at the horizon, not sure if it was lighter or if she was just imagining it.

***

Sunrise was drawing a gray hue across the eastern sky above the veldt. When Bradley looked out of the armored car’s narrow side window he could see the peaks of the Dessault Mountains away to the west, cold, sharp pinnacles jutting up amid the vanishing stars. He imagined the superstorm billowing around them to descend on the veldt like some apocalyptic force, scouring the land clear of all its new terrestrial life.

It wouldn’t happen for hours yet, if it did at all. They’d heard nothing from Samantha’s group since that last message yesterday about her being ready to surf. If she was keeping to schedule then the storm might be on time. They were still several hundred kilometers from the Institute, but making better time than they’d expected. So was the Starflyer convoy.

All of them had spent a long anguished night as the road rolled onward. Once they left the fringes of the rainforest behind the landscape reverted to featureless expanses of veldt with the occasional tree and bush poking up. It was as though their vision was locked in to some long loop of scenery that kept playing over and over. At night, with nothing to see outside of the headlight beams, the sense that they were making no progress at all was even worse.

After midnight they’d finally made contact with the Guardians who’d massed for the Final Raid. Watchers had been stationed along the last few hundred kilometers of Highway One to monitor the Starflyer’s movement. Their arrays and secure tight-beam links circumvented the wrecked nodes along the side of the road to put them back in contact with the main body of the Guardians, in itself a nice boost for morale among their little group as well as giving them a decent overview of the situation. When the reliable information started coming in they found they’d closed to within forty minutes of the Starflyer, but that still put it a hundred kilometers in front of them, and there were no more major bridges left to demolish. Highway One ran on across the veldt in an unbroken strip of concrete that was Roman in its brashness. At their current rate, they’d catch the alien just as it reached the Institute and before the storm hit. That was too close, Johansson knew. He was going to have to attack the Starflyer head-on. The warriors of the Final Raid would have their moment, sweeping down to block Highway One. The thought of how much blood would be spilled was chilling. The planet’s revenge would have been so much more effective. Isolation and exposure followed by death; but now that careful strategic plan was all but ruined. The fact that it was he who in the end had underestimated the Starflyer gave his situation its wretched poignancy. His one small grasp at salvation was the Paris team and Cat’s Claws; their armor might yet prove the winning hand.

“Picking up a short-wave signal,” Keely said from her seat at the back of the armored car. “Sounds like Paula Myo…” Her voice trailed off.

When Bradley looked around her face was ashen. “Put it through,” he told her gently. Interference generated by the sun as it rose in the east was now so bad it took nearly four minutes of the repeated message before they had a full version. There was silence in the armored car for some time as Paula’s voice cycled through its grim message again and again.

“Turn that fucker off,” Stig snarled. He was sitting in the back alongside Keely, where he was supposed to be resting after finally relinquishing the wheel to Olwen just before midnight. “He can’t be dead. She’s lying. I knew that bitch was trouble the moment I saw her.”

Bradley was still in shock from the news; otherwise he would have told Stig to calm down and keep quiet. That Adam might not survive had never occurred to him in the wildest worst-case scenario.

“After we kill the Starflyer I’m going to track her down and sort her lying mouth out once and for all.”

“Stig, pack it in,” Olwen said from the driver’s seat. Her attention hadn’t wavered from the road. She’d popped several beezees, but nowhere near as many as Stig. “We need to deal with this calmly and professionally.”

A communications icon flipped up into Bradley’s virtual vision. He opened it without thinking.

“This isn’t good,” Alic said. “The Starflyer agent is getting bolder.”

“But it’s not relevant,” Morton said. “I’m sorry, I know Adam was a big help to the Guardians, but their part is over. You said so yourself, the planet’s revenge team has finished setting up.”

Bradley frowned. Morton was right, and Paula would know that. She also knew that short-wave communications were completely open. Her message was still repeating, so she obviously considered it important. Why? “They must be doing something else,” he decided. “Paula’s many things, but stupid isn’t one of them. She’s telling us why this is so important. What’s at Stonewave?”

“Nothing right now,” Olwen said. “The travel companies mothballed it when the tourists stopped coming.”

“So what did it do?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a town out in the wet desert, they use it as a base for the hypergliders. There’s nothing else there.”

“Oh, dreaming heavens,” Bradley murmured in consternation close to panic.

“What is it?” Alic asked.

“They met Samantha and then they went hypergliding,” Bradley said. “Do you see?”

“Not a clue,” the navy commander admitted.

“The observation,” Olwen said. “Samantha needed them on Aphrodite’s Seat.”

“The navy people can all fly,” Bradley said. He stared at his watch. “And the morning storm’s about to hit the Grand Triad. One of them is the Starflyer agent, and they’re going to do the observation. Commander Hogan?”

“Yes?”

“Give me the guarantee she needs, some bit of trivia the Starflyer couldn’t possibly know.”

“In the Almada hotel lobby she told Renne she’d been running an elimination entrapment operation on her as well as Tarlo. There was only John King and myself there, and John and Renne are both dead now.”

“Good enough. Keely, we need to be absolutely sure this gets through. Link every short-wave transmitter we have, and crank them up to full power. Then put our message on constant repeat, no limit.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bradley grinned contritely. Having to tell the Investigator the reason behind the contact would effectively condemn Oscar, but he couldn’t afford not to, not anymore.

“Ready,” Keely said.

“Paula, this is Bradley. You told Renne you were running an entrapment against her in the Almada hotel lobby. It was Adam who contacted Oscar because they were at Abadan station together.” And I wonder what the Starflyer makes of that? He settled back into the seat and closed his eyes, suddenly very weary.

“Are you sure about that?” Alic asked.

“I’m afraid so, yes.”

“But…Oscar Monroe was a senior manager in CST. He’s a navy captain. He couldn’t be involved in Abadan.”

“People change,” Bradley said. “What did you do in all your earlier lives, Commander?”

“This is my second, and I’ve been part of the legal profession in both. Look…I can possibly ignore what I heard, but Myo can’t.”

“I know. Presumably that’s why Adam never told her. He was protecting Oscar to the end.” He peered out of the slit window again, the Dessault Mountains were clearer now, the sky above them shifting to a dark lavender. The tallest of them, StOmer, stood high above the others, its conical snowcap already glowing a musky white as it guarded the northeastern extremity of the range. Its shape was familiar enough, even though he hadn’t seen it in decades. The sight of it triggered a reluctant acknowledgment he couldn’t put off his decision any longer. His virtual hand pulled up the icon for Scott McFoster, who was commanding the Final Raid.

“Yes, sir,” Scott responded instantly.

They rode down out of the foothill forests, over a thousand Charlemagnes each carrying a clan warrior. There was no need for concealment, they wanted the Starflyer to know they were there, so they sang as they trotted out across the veldt, a slow marching song that rumbled on ahead of them amid the dust their hooves kicked up. Such scouts the Starflyer had positioned along the road babbled frantically into their communications links and raced back to the safety of the Institute valley twenty-four kilometers away, chased by clan outriders.

Six hundred riders formed up a crescent shape with Highway One at their center where it reached the bottom of a shallow fold in the land. They blew up the small bridge across the stream, and parties of McSobels trotted down the road scattering mines on the concrete and across the land on either side. Mortar launchers and missile racks were dug in on the higher ground overlooking the road. The remainder of the warriors divided into groups of two hundred and withdrew from the road, loitering a couple of kilometers to the north.

There they all waited as the sun rose to transform the sky into its daily sapphire brilliance. The heat built around them, pressing the air into silence.

In the placid silence of midmorning, the Starflyer convoy hove into view. Thirty armored Land Rover Cruisers were interspaced by several larger trucks, three buses, and a couple of small fuel tankers. A squad of ten big BMW bikes growled along out in front, ridden by armor-suited figures. The big MANN truck was positioned two-thirds of the way down the line of vehicles, its force field rippling the air around the buffed-aluminum capsule.

The bikes slowed as they crested the top of the fold and saw the Guardians blocking the way ahead. Their heavy engines grumbled loudly as they approached at walking pace down the long slope. The rest of the convoy followed them cautiously down. A kilometer from the rubble of the little bridge, the whole convoy came to a halt.

Out on the lush veldt, the remaining clan riders moved forward, spreading wide until the Starflyer convoy was completely encircled. The first armored car appeared on Highway One, rumbling forward until it reached the group of Charlemagnes standing on the road a kilometer behind the convoy. Olwen braked to a halt. “Finally!” she hissed.

The armored car’s thick door hinged up, and Bradley stepped out. Ten meters away, the door on the second armored car was already open. The Paris team and Cat’s Claws hurried out onto the sun-baked concrete and stretched elaborately. Scott McFoster handed the reins of his Charlemagne to one of his lieutenants and walked over. He threw his arms around Bradley. “Dreaming heavens, it is good to see you, sir.”

“You do the clans proud, Scott. There are more here than I expected.”

“Aye, and many more would be here with them. I had to be firm, else we would have had babes and elders riding with us.”

Bradley nodded slowly, thinking of Harvey’s corpse in one of the Mazda jeeps. He looked down the mild incline to the convoy. The growl of their engines was clean in the still, humid air. When he raised his eyes to the south, he could just see the saddle in the foothills that was the Institute valley.

“We’d best be quick. It will try to push through as soon as it can. Are there any signs of reinforcements?”

“No movement around the Institute. We’ve lost a couple of scouts, which is to be expected. But the rest are still in place. Besides, we’ll see anything approaching.”

“How many troops can it have left in there?”

“It’s not been easy to track movements along Highway One these last few months. But I’m confident there can’t be more than a couple of hundred humans left in the Institute.”

“That’s good. We have some zone killers on the armored cars, which should take out some of the convoy before we even start close-quarter fighting.”

“Can they puncture the truck’s force field?”

“I’d imagine not, but we’ll find out soon enough. We also brought some powerful dump-webs that’ll help break it down.”

“In that case, we’re ready.”

“All right then, I’ll suit up and join you.”

Just for a moment Scott hesitated. “Of course.”

“Don’t worry,” Bradley said softly. “I won’t get in the way. Besides, our friends here”—his gesture took in the Paris team and Cat’s Claws—“have agreed to escort me to the Starflyer itself.”

Scott took in the bulky armor with a professional glance. “I don’t suppose anybody would consider loaning me one of those fine suits for a couple of hours?”

There were several chuckles from the blank helmets.

Bradley turned to face the mountains that guarded the western skyline. The tall dazzling white peaks jabbed high into the clear sky. There was no sign of any cloud, not a breath of wind.

“We’ve heard nothing from Samantha,” Scott said, following his gaze. “That could mean it’s started.”

“Yes. Of course. Are there shelters nearby?”

“We’ve allocated some caves. I’ve got McSobels installing force fields in them now.”

“Let’s hope that’s good enough. No one really knows how powerful we can get—”

“Hey,” the Cat said. “We’ve got incoming. Very weird incoming.” Her gauntlet pointed into the western sky.

No DNA from Earth’s dinosaur epoch had ever been recovered despite some very creative science applied to the problem. This clearly hadn’t deterred the Barsoomians in their aspirational genetic experimentation. Bradley’s jaw opened in silent astonishment at the shapes that swam out of the lucent sapphire of Far Away’s sky. The creatures were clearly modeled on petrosaurs, with wings that were scaled membranes stretched over long tough bones. Sunlight shimmered in oil-rainbow patterns across the leathery tissue as the wings beat in long steady movements. Lizard ancestry was apparent in the body, though Bradley suspected a lot of sequences derived from crocodiles had been wound into the creature’s genome. Certainly the giant wedge head looked ferocious, and the four legs had lethal black talons.

As they approached, swooping lower toward the veldt, he could see the cloaked figures of Barsoomians sitting astride their thick necks. Some kind of saddle straps were wrapped around their pale oyster-gray hide. There must have been over thirty of them in the flock, all keeping a healthy distance from each other.

The first one came in low beside the road, its wings sweeping fast, then twisting around to pound at the air in giant downdrafts. It settled fast, its stumpy legs bowing into a crouch. A head that was three meters long, most of it jaws and teeth, swung around to align big protuberant eyes on Bradley. Wings that must have had a total span of fifteen meters fluttered once, and folded back with lazy neatness against the creature’s flanks. It bellowed out a high ululation that made Bradley clasp his hands over his ears. The cry was taken up by the rest of the flock as they plummeted down on the veldt as if they were descending on prey.

“Cool,” the Cat declared. “Hey you, Scott, I’d swap my armor for one of them.”

Their arrival never even flustered the Charlemagnes, who held their ground stoically. It was their riders who were gawping around in stupefaction. A ragged cheer began for the Barsoomians.

Bradley watched as the leader dismounted, seemingly gliding down the big creature’s side. “Greetings,” he said. “We wondered if you would join us for this event. I always hoped you would.”

“Bradley Johansson.” The Barsoomian had a dulcet female voice. “Your return to this world is auspicious, as we foretold. I am Rebecca Gillespie, and this is my congregation. We are happy to give what aid we can, but you must know we are also here to safeguard the Raiel.”

The shadows inside Rebecca Gillespie’s hood thinned slightly as she turned to look at Qatux. Two Barsoomians who had dismounted were gliding toward the big alien that had lumbered down from the back of the truck it’d traveled in. Tiger Pansy stood beside it in a very paternal fashion, giving the gray-robed figures a suspicious stare. The Barsoomians bowed deeply to Qatux, whose smaller tentacles extended toward them with the tenderness of a priest administering a blessing.

“What is Qatux to you, then?” Morton asked, his voice heavy with derision. “Some kind of old lost god?”

Rebecca Gillespie rotated slightly so that the front of her hood faced Morton. “The Raiel neural structure is supreme of all the sentients we have encountered in the galaxy,” she said. “As such it deserves our utmost respect. One day, we hope and believe our DNA can be elevated to such levels. In the meantime we are content with whatever insight it cares to grant us.”

“You people need to get out more,” Morton said.

“Whatever the reason, we’re glad you’re here,” Bradley said hurriedly. “Er, what are these, exactly?” He nodded toward the huge avian creature Rebecca Gillespie had alighted from.

“To us, they’re king eagles; although the towns on the Iril Steppes already whisper rumors of dragons in the skies of Far Away.”

“Whatever, they’re very impressive. Are you going to fly into battle on them?”

“Good Lord, no, that would be insanity.” She reached behind her head, and pulled a rifle with a very long barrel out of its hidden sheath in her robe. “The Institute guns would find us easy targets. We will sharpshoot for you. These weapons will cut through an ordinary force field skeleton suit from a thousand meters.”

“That kind of support is most welcome.”

“Sir,” Scott called. “Movement at the Institute. Something’s coming this way. There’s a visual.”

Bradley scanned his virtual vision for the icon, and pulled the scout’s image out of his grid. The picture wasn’t high quality, but it showed him vehicles pouring out of the valley mouth.

“That must be every vehicle they’ve got in there,” Stig said. “Who the hell’s in them?”

“See if the scout can get a close-up,” Bradley said. He was disconcerted by the quantity of vehicles. The Starflyer would be truly desperate by now, but it was logical above all else.

The image blurred, and zoomed in on a pickup truck. Several dark shapes were wedged in the back. At first Bradley couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing; his mind simply rejected the profile. They can’t be here. But of course, Dudley Bose had discovered the Starflyer’s true origin. “Dreaming heavens,” he said fearfully.

“Motiles,” the Cat crooned joyously.

“There must be hundreds of them,” Morton said.

“Soldier motiles,” Rob said. “I think. They look different to the ones on Elan.”

“They’ll be the improved version,” Bradley told him flatly.

***

There had been some uncomfortable moments during the flight. Several of the Scylla’s hyperdrive systems threw up glitches that had to be dealt with immediately. Ancillary support equipment failed with dismaying regularity. Nigel had spent most of his waking hours troubleshooting, holding things together with patched programs and backup components. Otis and Thame had improvised a lot of procedures; flight experience and hugely detailed knowledge of the frigate allowing them to take near-intuitive shortcuts.

The reluctant ship had slowly been coaxed into producing a performance that matched the specifications its designers had originally promised. Nigel had gathered a great deal of satisfaction from wrestling the technology into shape. Hands on was the only management style that worked one hundred percent. Knowing that a single mistake would leave them as a smear of outré radiation across the cosmos also helped to focus the mind to an astonishing degree.

Now they were closing on Dyson Alpha, he pulled the sensor display out of his virtual vision grid and studied it. It surrounded him with a speckled gray cube, illustrating the star as a small kink in the fabric dead ahead. Dyson Beta was off to one side, showing a larger twist as the transdimensional resonance skittered off the barrier’s surface. There was also a slim conical wake approaching Dyson Alpha. Tracking the Charybdis wasn’t easy; the detector mechanism had proved one of the least reliable systems on board. There had been a whole twenty-eight-hour period when they had lost the Charybdis entirely. Nigel had worked hard at adapting the unit’s software until the detector functioned near flawlessly. Certainly the last few hours hadn’t seen a single hiccup. He suspected the way they were slowly overhauling the Charybdis played a big part in that. There was now less than fifteen light-years between them.

“Have you decided what to do when we get there?” Otis asked.

Nigel’s virtual hand pushed the tracking display aside, compressing it back into his grid. “Not yet.” There was a rattled edge in his voice. Damnit, this was Ozzie!

“Ninety minutes until we get there.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“We should have enough resolution to see if he heads for the homeworld or the Dark Fortress.”

Nigel shifted around on the couch’s padding. The voyage had been pretty miserable from a physical point of view: paste food, bloated sinuses, nauseous stomach, and teetering on the verge of claustrophobia the whole time. “You think it will track anything once they drop out of hyperspace?”

Otis gave a lame grin. “In theory.”

“This ship isn’t too hot on theory.”

“If he goes for the Dark Fortress he really will be trying to restart the barrier.”

“Possibly.”

“It means he isn’t a Starflyer agent.”

Nigel glared at his son. “I know that! That’s why I’ve come with you.”

“Sorry, Dad. It’s just…it’s Ozzie, you know.”

Nigel felt more than a little pique at the reverence in Otis’s voice. “Have you ever actually met him?”

“No. But you used to tell us about him all the time when we were young.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why it will be my hand on the trigger if it’s to be done.” He couldn’t help yawning, not that he slept well in freefall. “Let’s get ready. I don’t want to be distracted on our approach. Thame, load the nova bomb into the launch tube, I’ll authorize its activation.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nigel followed the procedure through the ship’s schematics. There was a problem getting the missile out of the magazine, but Otis did something to the handling mechanism to correct the flaw. Green symbols appeared when it was loaded and primed.

“Mark taught me that trick,” Otis said. “It’s to do with balancing the electromuscle.”

Nigel ignored the reproachful tone. There was something innately appealing about Mark, a human lost puppy. “Initiate the neutron lasers,” Nigel said. “Thame, you’re handling short-range defenses.” When he checked the timer, Dyson Alpha was seventy minutes away.

***

The jeeps had cleared Stakeout Canyon when they began to pick up the scattered fragments of Johansson’s reply. Paula programmed her array to piece together the vocal snippets as they repeated again and again. Static crashed out of the speakers as she played the message. It was a little bit longer and cleaner each time. By the fifth time there was no mistake.

“Is it him?” Rosamund asked. “Did you tell Renne that?”

“Yes.” Paula stared through the jeep’s curving windshield. The headlight beams were flowing over the blank, shiny surface of sand and shale as the sleek vehicle raced for cover. She thought the eastern horizon might be slightly lighter. The ache had almost gone from her limbs now, but she felt desperately tired, as if she hadn’t slept for months.

“So Adam contacted Oscar,” Rosamund said. “Does that help?”

“It makes a lot of sense, especially the why of it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Adam knew Oscar wasn’t the Starflyer agent. If Oscar had been, then he would have captured Adam and taken him for interrogation as soon as Adam made contact; Adam would have been totally unprepared.”

“Then why didn’t he just tell us?”

“He was protecting Oscar.”

“From whom?”

“Me. Turn around.”

Rosamund shot her a startled look. “Do what?”

“Turn around.” Her virtual hands fluttered over icons, trying to contact Oscar. The handheld array didn’t have the range, not with the canyon wall blocking them. “I have to get back there.”

“We haven’t got time!”

“Stop the jeep. You can get in with Jamas or Kieran. I’ll drive back myself.”

“Oh, dreaming heavens!” Rosamund wrenched at the wheel, sending the jeep into a skid-curve. It shook wildly as it chased the turn.

Paula gripped the seat, thinking they were going to flip over.

“What’s happening?” Kieran demanded.

“Oscar’s in the clear,” Rosamund said. “We’re going back.”

“What for? The storm’s going to be here in twenty minutes.”

The jeep had now completed its turn, nose pointing back toward Stakeout Canyon. Rosamund floored the accelerator. “I don’t know.”

“What?” he asked incredulously.

“I have to ask Oscar some questions,” Paula said. “I should be able to find out which of the other two it is.”

“Then what?”

“We might be able to reach the Starflyer agent in time to prevent them from flying. It won’t take much. Your ion carbines can easily disable a hyperglider.”

“But we wouldn’t get clear,” Rosamund growled. “The storm is at its worst in Stakeout Canyon. These jeeps couldn’t take the beating it’d give us in there.”

“I said I’ll drive myself.”

“No you don’t. You can barely stay conscious.”

“Thank you,” Paula said. She flopped back into the seat, and began thinking of the questions she needed to ask.

“Even if we don’t reach the traitor’s hyperglider, the other two will be warned,” Rosamund said. “We have to give them that.”

“It might be enough,” Paula agreed; she could sense the woman’s need to justify what they were doing, the courage she gained from the cause. “I don’t know what the agent is planning on doing. A kamikaze in the glider, possibly, or pushing the others off Aphrodite’s Seat.”

“It’s Adam, you know, he’s helping us.”

“How?”

“He’s looking down from the dreaming heavens, spurring us on.”

Paula didn’t reply. The idea was mildly discomfiting. She based her universe on solid facts. It was easier.

“Aren’t you religious, Investigator?”

“I don’t think I was designed to be, no. You obviously are.”

“I don’t believe in the old religions; but Bradley Johansson actually visited the dreaming heavens. He told the clans what they’re like, what we can look forward to.”

“I see.”

“Don’t believe me,” Rosamund said, laughing. “Ask him yourself afterward.”

“I might just do that.”

They drove on in silence. After a while, Rosamund began to shift the wheel slightly. The ground didn’t seem to be uneven. It hadn’t changed for a long time.

“Wind starting to pick up,” Rosamund said as she caught Paula searching the dusky landscape outside.

“Right.” Paula ordered the jeep’s transmitter to signal again. They should be in range by now. According to the inertial navigation they were level with the entrance to Stakeout Canyon, ready to curve around into it.

“What did you mean, Oscar wasn’t safe from you?” Rosamund asked.

“He and Adam were at Abadan station together; he was part of the terrorist atrocity. Adam knew that if I discovered that I would arrest Oscar.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Time is irrelevant. The people they killed are still dead. Justice must be served. Without that, our civilization would collapse.”

“You mean that, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“So you really would have tried to arrest Adam after this was over?”

“Yes.”

“We’d have stopped you.”

“Only this time.” Paula’s e-butler told her the jeep’s transmitter had made contact with the three hypergliders. “Oscar, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. We all are. What’s the problem? I thought you’d be clear by now. You have to get out of Stakeout Canyon.”

“Oscar, I’ve been in touch with Bradley Johansson. He told me it was Adam who made contact with you to ask for a review of the Second Chance logs, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Investigator, what’s this about?” Wilson asked. “We’re about to fly. And you need to get clear.”

“Oscar, that puts you in the clear,” Paula said. “If you were the Starflyer agent you would have taken him captive.”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“What are you saying?” Wilson asked.

The jeep rocked to one side as it was struck by a sudden gust of wind. Paula tightened her restraint webbing. “It’s either you or Anna.”

“Oh, come on! We’re all navy, we’ve know each other for years. We already decided it’s either you or one of the Guardians. We’re flying to the summit, no matter what you say.”

“You were all on board the Second Chance,” Paula said. “Oscar, what did you tell Wilson when you went to him with the evidence? Did you tell him you were contacted by the Guardians?”

“Yes.”

“All right, Wilson, you knew there was a connection between Oscar and the Guardians. Did you tell Anna?”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Did you tell her?” The jeep was swaying about continually now as the winds picked up. Sand was scudding along the ground.

“I…I don’t think so. Anna, do you remember?”

“What did you say to her? Did you discuss the Second Chance data?”

“Anna?” Wilson entreated.

“She handled the sensors on Second Chance, that gave her easy access to the satellites and the dish. They were her systems; it would be easy for her to cover up any unauthorized use.”

“Anna! Tell her she’s talking crap.”

“Did you tell her Oscar had found the dish deployment?” Paula demanded.

“Anna, for God’s sake.”

“Did you?”

“Yes,” Wilson moaned.

“Anna,” Paula said. “I know your carrier wave is on, please respond.”

“She’s my wife.”

The jeep wobbled badly. Rosamund fought the wheel. “We can’t take any more of this,” she grunted. “We’re not going to reach Anna.”

“Damnit,” Paula said. “It can’t be much farther.”

“Investigator, we are going to die if we carry on.” Rosamund’s voice was emotionless. “That’s not going to accomplish anything, is it?”

“All right, turn around,” Paula snapped. Halfway into the turn another gust slammed into them, and she thought they really would flip over this time. Rosamund spun the wheel violently, countering the tilt. Outside, gray light was seeping into the sky to reveal a thick low cloud base that was moving at a daunting speed toward Mount Herculaneum. The jeep steadied. Rosamund was taking them straight toward the base of the canyon wall.

“Anna, respond please,” Paula said.

“Wilson,” Oscar said. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”

“She can’t be!” Wilson said. “She can’t. Damnit, she’s perfectly human.”

“I worked with Tarlo for years,” Paula said. “I had no idea.”

“Work?” Wilson spat contemptuously. “I married her. I loved her.”

“Wilson, Oscar, you have to decide what you’re going to do now. I know this is hard, Wilson, but I expect she will try to crash into one of you.”

“We’ll leave a gap between unhooking from the tether,” Oscar said. “That way she can only go after one of us.”

“That sounds viable.” Paula desperately wanted to offer some practical advice, but she couldn’t even think on how to improve Oscar’s suggestion. She saw the edge of the canyon approaching fast. There was sand under the tires again. Big worn outcrops of rock were cluttered along the base of the canyon wall. Rosamund steered them around a dark jag of abraded lava and braked in its lee; she raised the suspension so the rim settled on the ground. “I hope this is deep enough,” she said as she switched on the jeep’s emergency anchors. The screws on the chassis started to wind down into the hard-packed sand with a strident metallic whine.

“Good luck, both of you,” Paula said.

Rosamund cut the mike and faced Paula. “You didn’t tell him you know about Abadan.”

“Oscar has enough to worry about right now. I didn’t want to impede his effectiveness. He’ll find out if he survives.”

“I don’t know about the Starflyer, but you frighten the living crap out of me.”

“She didn’t know.” Oscar repeated the phrase like a mantra; he’d lost count of how many times he’d said it now. The emptiness of human silence was oppressive and demoralizing as the furious wind rose in counterpoint around the hyperglider. A sense of isolation was folding around him like the caress of interstellar space. Anna: lost beyond redemption goodness knows how many years or decades before. While Wilson had withdrawn into a private hell of anguish and grief. “The human part of her was drawn to you. That’s still alive.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Wilson answered curtly. “I’ve had wives before.”

“Not like this, man; we saw flashes of the real Anna. She’s still there. Lost. She can be re-lifed and her memories edited.”

“After we kill her now. Is that it?”

Oscar winced. The whole conversation was made even more disquieting by the little emerald symbol shining in the corner of his virtual vision showing that Anna was still on the air, receiving everything they said. Maybe silence is best. “What do you want to do?” he asked warily. Wisps of fine sand were drifting past the cockpit, whipped up from the wet desert out beyond the gaping canyon mouth.

“Get to Aphrodite’s Seat. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what we do.”

Oscar resisted letting out a long breath of relief. At least his friend was starting to focus. That was the thing about Wilson, an ability to put the human element aside while he made choices. It was probably what made him so good at command. The parallel between that and Starflyer agents was one Oscar didn’t like to think of.

“We’ll get there,” Oscar said. “After all, there’s not that much she can do.”

“You think?”

Oscar was very close to turning his radio off and just keeping the hyperglider on the ground while the storm raged. The universe can survive without me, surely? Just this once. If he could just do what Wilson did and turn off his emotions.

The hyperglider shook as the wind strengthened around it. Overhead, the gray clouds had merged into an unbroken rumpled ceiling above the stark canyon. “Whatever you want to do, I’m with you,” he told Wilson. It was a cop-out and he knew it, transfer responsibility to someone else. But then that’s what he’d been doing ever since Abadan.

He checked the weather radar with its false-color mating jellyfish patterns. The whole cockpit was juddering now, wobbling the images on the little screen. It showed him a salmon-pink tide of wind channeled by the overbearing walls of Stakeout Canyon and reaching close to a hundred miles an hour. Somewhere in the invisible distance ahead of the hyperglider’s nose, the stormfront had reached the base of Mount Herculaneum.

“Confirmed go status,” Wilson responded with toneless dispassion.

Oscar smiled tenderly at the absolute professionalism; in his own fashion Wilson was showing him the way. Okay, if that’s what it takes to do this, I’m game. “Roger that. I’m beginning ascent phase.”

He brought his hands down on the console’s i-spots, gripping the concave handholds. Plyplastic flowed over his wrists, mooring them into place for the flight. His e-butler reported a perfect interface with the hyperglider’s onboard array.

Oscar put Anna aside and allowed the memories to come to the fore. Not his memories, but the skill belonged to him now, merging him with the hyperglider. A red and violet virtual hand gripped the joystick that had materialized in front of him. His other hand skipped across the glowing icons.

The plyplastic wing buds began to flow, extending out from the fuselage into a simple delta configuration. Oscar was rattled from side to side in the cockpit as they caught the wind. He disengaged the forward tether lock, and the hyperglider leaped about wildly. His own sparse piloting knowledge buoyed by the recent skill implants helped him counter the movement with relative ease, keeping the craft as level as possible.

He allowed the front and rear tether strands to unwind, and adjusted the wings to provide some lift. The hyperglider began to rise away from the floor of the canyon, tugging hard at the cables as the wind tore at the fuselage. Once he was fifty meters high he adjusted the tail fin into a long vertical stabilizer. The shaking began to lose its urgency, though the howl of the wind outside was still growing. Oscar expanded the wings farther, deepening the camber to generate more direct lift. With the tether cables reporting a huge strain, he began spooling them out at a measured rate, scrupulously keeping his ascent at the recommended pace. This was not the time, he decided, for cutting corners, no matter what the stakes.

Tatters of mist shot past the cockpit, twined into a sheath that restricted his visual range to little more than twenty meters. Rain was battering aggressively into the fuselage with loud drumbeat reverberations. As he climbed higher the cables began shaking with unlikely harmonics. He was constantly adjusting the wings to try to keep the hyperglider stable.

“If this storm isn’t enough for Samantha to work with, I don’t know what is,” Wilson said. The radio link wasn’t good, but the static-creased words contained a formidable determination.

Oscar clung to his friend’s voice, the contact with another human was suddenly tremendously important. When he scrutinized the weather radar again he could see the scarlet and cerise flow waves of the storm rushing down Stakeout Canyon, overlapping and twisting at a giddy velocity. The speed around the fuselage had now exceeded a hundred sixty kilometers an hour. Indigo stars marked the other two hypergliders; both were in the air, about the same height as he was. So she is alive and kicking, then. It had been a foolish fantasy that her silence meant she was somehow inactive.

“Yeah,” he said as he rose past the thousand-meter mark. “I don’t like being inside it; I certainly wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end.”

“Adam only meant for you to do this, didn’t he? That’s why he put you through the memory implant procedure. There was no moisture damage. He wasn’t going to let me and Anna fly.”

“No. He was going to explain it to the Guardians and use them to make sure the two of you stayed on the ground. Bloody idiot, as if my flying can guarantee a landing on the summit.”

“Why didn’t he tell us you were in the clear?”

“He would have to explain why to the Investigator, that we knew each other from way back, which was why he contacted me in the first place.” The hyperglider lurched alarmingly to starboard. Oscar brought it back with steady pressure on the joystick, flexing the wings. The craft rolled back to its level position. He concentrated hard on the weather radar, though even that had trouble spotting the extreme airflow turbulence inside the jetstreams.

“Is that important?” Wilson asked.

Oscar ground his teeth together. For decades he’d assumed that this moment, if it ever came, would be cathartic. It wasn’t. He hated himself for confessing, for what he had to confess. “I’m afraid so.”

“So why did he know you?”

“We both got involved with student politics at the university. It was stupid. We were young, and the radicals knew how to exploit that.”

“What happened?”

“Ultimately? Abadan station.”

“Oh, Jesus, Oscar, you’ve got to be kidding. That was you?”

“I was nineteen. Adam and I were in the group which planted the bomb. It wasn’t meant for the passenger train. We were making a gesture against the grain dumping. But there was some snarl up on StLincoln; the express was running late so traffic control gave it priority, they pushed the grain train onto a different line.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Yeah.” Oscar watched his altitude go through the fourteen-hundred-meter mark. It was difficult to see. Tears were washing down his cheeks. He ordered the wing configuration change ready for flight. “The Intersolar Socialist Party took pity on me and paid for me to undergo an identity change on Illuminatus. I’ve been…I don’t know. Making amends? Ever since.”

“I’ll be damned. This really is a day for revelations, isn’t it. I guess we’re all strangers in the end.”

“Wilson. No matter what…if you hate me now. I’m glad I knew you.”

“I don’t hate you. So is Oscar your real name?”

“Hell no.” He checked out through the cockpit canopy, seeing the wings curving away on either side. Virtual vision showed him the tailplane morphing into a broad triangular stabilizer. Deep in his gut he was tensing himself up for the release. “I used to be a big film buff. I loved all those fabulous musicals and cowboys and romances they used to make back in the mid-twentieth century. Oscar awards, see? And the biggest star they ever had was called Marilyn Monroe.”

“Well, Mr. Star Award, you named the tactic: two on one.”

Oscar saw Wilson’s hyperglider disengage. Its indigo star went shooting off down the carmine river flooding the length of Stakeout Canyon.

He could almost hear the calculation that Anna must be making. Out of all of them Wilson stood the best chance of reaching the summit. The longer she left it the more difficult it would be for her to catch him and presumably force some kind of collision; but if she disengaged before Oscar he could pick his own moment anytime in the next hour or so, and make his flight completely unimpeded. It all depended on how much faith everyone had in his ability to fly the foreshortened parabola.

Anna disengaged.

She was twenty-five seconds behind Wilson.

Oscar’s virtual hand punched the disengage icon. G-force shoved him down hard in the seat. The hyperglider streaked away at over a hundred ninety kilometers an hour. Roiling air buffeted the wings mercilessly. He’d envisaged keeping the craft steady while watching the movements of the other two, waiting for whatever moment presented itself. Instead he was thrust into an immediate battle for simple survival. All he cared about was maintaining altitude. The two terrifying canyon walls jumped out of the radar screen at him as the winds impelled him from side to side. He countered each floundering swerve movement the screaming storm flung at him, tilting the joystick with a fear-burned calmness. The wings shifted obediently, tips twisting and flexing to produce a response so quick he had trouble registering it before it became overcompensation.

For a split second he searched out the two indigo stars. His e-butler projected their course trajectories. The slender topaz lines it sketched intersected before the end of Stakeout Canyon. Then the vast rock walls were closing in again, and the instabilities clawing at the fuselage intensified. It grew darker outside as the shreds of clouds threaded within the storm were wrenched back into a single wild braid high above the ground. Big raindrops smashed against the cockpit in a sudden wave. The hyperglider yawed under the assault. Oscar struggled to right the craft again. He had to reduce the wing size, increasing control at the cost of the acceleration that the previous wide curve had given him. There was no noticeable loss of speed, and it was easier to force his way back into the center of the canyon, keeping above that writhing arterial cloud. The radar found the end of the canyon wall twenty kilometers ahead, a vertical cliff that stretched up off the screen.

He checked the other two hypergliders again. Anna was flying with mechanical exactitude. Her wings hadn’t been trimmed down, yet somehow she was maintaining her vector, closing fast on Wilson. She didn’t have to worry about maneuvering into the right position to go vertical at the end of the canyon. She didn’t have human concerns to distract her anymore. Her hyperglider streaked on like a missile. Wilson couldn’t move away; if he was to soar up the incredible waterfall that flowed out of the canyon he had to hold his course perfectly steady.

The skills of some long-departed pilot had settled calmly into Oscar’s mind now, allowing him to manipulate the joystick in kinesic synergy with the hyperglider, bestowing a flawless control over the aerodynamics at some animal-instinct level. Amid the darkening sky and belligerent uproar of the storm he watched the express train from StLincoln leave the tracks in a cloying oily fireball, saw the carriages jackknife and crumple, caught sight of the broken charred bodies sprawled along the side of the tracks. He knew them all now, every night for forty years their faces had filled his one and only dream.

His virtual hand manipulated the wing configuration again, molding it into a wider, longer planform among the red warning symbols thrown up by the onboard array. His speed increased, and he lowered the nose, hurtling down toward the torrent of white foam that soared through the air two kilometers above the canyon floor.

“Wilson?” he called above the cacophony.

Savage rivulets churned around the hyperglider fuselage to be sliced apart by the rapier blade wings. High above, the sun rose over the summit of Mount Herculaneum.

“I hear you.”

The sunlight broke apart on the water, scattering into a seething cloud of ephemeral rainbows. Oscar smiled in delight at the beauty of this world’s bizarre nature. Directly in front and below a dazzling white cruciform shape surfed along the top of the coruscating foam.

“My name is Gene Yaohui.” As he said it, he plunged into the glorious vortex of light and water, crashing straight into Anna’s hyperglider.

It had happened before, many times, back when he was flying with the Wild Fox squadron. It was such a tight institution that they willingly lived each other’s lives in the air and on the ground; they trained together, they partied together, went to the big game together, flew missions together, served overseas together. On base he knew the wives and kids of every other pilot, their money troubles, their fights, their grocery orders; while in the air he knew the performance and limit of each man flying. They were as close as brothers.

When they flew combat missions some didn’t come back. The radar showed them die, its neat little neon-green symbology on the HUD printing up CONTACT LOST codes where their plane had burst apart from a missile strike to fall like a meteor in flaming ruin. Each time, a part of himself had been wrenched away into the crash leaving a void that would never be filled in quite the same way again. But you carried on because that was what the guys wanted, you knew them well enough to be certain. It was that knowledge that gave you the strength to carry on.

And now, three and a half centuries after he thought he’d lost his last squadron buddy, Wilson Kime watched the radar symbols of his wife and best friend tumble out of the sky to smash apart on the implacable rock far below his hyperglider.

“Good-bye, Gene Yaohui,” he whispered.

Two kilometers ahead of him, the river that streaked through the air performed its magnificently paradoxical curve and charged up parallel to the immense cliff face. Orange positioning vectors printed themselves around his virtual vision, and he moved the joystick calmly, lining the craft up on the correct approach path. He withdrew the wings back into a short swept-back planform as the canyon walls rushed in on either side. The waterfall was directly ahead, a sheet of silver ripples ascending at over three hundred kilometers an hour. He held his breath for a long heartbeat.

The hyperglider was abruptly torn upward with a force that thrust him down into the seat. He grappled with the joystick, wrangling the wing surfaces to keep the craft perfectly level as it stood on its tail and blasted straight up for the pristine sapphire sky. Wilson breathed again, then he was suddenly laughing, only it sounded more like a defiant snarl that the Starflyer would hear and know.

Peaking out at five kilometers, the vertical waterfall began to break apart as the immense pressure that created it lessened, escaping from Stakeout Canyon’s brutal constriction. The water parted into two cataracts of looser spume, gushing away north and south onto the huge volcano’s lower slopes. Wilson rode the residual blast of air from the escaping storm, letting it carry him still higher, maintaining velocity. As he soared above the grasslands of the higher, temperate slopes, he watched the massive cloud bands below him tumbling away around the volcano where they would engender the planet’s revenge on the other side.

The radar started to pick out the twisters up ahead as they birthed out of the clear turbulence that marked the upper fringes of the storm. He watched them whipping around, translucent columns skating erratically across the ground that would suddenly be plunged full of dust and stone as they sucked up an exposed patch of soil. The onboard array started tracking them, winding in his options.

Three were in the right area, all of them large enough. One he dismissed, its oscillations too unstable. Out of the remaining two, he simply went for the nearest.

He eased the joystick forward, aiming the nose at the whirling base of the twister, matching the semirhythmic way it skewed from side to side as it snaked its way upslope. The hyperglider’s wings and tailplane were pulled in to simple shark-fin steering flaps as he dived in toward the target. Holding steady, intuitively aiming for where he knew it would go. If Gene Yaohui can aim straight, then I sure as hell can. Our purpose will go on, will succeed.

Wilson tugged the joystick back, pulling the hyperglider into a steep climb as it slid into the twister. The canopy was instantly bombarded with sand and gravel; larger chunks of stone made him cringe as they impacted. Fuselage stress levels peaked. Motors whined directly behind his seat, spinning the forward section of the hyperglider in counter to the twister rotation, adding stability to the climb. The wings had morphed again, becoming propeller blades to tap the tempestuous power of the twister.

Seconds later the hyperglider burst out of the top of the twister. Wilson began an urgent review of the flight vector. He’d gained enough velocity to fly the complete arc over the summit. Good, but not what he wanted. The wings altered their camber, pitching the nose up in a modest aerobrake maneuver. There wasn’t much time, the gases were thinning out rapidly as he left the stratosphere behind. He extended the wings farther still, and angled them to increase their drag on the tenuous gusts of molecules that were slipping past the fuselage. In his virtual vision, the projected parabola slowly sank back down into the one he’d plotted, giving him an impact point a kilometer and a half behind Aphrodite’s Seat.

The hyperglider sailed up out of the atmosphere. Space reverted to familiar welcome black outside, the stars as bright as he’d ever seen them. He watched beads of moisture smeared across the fuselage turn to ice. Beneath his starboard wing, Mount Titan’s crater bubbled with gloomy red light as the lava churned and effervesced, spitting out smoky gobbets of stone that chased parabolas of their own down into the atmosphere where they burst apart in crimson shock waves. In front of the nose, Mount Herculaneum’s flat summit tipped into view as the hyperglider reached the apex of its trajectory, presenting a dismal umber plain of cold lava dimpled by the twin caldera.

Wilson saw it but that was all; there was no interest, no marveling at the vista. He’d honored those taken from him, he’d flown the perfect flight for them. That alone was victory. There was nothing else left for him to do, no adjustments to make. Tiny cold gas reaction thrusters kept the hyperglider level up here in the vacuum. Gravity would bring him down where they’d chosen. That was his last memory of the three of them: gathered around the projected map back in the hangar, squabbling excitedly over the best patch of ground, ignoring the sullen armed Guardians as they glowered at the inappropriate jollity. Oscar and Anna, the two people he would have vouched for above anyone else. People who’d never really existed to begin with.

The hyperglider sank swiftly down toward the fissured surface of the summit. Too steep for comfort. Nothing I can do, this is all gravity now. Already the rest of the planet had vanished below the false horizon of Aphrodite’s Seat where the lava ended in sheer cliffs over eight kilometers high. Wilson was alone in space above a rugged circle of lava that was a lot more craggy than the images had hinted at. Shards of clinker littered the ground. He checked his helmet seals again, then made sure the suit’s environmental system was switched on. The wings were drawn back to a ten-meter span, their tips curled down in case they were needed for stability should the wheels be damaged on impact.

Fifty meters altitude, and only eight hundred meters from the edge of the cliff. The parabola hadn’t been quite so perfect after all. Wilson fired all the upper surface gas thrusters at once, trying to speed the descent. The quiet crept up on him, unexpectedly unnerving. Even in a glider he expected some sound from air rushing over the wings as it came in to land. Here there was nothing, only the ghost of Schiaparelli crater. He lowered the landing struts. And the speed was still way too fast.

The hyperglider hit and immediately bounced. He saw stone fragments spinning off on either side where the wheels had kicked them. Seven hundred meters from the cliff. The wheels touched again. He heard something then, the sound of impacts on the little tires. Then the cockpit was juddering frenziedly. Dust flared up from the wheels, shooting out streamers thinner than water vapor. The nose landing strut snapped, and the real noise began as the fuselage started skidding across the ground.

Wilson knew it was going to flip. He could feel the motion building. Nothing I can do. It’s all gravity. The tailplane lifted up as the main body rolled to starboard, jabbing the wingtip into a small crevice. In low gravity the somersault was almost graceful. The hyperglider turned lazily and thudded down on its upper fuselage. An inverted horizon skidded toward Wilson as cracks multiplied across the cockpit canopy. The tough glass finally shattered in a burst of gas. Raw pocked lava rushed past, centimeters from his helmet. Through the swirling white haze of the cockpit’s evacuating atmosphere Wilson saw a big spur of rock straight ahead. The hyperglider crashed into it, flooding Wilson’s universe with a searing red pain.

***

“Man! This is one seriously cruddy radar,” Ozzie complained as the Charybdis approached the edge of the Dyson Alpha star system. He’d pulled the TD detector visualization out of his grid to find a translucent gray cube filling his virtual vision. It was grainy inside, with minuscule photonic flaws flowing past him like some kind of smog. Clusters of them veered into warped blemishes, knots in the structural fabric that represented the stars back in the real universe. Now they were only twenty minutes out from Dyson Alpha he changed the scan resolution to focus on the star system ahead. There was a silent inrush of the streaming particles as they foregathered as the star. Smaller congregations swept around it in concentric orbits, three solid planets and two gas giants. Ozzie searched for the location of the Dark Fortress but there was nothing available on this scale. Strange, that mother’s the size of a planet. He pulled astronomical data out of the grid, and overlaid it. A tangerine reticulation sprang up to mimic the planetary system layout and size-adjusted until it synchronized with the sensor imagery. A simple purple decussation highlighted the coordinates of the Dark Fortress. Ozzie shifted the focus to center it, then expanded to the sensor’s absolute limit. The little gray motes underwent some kind of jitter as they slipped through the volume of space where the Dark Fortress should be.

“Well, something’s still there,” Mark said without much conviction.

“Let’s go take a look,” Ozzie said. He altered their course vector to take them in a mild curve around to the Dark Fortress coordinates. “Can this thing pick out ships?”

“I’ve no idea,” Mark said. “It doesn’t have very good resolution. I suppose if you get close enough it can pick up smaller objects.”

“Don’t you know?”

“I haven’t got a clue about the physics behind any of this, that’s if you can even call it physics anymore. I just do the assembly, remember?”

“Okay. Let’s get ready to drop out of hyperspace five thousand kilometers above the outer lattice sphere. Get our force fields activated. I’ll scan around with ordinary sensors. And, Mark, if there are any ships out there, they’re going to be hostile. They’re going to think we’re here to turn their star nova.”

“I know! I was on Elan when they invaded.”

“So,” Ozzie prompted.

Mark gave him an irritated frown. “So?”

“You’ve encrypted the weapons. You’re going to have to shoot them.”

“Oh. Right. I’ll enable the tactical systems.”

“Good idea, man.”

Ozzie gradually reduced their speed as they drew closer until they were stationary relative to the Dark Fortress. There were sixteen ships or satellites orbiting around the structure. The TD detector couldn’t provide reliable size estimations.

“Got to be big to show up on this piece of junk,” Ozzie decided.

“The smallest mass to create a gravitonic fold in space-time which can be detected from hyperspace is approximately one thousand tons,” the SIsubroutine said.

“They’re ships, then.”

“That is a high probability.”

Ozzie touched the icon that activated his couch’s plyplastic webbing. He turned his head to look at Mark. “You ready for this?”

Mark gave him a calculating look. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s go.”

Ozzie dropped the Charybdis back into real space. Tiny segments of the stealth hull peeled back like eyelids, allowing sensors to peer out. Five thousand kilometers in front of the sleek ultra-black ellipse of the frigate the Dark Fortress writhed in electromagnetic agony. Beneath the outer lattice sphere a dense typhoon of radiant amethyst plasma was beset with eruptions and upsurges of copper and azure gyres. The unstable surface spun out tumescent fountains. As they lashed against the outer lattice sphere they triggered snapping discharges deep within the struts causing them to glow with ethereal radiance.

“Wow,” Mark hissed. “Looks like it’s on fire down there.”

“Uh huh.” Ozzie was watching the data from the nonvisual sensors. The energy environment around the gigantic orb was diabolical, with electrical, magnetic, and gravitonic emissions pulsing up from the rutilant interior to create a maelstrom of particles and radiation above the outer lattice sphere. “I guess something this big doesn’t have a quick death no matter what you hit it with,” he mused.

“What about the flare bomb’s quantum signature?”

“It’s still there all right.” Ozzie grinned in relish. I was right; so screw you, Nigel. “Unchanged from when they first detected it right after the barrier collapsed.”

“Can you find the origin point?”

“No way, man. There’s a hell of a lot of interference from this plasma storm and God knows what else that’s going on in the depths. We’ll have to use the active sensors, and go in to take a look.”

“They’ll see us.”

Ozzie reviewed the infrared image. The objects that the TD detector had found were Prime ships, glowing cerise against the dark. They were also emitting just about every sensor radiation that the Charybdis’s passive scanners could detect, sending great fans of it to wash across the outer shell. Their constant radio emission matched the chaotic analogue signals that MorningLightMountain used to mesh its multitude of motiles and immotile groups into a unified whole. “There’s a wormhole open about ten thousand kilometers away,” he said. “And I’m also picking up some strong radio signals from inside the lattice spheres. It’s got ships in there.”

“They’re waiting for us.”

“No they’re not. Don’t panic. These ships are just part of a science mission to examine this thing. Man, it’s impressive. You don’t realize that until you get up close and personal. Even for a species that went through their singularity event this had to take some doing. And I thought the gas halo was formidable. This could well peak it.”

“Gas halo?”

“Long story. We need to get inside. Do you think our onboard systems are up to it?”

“Why shouldn’t they be?”

“The first lattice has a composition that produces electro-repulsive properties. It’s in the files. Get too close to it, and your power goes dead, that and other generally bad things.”

“How close?”

“Under ten kilometers, I think. The Second Chance couldn’t get any probes nearer than that.”

“Ozzie, some of these gaps are over a thousand kilometers wide. The Primes have got their ships through and they’re five times the size of the Charybdis. We’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, but we’re going to have to switch on our active sensors. There’s no way we can do this on visual alone.”

Mark’s fingers drummed nervously on the acceleration couch cushioning. “All right.”

“Is that quantumbuster ready to go?”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Force fields?”

“Get on with it.”

Ozzie enabled the active sensors. The data return quadrupled, amplifying and clarifying the image. “The environment inside is a lot worse than it was before,” he said tightly. “But I’ve got a more accurate fix on the quantum signature, it’s definitely inside the fourth lattice sphere. The Starflyer agent planted it in the ring structure somewhere.”

“Can we just get this over with. Please.”

“No problem, man.” Ozzie fed power into the secondary drive units. The Charybdis accelerated at a smooth one gee toward the outer lattice sphere. He was aiming for a pentagonal interstice that measured six hundred kilometers in diameter. Radar return was fuzzed by the struts, denying them any close resolution; but their bulk was easy enough to track.

The infrared sensors reported long slender jets of superheated plasma appearing in space around them. They were being swept by laser, maser, and standard radar pulses, which the stealth hull was deflecting. “Uh, bad news, man. They’ve seen us, sort of; they’re locking on to our sensor emissions. Ships are accelerating this way. Jeez! Nine gees. Is that big Mountain dude paranoid, or what?”

“Let’s speed things up here.” Mark’s voice had risen in pitch.

“Okay, here we go, five gees.” It built quickly, crushing Ozzie back into the cushioning. The outer lattice sphere was expanding fast in the sensor image. “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Mark barked.

“It’s not waiting for its ships to catch us. Eight wormholes opening. Five hundred kilometers away. Another four; damn, they’re popping up all over the place. Hang on.” Ozzie bumped the acceleration up to ten gees. He could feel his flesh sagging backward. It was getting very hard to breathe. Not a day to be wearing tight pants.

Big ships began to fly out of the wormholes, already accelerating. Missiles leaped away from them, plasma exhausts turning space above the planetsized artifact to a noonday brilliance. Nuclear explosions erupted, stabbing vast tracts of coherent radiation toward the tiny emission point betraying the Charybdis’s existence. Force field warning icons glared red. Ozzie increased their acceleration to twelve gees. His own anguished whimper joined Mark’s.

***

MorningLightMountain had never given the alien mega-structure much consideration. Not that it ignored the strange artifact. It had noticed the structure almost as soon as the barrier withdrew. Ships sent to investigate found a planet-size machine with incomprehensible mass properties. Given its scale, MorningLightMountain concluded it had to be associated with the barrier; in all probability it was the generator or a part of it. According to the Bose memories, that was what the humans considered it to be. It did not understand why they called it the Dark Fortress. Something to do with combining fiction and humor.

The investigation that followed was as methodical as MorningLightMountain could be. Its primary attention was of course directed first toward eliminating its rival immotiles, then the conquest of the Commonwealth. Even so, it kept worrying away at the enigma. New sensors were fabricated and sent out. Ships ventured through the giant webbed carapace and began to map the properties, energy patterns, and geometry of the interior. Over the months this became more difficult as the internal energy secretions grew in strength while becoming more frenzied. Eventually the artifact resembled a caged star.

Data extraction on several Commonwealth worlds revealed the human physicists were equally puzzled by the Dark Fortress. They, too, did not understand its functionality. They also had no idea who constructed it. MorningLightMountain suspected the human SI could build such a thing. The Silfen aliens might also have the ability, but according to the associated mined data they didn’t have the psychology. MorningLightMountain didn’t trust that analysis. The galaxy was full of non-Prime life, all of it was an enemy, all of it was suspect. One day it would find its greatest enemy and eliminate them.

As its investigation progressed, the greatest puzzle came from the errant quantum signature emanating from somewhere deep inside the alien artifact. MorningLightMountain could not understand why it matched its own corona-rupture weapon. Logically it implied the humans on the Second Chance had deployed it against the Dark Fortress. They had the technology, but they appeared to be as bewildered as it was by why the barrier had failed—assuming their records were accurate, and not disinformation.

Such questions were abruptly pushed farther down its priority list when the humans turned the staging post star nova. MorningLightMountain realized it had seriously underestimated human scientific resourcefulness. It was now facing the very extinction event it had begun its expansion campaign to eliminate. Humans would move swiftly after their initial success. They only had one ship, one nova bomb when they attacked the staging post star. It was probably a prototype. If they had more, they would have used them. Right now, their smoothly efficient manufacturing machinery would be producing more ships and bombs. When they had enough to guarantee a successful attack on its home star and all other outposts, they would come.

With its own survival now paramount MorningLightMountain dispatched more ships and equipment through the wormholes already linking it to new, uninhabited star systems where its settlements were establishing themselves. There were over forty now, which would hopefully stretch human resources to locate and destroy them. It also began to install wormhole generators in its largest ships, modifying them for FTL flight. They were nothing like as efficient and fast as the human FTL ships, but they did work. It started to send them through the giant wormhole it had originally built to bridge the gulf between its home system and the Commonwealth, scattering them across interstellar space hundreds of light-years away. Eight had been completed when the immotile group clusters researching the barrier generator detected a wash of sensor radiation. It was coming from a point in space without any physical origin.

MorningLightMountain’s primary thought routines immediately recognized the reason. The advanced human ship had been undetectable. The navy-class humans had arrived to turn the home star nova. Every ship researching the generator launched an attack against the intruder, missiles aiming for the elusive emission point.

It didn’t understand why the human ship had appeared at the generator. Probabilities were examined. If they were here, why had they not simply bombed the star? It would never have known until the moment the star erupted.

Humans were weak, they would avoid a direct confrontation if at all possible. The ship must somehow be attempting to restart the generator. MorningLightMountain feared that as much as it did extinction. With itself cut off from the freedom of the galaxy, it would ultimately die inside the prison of the barrier as the star slowly burned out. This would become its tomb.

MorningLightMountain immediately opened twenty-four wormholes around the intruder, and began to send its most powerful warships through to intercept the humans.

***

“If one of them made it, they should be there by now,” Andria said.

Samantha took yet another glance at the five dead screens standing on Andria’s table. She’d secretly been hoping that the hypergliders might even make it to Aphrodite’s Seat early. It was impossible to accept that all three had failed. Now she didn’t know what to think. Everyone in the cave had listened to the short-wave messages between Paula Myo and Bradley Johansson. She really couldn’t figure out the relevance, but the Investigator was obviously desperate to know about Oscar. Did the information put him in the clear, or condemn him?

Several people in the cave had known Adam. They’d all been shocked by his murder. Samantha found it severely disconcerting; it was hard to accept the Starflyer had got so close to them, that it might still wreck their plans.

“It’s here,” one of the control group said.

Samantha automatically glanced at the five dark screens. Frowned.

“The storm,” Andria said quietly.

Up on the big topographic map projected by the portal, the morning storm was billowing around the lower slopes of Mount Herculaneum. Hammerhead clouds poured out into the Dessault range, riding high-velocity jetstreams. At low altitude the clouds roared around peaks, splitting to churn down valleys and bring a deluge of hard rain; while overhead a smooth-flowing sheet of clear air, kilometers high, fanned out above the mountains, driven by the huge pressure surge from behind.

The picture had gaps. Coverage from the manipulator stations was sporadic; the large array was filling in the omissions as best it could.

“Here we go,” Andria said. “Sequence one, please. Be ready to phase in your sections.”

The Guardians sitting at the tables were abruptly quiet as they studied the data their screens were rolling up. Samantha saw the first echelon of manipulator stations powering up, their gigantic curving blades of energy materializing to rival the rocky peaks they paralleled. Clouds surged in toward their blades, only to be flung on wild curves by the newborn eddies as they began rotating.

“Can we do it?” Samantha asked tersely.

“Sure we can,” Andria said.

Samantha wanted to curse the Starflyer, the useless navy people, Adam for allowing himself to be murdered, the Guardians he’d taken with him, the hyperglider designers, the…

“Hey!” Andria cried. “Carrier signal detected. Coming right at us from Aphrodite’s Seat. Dreaming heavens, they made it.”

The image of the storm began to strengthen with details filling in as the large array processed the incoming data; the swirls and mini-cyclones that squalled off from individual peaks, the long hurricane streams rampaging along the bigger valleys. Jetstream velocity, direction, pressure; it all ran through the large array’s software to be transformed into initial projections. From that came firm commands on how the manipulator stations should perform if the storm was to be amplified and directed as they wanted.

Applause and cheering burst out all down the cave.

“This is Wilson Kime on Aphrodite’s Seat, I hope to God you’re receiving all this. My array says it’s transmitting okay.”

Samantha had to grip the back of Andria’s chair for support as the voice boomed cleanly out of the speakers.

“Deal with him,” Andria snapped. She held out a small mike, never glancing up from her displays.

Samantha took the mike with shaking fingers. “This is Samantha, we’re receiving you just fine, Admiral. The picture is perfect. Thank you.”

“Glad to hear it, Samantha. I have one awesome view from here. The whole world is spread out underneath me, and the detail is astounding. I can see the storm rushing around Herculaneum; it’s moving so fast.”

“Admiral, who else is there with you?”

“I don’t remember the view from orbit ever being so spectacular; and I’ve seen a lot of worlds from space now.”

She gave the mike a worried glance. “Admiral?”

“It was my wife. She was the Starflyer agent.”

“I’m sorry. Where is she?”

“Anna and Oscar never made it out of Stakeout Canyon.”

“Dreaming heavens.”

“I hope this works. I hope this was worth it.”

“We’ll make it work.”

***

Bradley quickly pulled his armor suit on as everyone else hurried to their deployment positions. The air creaked around him as the king eagles took off again, riderless this time, and set out low across the veldt to the east. On the road, the jeeps and trucks backed up, leaving the three armored cars together at the top of the shallow slope. The Paris team and Cat’s Claws formed a tight little group around the first vehicle, weapon barrels were sliding up out of various segments of the suits in readiness. They were talking among themselves, using secure links. One did what looked like a little jig.

“Anything from the forts?” Bradley asked Scott, who was standing beside him.

“No, sir.”

“Ah well, we can’t delay anymore.”

“When the storm arrives, they won’t be able to give us much warning, a couple of minutes at best.”

When, not if, Bradley thought in bitter amusement. Their belief is still strong. “I know. It’s just that I’ve spent so much time and effort trying to stop this moment from happening. I truly thought the planet would have its revenge. Now we don’t even know if the navy people made it to the summit.”

Scott opened his mouth to answer, then found himself being edged aside as Stig pushed between them.

“I want to drive you,” Stig said.

“Stig—”

“My skeleton suit is adequate if anything gets through the armored car’s force field.”

Bradley looked at the tough young man’s stark face; the set of determination was easy enough to read. He couldn’t say no. This was the climax of everything the Guardians had achieved.

“I think I’ve earned the right to be in at the kill,” Stig said stubbornly.

Bradley smiled and rested his hand on Stig’s shoulder, remembering the man’s great-grandfather setting out on a raid he never came back from. “Of course you have, Stig, I’d be delighted and relieved if you took the wheel.”

Stig gave a slight start. He’d obviously marshaled a big argument ready. His face split into a winning smile. “Thank you, sir.”

“But no more beezee; you’ve had enough.”

“I don’t need it for this, sir.”

“Get the engine started, we’ll be going any second.”

Stig raced across the enzyme-bonded concrete to the armored car’s open door.

“I think we’re ready,” Bradley told Scott as he watched Stig with a fond smile. “Start pulling your people back from the road, these zone killers are pretty indiscriminate.”

“Yes, sir. I’m going to send three platoons to intercept the soldier motiles.”

“Fair enough, but those creatures will not be pushovers. Make sure the platoons understand that.”

“Yes, sir, I’m…” He broke off to watch the remaining Barsoomians who were dispersing along the top of the ridge, gliding sedately through the short grass like small hovercraft. “Do they actually have legs?”

“Who knows?” Bradley said. “Maybe tomorrow we’ll have earned the right to ask them, eh?”

“Tomorrow it is.” Scott’s expression changed to one of mild exasperation.

Bradley didn’t have to turn; he knew who was coming. Those heels made a very distinctive sound on the concrete.

“ ‘Scuse me, Mr. Johansson,” Tiger Pansy said. “Where do you want me for the attack?”

“I think, dear lady, you would be safest here with Qatux.”

“Hey, no way. That’s not what Qatux wants. The action is with you guys.”

“I see.”

“She can come with me,” Olwen said. “I’m driving the second armored car. It’s as safe as anywhere’s going to be today.”

“That’s really kind,” Tiger Pansy said.

“All right then,” Bradley said. “Let’s go. May the dreaming heavens welcome all of us.” He took out his pendant, a small clear stone with a tiny turquoise glow at the center, and kissed it before tucking it down into his armor again.

Behind him, Qatux hooted softly. Tiger Pansy was giving him a strange look. “Cool,” she crooned.

Bradley pulled his helmet on, and told his e-butler to seal the collar. The armored car’s engine was growling as he settled himself into the forward passenger bench. He pulled sensor images from all three armored cars out of his grid, then opened channels to both Cat’s Claws and the Paris team. The image that filled his virtual vision was looking down on the Starflyer convoy, which still hadn’t moved. All around it, the clan warriors were withdrawing, widening the circle.

“Everyone ready?” he asked.

As the confirmations came in, he checked on the motiles. Their vehicles were now only eleven kilometers away. Eighty clan warriors were riding fast toward them.

“Stig, Olwen, Ayub, fire the zone killers, please.”

The armored cars rocked slightly as the delta-shaped weapons burst up out of their launchers. Sensors briefly captured the three of them tracing a fast arc through the sky above Highway One. Distorted, superheated air churned in their wake.

Kinetic cannons mounted on the Land Rover Cruisers tracked around to the vertical and opened fire. They were answered by a massive barrage of ion rifle fire from the encircling band of clan warriors. Dazzling blue-white pulses sleeted in like a constricting noose of sheet lightning. Hyper-rifle shots and Alic’s particle lances ripped down from the top of the rise.

“Focus on the Starflyer,” Bradley yelled. Fire lines swept inward toward the MANN truck and its shiny capsule. A hundred meters above it, three zone killers detonated. The triple cataracts of emerald twinkle-points descended with slow grace to submerge all the convoy vehicles in a translucent corona. For a second they lay entombed within the glowing shroud like insects in amber.

The ground exploded. Huge gouts of soil and rock streaked up into the sky, obliterating all sight of the convoy. Fireballs from ruptured fuel tanks bloomed within the undulant dirt, to be snuffed out almost immediately. Bradley felt the blast wave strike the armored car, rocking it slightly. Dozens of Charlemagnes bolted, oblivious to the riders clinging to their backs, several toppled over. The cloud of pulverized rock fragments and gritty soil began to dissipate.

A section of Highway One three hundred meters long was completely missing. The ground around it had been reduced to a concave circle of raw smoking soil. Right at the center of the blast maar, the MANN truck sat completely intact; cloying dust motes slithered down its force field as the sunlight returned to glint off its shiny aluminum capsule. Seventeen Cruisers had also survived the zone killers, their force fields glowing like radioactive bubbles around them. Scraps of wreckage from the other vehicles were scattered across the pulverized earth, flames chomping eagerly at their plastic elements. There was no sign of any bodies.

“Dreaming heavens, doesn’t anything touch it?” Stig demanded.

“Go!” Bradley told him.

The armored car lurched forward to race down the remaining strip of road, gathering speed.

Morton had been surprised when the debris plume swirled away. He really hadn’t expected to see the MANN truck intact. His hyper-rifle had fired shot after shot at the stubbornly resistant force field cloaking the silvery capsule before and during the zone killer strike. He’d fired two HVvixen missiles into the melee. Beside him, Alic’s twin particle lances had boomed away, splitting the air with incandescent energy.

“Holy fuck,” Rob spat in amazement. “We never even scratched it.”

“That’s why they call them juggernauts,” the Cat told them with her usual peppy humor.

“The Starflyer gave the Commonwealth force field technology by all accounts,” Alic said. “Looks like it kept the best bits for itself.”

Bradley’s shouted command filled the general communications band. The armored cars began to drive hell-for-leather down the gradual slope. Morton took off beside them, body angled forward, moving with a simple fast loping movement, allowing Far Away’s low gravity to carry him in short arcs above the road between each footfall. His hyper-rifle folded back into its forearm recess while he was on the move. Accelerants began to fizz into his bloodstream, sharpening up his thoughts, binding the interface with his suit even tighter. Nerve strands lost their slackness, contracting to taut conduits that provided instantaneous responses, so tight he could hear them humming. The tactical display in his virtual vision graded up to an even faster refresh rate. Suit sensors showed him the clan warriors reeling their blast-spooked warhorses back under control, and turning back toward the remnants of the convoy. Cruisers opened up with kinetic rapid-fire guns. Long lines of soil in front of the charging horses were ripped up as they ranged in, then the lethal wall of projectiles was chewing through flesh and bone. The front rank of horses died as their legs were triturated beneath them, dropping their bulk into the horizontal fire plane. Their mortal screams seared straight into Morton’s electrified nervous system as they vanished beneath swirling plumes of blood and gore. Inside the scarlet fog, force field skeletons flared amber as riders tumbled to the ground. The second rank rode onward over the steaming gobbets of meat. Morton’s sensors pulled in a swift sequence of images, flicking along the remaining riders to capture faces contorted with rage, hanging on to reins with one hand while they fired off wild shots with ion carbines and lasers. Then they began to fall as the Cruisers continued their fusillade.

“Call them back,” Morton screamed into the general channel. “Get them out of there!” He deployed two plasma carbines and started bombarding one of the Cruisers with pulses. They broke apart into energy flares that whipped impotently across the translucent boundary.

Mortars fired by the McSobels began to land amid the Cruisers, disrupting their fire as force fields hardened temporarily against the electron squalls. Loiter missiles sailed overhead, waiting for the moment when the kinetic fire resumed to slam down hard.

The Barsoomians opened fire. Streaks of violet light hammered into the Cruisers, almost invisible against the sapphire sky. Morton’s tactical software couldn’t classify the weapons at all. The force fields began to glow a perilous rose-gold.

Short-range defense X-ray lasers on the armored cars opened up. Stig and the other drivers coordinated their attack, concentrating on one Cruiser. Morton’s aim shifted with accelerant lubricated precision to join the barrage.

They were halfway down the slope now, ranged at four hundred seventeen meters from the MANN truck. Thick clouds of diesel gushed up out of its vertical exhaust pipes behind the cab, and it started to rumble forward.

“Don’t go,” the Cat yelled at it. “That’ll make me cross.”

The Cruiser they’d been concentrating their firepower on exploded. Morton watched in dismay as the Guardians continued to ride into the kinetic guns. “They’re being slaughtered,” he shouted accusingly.

“We are where we’re meant to be,” Scott replied levelly.

“Fuck that.” He had two HVvixen missiles left. Both of them burst out of his shoulder tubes. Two seconds later they stabbed down on a Cruiser, taking it out in a clean pillar of white flame.

“Bad move,” Rob said. “I think we’ll need them later.”

Morton ignored him. The surviving Cruisers were still shooting. “Cat, Rob: synchronize.” He stopped running, and crouched down as his hyper-rifle slid smoothly up from his forearm. The MANN truck started to draw away. Beside him the Cat and Rob had come to a halt. Charlemagnes charged past in pursuit of the armored cars. Masers from Institute vehicles had locked on to them. The shield webbing protecting the warhorses blazed with energy that was discharged through their elaborately woven saddle tassels; the big beasts raced onward trailing whirlwinds of sparks. Morton pulled targeting data out of the tactical display at accelerant speed, bundled some of it in a neat file that he shunted to the Paris team. “That one.”

Three hyper-rifles fired at once, joined a moment later by the boom of the particle lances. The Cruiser’s force field burned dark crimson. They fired again. The Barsoomians joined them. This time they punctured the force field. “Switching,” Morton told them. He picked a second target while the fireball was still expanding.

The Cruisers were on the move, bucking and juddering over the rough ground as they closed protectively around the MANN truck. Accelerants allowed Morton a seemingly leisured review of the fickle data coming in from the Guardian scouts up ahead. The vehicles carrying the soldier motiles were only three kilometers away now. Already a running firefight had broken out between the aliens and the lead riders of the mounted platoons sent to intercept them. It looked like the soldier motiles were equipped with a very powerful version of a plasma rifle. They were also shooting mini-missiles with enhanced-energy warheads. Once again, the horses were taking the brunt of the attack.

Morton’s wired scrutiny snapped his attention back to one of his own sensor feeds. One of the Cruisers around the MANN truck was firing missiles. A squadron of intense purple sparks went slicing through the air to detonate against the front of Bradley’s armored car with a ferocity that slammed the heavy vehicle back several meters. The blast wave nearly knocked Morton to the ground. He swayed back as the inside of his helmet reverberated with the roar of the explosion.

“This is a strategic balls-up of the first order,” Rob declared. “They haven’t got a fucking clue what to do.”

“Is there anything we’ve got that can split that bastard’s force field?” Morton asked.

“I don’t think so,” Matthew said. “If the zone killers couldn’t do it, nothing we’re carrying can.”

“Bradley,” Alic called, “what’s your plan now?”

“We’re going to ram the truck. That’s the only way left to stop it reaching the Marie Celeste. We must pray the planet is having its revenge.”

“Crazy,” Rob wailed. “This isn’t a battle, it’s a joke.”

Morton swiped his attention across various images. The MANN truck had almost made it to where the road began again. Two kilometers ahead of it, the motile soldiers were brushing off the wild attacks by the mounted Guardians. They’d link up soon enough.

Another flight of missiles from a Cruiser pounded into the armored cars.

“If it’s running for its ship it has to get out of the truck to transfer,” Morton said. “That’s when it’s vulnerable. We just have to keep up.”

“Morty, clever boy,” the Cat said approvingly.

“Are you with me?”

“Wouldn’t miss it, darling.”

“Let’s show these morons how to fight a real war,” Rob said.

“Okay,” Alic said. “We’ll take it to them.”

Morton’s smile was feral as he started running.

***

Amid the gray desolation of solidified lava that comprised the summit of Mount Herculaneum the hyperglider had become difficult to see. Dust churned up by the crash had settled on its white fuselage, sticking to the streaks of ice to tone down the shiny plyplastic like adaptive camouflage. Its sharp aerodynamic planform had disappeared the instant it struck the rock spur, crumpling and warping until it resembled the worn vacuum-boiled ripples of lava on which it had come to rest. In the dark cavity underneath what was the badly smashed-up cockpit a couple of small red LEDs glowed in the shadows, slowly dimming as the ruined power cells decayed.

The thin regolith around the wreckage had been disturbed when Wilson hauled himself out of the inverted pilot’s seat. A trail of meandering sulci led away to the rim of Aphrodite’s Seat, illustrating how he’d pulled his inert legs along behind him as he crawled the remaining two hundred thirty meters. Every now and then the trail widened with broad scuff marks where he’d squirmed around. The exposed lava was covered by flaking splotches of dried blood and little droplets of epoxy foam used to patch the splits in his pressure suit that had torn open again.

Wilson never looked back now. He’d found a smooth cleft right on the precipice that accepted his body like a comfy old sofa. His feet didn’t quite dangle over the eight-kilometer drop, but they were only a few centimeters from it. The pressure suit’s silver-blue fabric was dull beneath a grimy coat of regolith dust it’d picked up as he dragged himself along. Thick pleats of epoxy foam crisscrossed his shattered legs. Two of the blobby lines were still oozing blood; little droplets inflating out from the edges to bubble away in the vacuum. He no longer worried about such things. Painkillers insured his remaining time would be comfortable. The last of the Wild Foxes had successfully completed the mission.

To his right, the arrays and their supplementary electronic modules were arranged neatly on the rock with the broad sensor strips sitting on squat tripods, their matte-black multi-absorbent faces pointing east. The view was perfect, showing him the entire Dessault range all the way across to the tiny spire of Mount StOmer in the east. Far, far below him, the glacier ring was a bright diamante strip braided by thin wisps of cirrus. Farther down, the thick storm clouds continued to sluice around the tremendous volcano. After hours watching keenly, he was sure the power of the winds from the ocean were weakening now. It didn’t matter; the storm had provided the Guardians with more than enough raw material to manufacture their planet’s revenge.

While he lay there in the quiet peace of the vacuum he’d observed the clouds spreading east. From this altitude it was like seeing a white-water torrent pouring down a dry riverbed. The green valleys were slowly occluded by the cumulus, leaving just the rugged gray and white pinnacles sticking above the surface.

In the background Samantha and the others chittered away, their voices like some kind of insect trapped in his helmet. He didn’t say very much to them now, just the occasional comment to confirm some aspect of the observation. At first there was little to see. The storm for all its size and speed was perfectly natural. He lay there watching its progress as the sun warmed his chest and the lava slowly sucked heat out of his spine. Eventually he noticed how the winds were gradually speeding up; the strange way clouds were confined to the mountains. Ordinarily most of the storm would flow away out across the vast expanse of the Aldrin Plains, while on the other side of the Dessault range it spewed around Mount Idle to disperse over the southern pampas lands. Today it was blocked and channeled. As the morning went on he started to recognize the Guardians’ choreography. Between the mountain peaks, manipulator stations churned up gigantic whorls in the fast-flowing cloud, sucking stationary highs into the Dessault range, denying the storm any release. As a consequence, the cloud swarm rose in height as it thronged along valleys, layer after layer building into a solid thunderhead, kilometers deep. With every exit denied it had nowhere to go but east. A smile ghosted Wilson’s face as he watched the front roar along Trevathan Gulf, fed by fresh gales that the manipulator stations injected through every major valley.

Thumb jabbing down hard on the red button at the top of the joystick. Missile launch: its contrail streaking off into the sky. Bring the fighter around back to the safety of the Wild Fox pack. Watch the radar as the missile hurtles toward its target. Distant unfelt kill.

When the winds reached the end of Trevathan Gulf and hit the High Desert they were traveling in excess of five hundred kilometers an hour. There were no manipulator stations out here. They had become irrelevant. The storm was so powerful it was now self-sustaining. Uncontrollable.

The vast deluge of white cloud spread out to obliterate the High Desert. Wilson saw it change color, the cumulus darkening, not with the slate-gray of suspended rain but the ocher of particles siphoned up from the desert floor by an army of twisters that had grown to the size of the very mountains that they had rampaged through. He watched it race toward the final line of pinnacles that guarded the desert’s eastern boundary. The enraged mass grew higher and higher until its thrashing crests finally rose above the snowcapped peaks, eclipsing the lands over which they were about to fall.

***

The soldier motile came at Morton with a nimble arachnid gait, veering from side to side in precise controlled motions. It was different from the ones back at Randtown: each of the four legs forked, giving it eight hoofs. Two of the arms also divided halfway along. The damn thing was insectoid. Triggering deep phobias. Even with accelerant freeze framing its body actions for examination he could never tell which of its hooves it was going to pirouette around next. Targeting was nearly impossible. One pair of the creature’s arms held hefty long-barreled weapons, which Morton was urgently trying to avoid. He did so with a fast low zigzag run, always keeping his feet in contact with the ground, enabling him to switch direction when he needed. Using the ground-eating leap here would give the alien a clear shot as he glided along.

A plasma flare from the soldier motile’s weapon hit the earth beside his feet. The suit’s force field held, but his legs were yanked from under him. In Far Away’s gravity it was an annoyingly slow fall to hit the earth and regain stability. Annoying verging on lethal. The moment stretched in accelerant time. Another blast struck him on the chest. The suit force field flared purple, and he was spinning in the air. Legs flung wide, trying to jab a foot on the ground, anything to kill momentum. Virtual hand moved leisurely through the battle cluster icons, selecting his weapon. Another energy blast stabbed past his helmet. Upper arm plasma grenade canisters thumped out their munitions. Air around the soldier motile glared with fizzing electron static.

Morton hit the ground, flattening himself. The world swept back to operate in real-time. He crouched and sprang. Electromuscle enhancement propelled him forward like a kamikaze aerobot.

The electrons drained away, leaving the soldier motile braced on all eight hooved legs. It was wearing what looked like a loose robe of scaly gray-green fabric, which was also acting as a force field conductor. Its sensor stalks ended in a clump of golden electronic lenses. Some of its arms ended in a tripartite mechanical claw; while the torso was strung with flat metallic boxes webbed with flexible cables. Arm two swung a big gun around on Morton, its sub-branch gripping some kind of grenade. Arm three fired an ion pistol. Arm one was holding a long buzzing blade. Arm four shot the other large gun at a target off toward the road, micromissiles shrieking away from their rotary launcher in its sub-branch.

The ion pulse jangled Morton’s suit sensors as he careered into the alien. For a second he was blinded. Tactile feedback gave him the sense of the alien’s weight against him, its second arm bending to grip around his hips. The blade skating over his neck, hunting a weak spot. Virtual vision shrieked a warning that his force field was being overloaded by some drain mechanism. These soldier motiles were faster than the ones on Elan. Sensor vision returned. Incomprehensible montage of alien suit fabric, purple light, trampled grass. His own senses told him they were falling together. He triggered the electrification circuit, pumping forty thousand volts through his suit. The alien turned lambent crimson. It sought to roll on top of him, legs three and one bucking, trying to latch what felt like hundreds of hoof claws around his ankle and knees. Morton went with the roll, then amplified it with a savage body twist. Wound up on top. His gauntlet clamped around arm one and twisted with full electromuscle strength. Something beneath the alien’s flesh buckled, and the arm bent around at a sharp angle. The claw of arm three closed around his neck. His force field alarm went up a grade.

“For fuck’s sake,” Morton grunted. Five-centimeter talons slid out of every finger on his right hand. He punched down hard. Red lightning spat out of the impact. He kept pressure going as the dump-function on the talon tips pulled energy out of the soldier motile’s force field. A stressed whine cut through his insulation. Then the alien’s force field weakened around the talons. Morton’s hand ripped through fabric and flesh. He thrust it deep into the body turning as he went, ripping organs and blood vessels, then pulled back. It came free reluctantly, sucking up a honey-yellow gore. The soldier motile went limp.

“Morty, we don’t have time to make it personal, darling,” the Cat chided.

A micromissile detonated beside him. A cloud of hyperfilament shrapnel boiled out of the explosion, shredding through soil and surface rock. His force field glared scarlet on the point of overload as he was punched sideways by the writhing impact.

“Told you not to waste the HVvixens,” Rob said.

Morton scrambled to his feet. The Cat was right. They were getting swamped by soldier motiles, of which there was a seemingly endless number. Hundreds of them had jumped out of their vehicles as soon as they reached the MANN truck. Now they were blocking the way forward. Leaving the road to try to outflank them had been a big mistake. A hundred fifty meters to his left, the armored cars were driving down Highway One, their X-ray lasers slashing from side to side like a demented swordsman keeping his opponents at bay. They could pierce the force fields used by soldier motiles if they got within fifty meters, which gave them a small clear area. A flight of micromissiles hammered into the road just ahead of the armored car Bradley was riding in. Hyperfilament shrapnel shredded the concrete to fine gravel. The armored cars started to fishtail as soon as they drove into it, wheels throwing up grit as they spun.

Alic’s particle lances boomed, sending pulses streaming toward the cluster of soldier motiles that had fired the missiles. They toppled to the ground, then started to pull themselves upright again.

Morton scanned his sensors around, building a tactical profile. It wasn’t good. So far they’d traveled about three kilometers on from the original blockade. At least a hundred fifty soldier motiles had them effectively surrounded. The Guardians on their Charlemagnes were a kilometer behind, and holding off—not that they could help. His suit power cells were down to under fifty percent. There had been too many close calls in combat. None of them had any HVvixens left.

His radar scanned ahead, picking out the MANN truck with its escort eight kilometers away. It was traveling fast along the clear road. Bradley wasn’t going to catch it, let alone ram it.

“We’ll ride shotgun,” he said. “Stig, switch off your X-ray lasers. We’re hitching a ride.”

“Morton, we have to catch up,” Bradley said.

Morton could hear panic edging into his voice. “We can cut through if we combine our firepower.” He’d already started running; the other suits were beside him firing energy weapons into the elusive line of soldier motiles. Up ahead, the armored cars took more hits from micromissiles. The road surface was completely trashed, reduced to a mire of loose fragments that bogged them down.

“Shit,” Rob screamed.

Morton’s sensors caught two soldier motiles pouncing. They’d been lurking in a shallow depression, their suits powered down to avoid detection. Limbs lashed out at Rob’s suit as the three of them crashed to the ground in a tangled bucking heap. Force fields flickered between lavender and cerise as weapons fired at point-blank range.

“Keep going,” The Cat insisted.

It was hard. Morton wanted to halt and pound the wrestling figures with shots from his hyper-rifle. Imagery shot into his brain at accelerated speed, and he saw just how many soldier motiles were charging after them. Front rank almost on top of Rob. “Rob!”

“Do it,” Rob grunted. “I’m gonna show them a little Doc Roberts trick any second. These motherfuckers don’t ever learn.”

Morton’s virtual hand flashed into his grid and hauled out Rob’s telemetry. He could see the safety overrides clicking off one by one. Powdery gravel crunched underfoot. The armored car was ten meters ahead. Morton leaped, powerdiving over the curving wedge-shaped vehicle. He’d almost landed on the other side when Rob shorted out every power cell he was carrying. The explosion turned the empty sapphire sky solar white.

“Way to go, Robby boy,” the Cat cried.

Morton’s outstretched hands touched the ruined road. He curled himself into a ball and rolled forward to kill momentum. The fearsome glare drained away. Behind him the armored car was skidding sideways. Stig fought for traction, slewing it back on course. Morton hopped on the front, clinging to one of the X-ray laser mounts.

The Cat appeared beside him as if she’d teleported in. A lone sensor image showed him the smoldering blast crater where Rob had been. Alic thudded onto the roof, gauntlets gripping narrow ridges tight enough to gouge the metal. Morton’s hyper-rifle deployed out of his forearm; targeting graphics slid out of his grid. The three of them began to shoot any soldier motile in a broad swathe ahead of the armored car. “Use everything,” Alic shouted. “Punch them out of the way.”

Morton’s grenade canisters thrummed as they fired. His plasma carbine switched to continuous pulse, hosing out energy. The hyper-rifle swung around as he picked out target after target. Power cell charge wound down at an alarming rate. More ion rifle shots came from behind them where Jim and Matthew were clinging to the armored car Ayub was driving. Micromissiles burst all around, hyperfilament lashing against the suits, streamers of ion fire clawed at the grizzly bodywork of the armored cars. They were driving through a demonic inferno that blotted out every sensor return in a digitized blizzard. His suit surface screeched as the demented energy slashed against it.

Then they were past the bedlam, racing down the gray-white concrete strip of Highway One, shedding static tendrils like chaff. Stig had cranked their speed up over a hundred sixty kilometers an hour; smoke was shooting out from somewhere underneath. Morton hunted around, finding the bulk of the soldier motiles streaming together behind them. Their weapons fire contracted, centering on the last armored car. Jim and Matthew were doing their best to return fire, but they were swamped by the colossal barrage. Hyperfilament shrapnel mauled the road right in front. The armored car exploded.

“No!” Alic cried. “Godfuck all of you. Oh, sweet Jesus, why can we never catch this monster?”

Morton wanted to answer, but all he saw was Rob’s demise, and Doc Roberts, Randtown’s glass crater.

“How much power have you got left?” the Cat asked.

“Twenty percent. Maybe.” Morton checked his schematics. “Bit under.” He started scanning along the side of the armored car. Somewhere inside metal was grinding against metal with a terrible clattering violence. The smoke rushing out from underneath had thickened.

“It’s the one percent that’ll kill it,” the Cat said.

“Stig?” Morton asked. “Are we going to make it?” The sound coming from the armored car sounded terminal.

“We’ll make it. This thing has redundancy everywhere. Sixteen kilometers, that’s all.”

Their speed still hadn’t slackened. Up ahead, the road was angling into the foothills. The Institute valley was visible as a wide saddle that led back to the first mountains of the Dessault range. They weren’t high enough to have snowcaps, but the ones in the misty distance behind them did. He scanned the jagged skyline, looking for any hint of an approaching storm. Far Away’s vaulting sapphire atmosphere was as placid as he’d ever seen it. Damnit, I thought we could rely on the Admiral at least.

The armored car juddered sharply and recovered. He swept his radar along the road, getting a clear empty image until it curved into the valley ten kilometers ahead. The MANN truck was already inside.

“Bradley,” Morton said regretfully. “We’re not going to catch it. Do you have any notion how we can disable the starship?”

“Not disable, no. We just have to delay launch until the storm arrives.”

“How?”

“There is one possible option, if you’re willing to help me.”

That didn’t sound good in any way. Morton wanted to look at the Cat’s face, to see what she felt. Despite her thick shell, he knew her well enough now to read her thoughts.

She could obviously read him a lot better. “We’ve come this far,” she said.

***

The amethyst plasma inside the Dark Fortress churned in violent torment as it was bombarded by radiation from salvos of fifty-megaton fusion bombs. Thousand-kilometer peaks soared up through the gaps in the outer lattice sphere like solar prominences, their extremities evanescing away into tattered streamers. The Charybdis dived down between them and struck the plasma at fourteen gees.

Ozzie had been bracing himself for a spine-snapping impact, even though he knew the plasma had a density that barely disqualified it from being a vacuum. There was a slight tremor, which he had to strain to notice amid the brutal acceleration. He disengaged the drive, and was plunged into freefall so abruptly his maltreated body interpreted it as being flung forward.

“What the fuck?” Mark mumbled.

Ozzie shut down their active sensors. “Flying dark, see?” The passive sensors showed fusion drives drilling through the plasma all around as the Prime missiles hurtled past. “They’re overshooting.”

“Can we navigate like this?”

“Sure. Look at the returns. The plasma is illuminating the lattice spheres in twenty different spectra. We can fly through this, but slowly.” Their velocity was already taking them toward the second lattice sphere at twenty kilometers per second. Behind them, three hundred twenty Prime ships slid through the outer lattice sphere and plunged into the plasma. They launched another massive missile salvo.

“Uh…”

“It’s fine, I can steer us through the second lattice no problem. It’s the negative mass one, there’s like no way we can hit it, we just get shoved away if we get too close, like magnets.”

“Ozzie…Christ! They can see our wake.”

“Huh?”

Behind the Charybdis, a five-hundred-kilometer-long contrail of plasma spiraled like a gargantuan tornado. The armada of missiles was all converging toward the apex at seventeen gees. They started to detonate. The frigate’s hull field blazed rose-gold as it warded off their directed radiation pulses, flinging vast webbed lightning zephyrs off into the plasma. “Shit.” Ozzie pushed power back into the secondary drive, accelerating the Charybdis away from the vector it had been coasting along. G-force shunted him down into the cushioning again. “Are we losing them?”

“No!”

“Mark, you control the weapons, do something!”

“What? I can fire a quantumbuster, a nova bomb, or a neutron laser.”

Behind them, another wave of missiles detonated. Radiation turned the plasma to an opalescent violet.

“Use a quantumbuster.”

“We need to be a million kilometers away at least when one of those goes off—anything closer than that and this frigate is dead.”

“Son of a bitch, we’re not going to make it.”

“You have an incoming call,” the SIsubroutine said. “An encrypted maser link originating outside the first lattice sphere.”

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Ozzie groaned.

“Do you want to establish a connection? The identity certificate is confirmed: Nigel Sheldon.”

Ozzie was crying as he laughed. “Tell him we’ll accept the charges.”

“Yo, Ozzie, how’s it hanging?” Nigel said. “You guys need any help down there?”

***

Both armored cars charged around the final curve in the road, and the Institute valley was directly ahead. The town had the look of a small elite university campus, with villas and apartment blocks colonizing the shallower southern slope in prim rows where their silvered windows looked out over the long white laboratories and engineering sheds that sprawled across the floor of the valley. All of it was dwarfed by the huge cylindrical starship sheltering inside a force field. The scaffolding that had surrounded its eight-hundred-meter length for over two decades had gone, revealing a light gray fuselage that the morning sun gave a satin sheen. Eight dark fusion rocket nozzles dominated its aft superstructure, their external casings inset with concentric thermal duct strips that were glowing a mild maroon as they kept the superconductor coils chilled. Several long blunt fins protruded from the fuselage, fluorescing a deep fuchsia purple as they maintained thermal stability within the internal tanks and generators. Up at the prow, the original tumorous cluster of force field generators had been supplemented by an elongated scarlet cone, fifty meters across at the base. Frost clung to long segments of the fuselage, revealing the outer walls of the deuterium tanks.

A single gantry pillar had been left standing just behind the prow. The MANN truck was parked at its base.

“The son of a bitch made it,” Alic said bitterly.

“We’d have been royally screwed anyway,” the Cat said. “I somehow don’t think these boys would let us pass.”

Soldier motiles had formed a broad line across Highway One and the surrounding ground half a kilometer from the rear of the Marie Celeste.

“Oh, shit,” Morton muttered; there must have been a thousand aliens waiting.

“Ready,” Stig said.

“Hit it.” Morton launched his three electronic warfare drones; the Cat launched her remaining pair. Stig and Olwen had changed the focus on the X-ray lasers; now they fired them in broad fans at the waiting aliens.

For a couple of seconds the soldier motiles were bombarded by false signals and insidiously corrosive software; X rays seared into their electromagnetic sensors. They adapted and filtered and flushed the digital viruses, but there was still a moment while they were purblind.

It didn’t matter. When their sensors regained full functionality and scanned the land in front of them nothing had changed; the armored cars were still racing along Highway One, three armor suits riding on the outside of one that was puffing out hot black smoke. The two vehicles suddenly braked hard, tires squealing as the gearboxes were slammed into reverse. Then they were turning, skidding around as if the concrete had iced over. They started to flee back down the road.

As one, the soldier motiles started running after them. The armored car that was leaking smoke suddenly juddered. It began to slow, sparks flying out from underneath along with thickening belches of smoke. Something inside it was clanging like a broken bell. The soldier motiles opened fire.

“FUUUUUUCK,” Morton yelled, and powerdived off the armored car. The sky around him erupted in a relentless blaze of malignant ion bolts. He hit the edge of the concrete and rolled perfectly, timing it so he recovered his footing in a half turn. Suit electromuscles propelled him into an immediate sprint, his body leaning forward at forty-five degrees. The force field reshaped itself, mushrooming out around his head and shoulders to act as a spoiler, providing downpressure from the air that rushed over him. He swung his hands in a near-Neanderthal gait, knuckles not quite touching the ground, but close.

Sensors caught Stig bursting out through the armored car’s front emergency hatch as its force field’s glow escalated to a scarlet climax. The Guardian sped away, moving with fluid ease in the low gravity. Behind him the soldier motiles concentrated their fire. The crippled armored car exploded.

Up ahead, Olwen’s armored car braked.

“Keep going,” Morton yelled frantically. “Get the fuck out of here.” Micromissiles streaked overhead, pummeling the slow-moving vehicle. “We can outrun them.”

“But—”

“Go!”

The armored car accelerated hard again, building distance.

“Outrun them.” the Cat laughed raucously. “You going to run away from the launch, too, Morty darling?”

He gritted his teeth inside his helmet. Ever since he’d seen the ship he’d been trying to work out how much it massed. A lot of it was fuel; he remembered that from the quick review he’d given the files. Despite that, a quarter of a million tons was a conservative estimate. Even with force field wings generating some degree of lift, igniting the kind of fusion engines that could produce that much thrust would be worse than letting off a strategic nuke.

He saw the dark tide of soldier motiles flow over the burning wreckage of the armored car. They were fast, but they didn’t have electromuscle support. They’d never be able to keep that speed going. Would they?

The Cat was keeping up with him, leaning over at an even greater angle. Alic was off to one side.

“There won’t be a launch,” he grunted.

“Oh, Morty, you’re priceless. These Guardian fuckups have blown every chance they had. This won’t be any different.”

“It has to be. Bradley has to win. The Starflyer can’t go free.”

“Then we should have brought some tactical nukes or a Moscow-class warship. Don’t you get it? This thing is smarter than us.”

“You. Not me.”

“Morton’s right,” Alic said. “It hasn’t launched yet. Bradley just has to keep it on the ground.”

“Men! Why accomplish when you can dream?”

“Fuck you.”

It took them three minutes to cover a kilometer. They didn’t use the road, it was too open. The ground alongside was rugged, with the grass and eucalyptus shrub offering a small degree of cover. They kept going for another fifteen minutes, until Morton’s laser ranger finally showed him they were widening the gap on the soldier motiles behind. “We need to get away from the road,” he said. “The other motiles are still up ahead. I don’t want to be caught between them.”

“Good idea,” Alic said.

Morton changed direction slightly, angling away from Highway One.

“How far do you figure they’ll chase us for?”

“More to the point, how much power have you got left?”

“My suit is down to eleven percent. The force field is a real drain.”

“Look, boys, we don’t have to—”

The sun went out.

Even with accelerant driving his thoughts, it took a second for Morton to register the monstrous anomaly. The light was draining out of the veldt, rushing away from him like an extinction event. “Huh?” He twisted to face the west and tilted his head up, aligning the main visual sensors on the Dessault Mountains. His knees nearly faltered with shock. “Not possible,” he gasped.

***

The Charybdis began to creak in protest as Ozzie shunted the acceleration up to fifteen gees. They were chasing a shallow parabola back up from the second lattice sphere. Behind them, nuclear explosions had pumped the plasma into a solid incandescent white sky. Sensors showed them the outer lattice sphere as back prison bars across the hazy stars.

An armada of Prime ships was curving around to follow them through the turbulent plasma, firing volley after volley of missiles. More explosions bloomed, and an indigo stain began to seep through the plasma as the energy levels built toward saturation. Masers and X-ray lasers left visible cerise lines through the diaphanous ions as they stabbed at the frigate.

Ozzie was feeding small random variations into the acceleration, evading the missiles’ target tracking function. A red mist was encroaching the edges of his virtual vision. He tried to keep his attention on various colored lines that represented important criteria like velocity and closing distance. External cameras showed him a very large dark strut of the outer lattice looming in front of the frigate’s blunt nose. It was a hundred eighty kilometers wide, and stretched out to a junction with five other struts four hundred kilometers ahead.

“Nigel?”

“Contact lost,” the SIsubroutine reported.

“Well, I suppose that’s a good thing,” Mark said. “Proves the material is still electro-repulsive. This thing isn’t dead yet.”

“Right.” Ozzie changed direction again, heading straight up toward the strut. It was fifty kilometers away when he curved around to fly parallel to it; he didn’t dare try to get any farther in. Vast rivers of luminescence flickered on and off deep inside the dark material. “Come on, Nigel.” He reduced acceleration to a steady two gees.

“Do you think they’re—”

Outside the Dark Fortress, the Scylla fired a quantumbuster and immediately dropped back into hyperspace. The missile intercepted a Prime ship, converting a modest percentage of its mass directly to energy. For a brief instant, the radiative output of a medium-sized star contaminated space around the Dark Fortress. It sliced through the forty-eight wormholes MorningLightMountain had opened from its gas-giant settlements, obliterating the generators on the other side and anything else caught inside the beams. Around the Dark Fortress, every Prime ship flared like a comet as it vaporized, trailing dying molecules through the brilliant white void.

Ultra-hard radiation poured through the outer lattice sphere, decimating the ships and missiles inside. Safe in the umbra of the electro-repulsive matter, the Charybdis flew onward unharmed as the radiation sleeted down on either side of the massive lattice strut.

“Now that’s what I call hellfire,” Ozzie mumbled.

Below the Charybdis the plasma had turned a lethal pellucid violet. Visual sensors could see each of the remaining three lattice spheres. The core remained an impenetrable haze.

“Do you think the inner lattice spheres can withstand another blast like that?” Mark asked.

“Who knows, but Nigel was right. We were going to do that anyway when we knock out the flare bomb. Nothing to lose by doing it twice.”

“Nigel Sheldon’s pretty smart, isn’t he?” Mark said admiringly.

“Yeah.” Ozzie’s smile tightened. “Pretty smart.” He fed power into the frigate’s secondary drive, and dived straight down toward the second lattice sphere at eight gees.

The fourth lattice shell was made from a material that appeared to be completely neutral, devoid of any detectable properties, it didn’t even have any mass as far as human sensors could discover. All that existed was its physical boundary. Like the upper three lattice spheres, it remained completely unaffected by the energy deluge from the quantumbuster. Ozzie piloted the Charybdis through it without any trouble. He decelerated to a velocity vector that kept them stationary relative to the core, and extended every sensor.

The rings were in turmoil. They oscillated and stretched, rising and falling in and out of alignment through the ecliptic. The black cables that held together the outermost ring, the daisy chain, were flexing like lengths of elastic as they strove to contain the wild fluctuations of the lenticular disks. Inside that, the green ring that had been so uniform when the Second Chance recorded it was now undergoing curious distensions; bulges would suddenly appear, sending out slow ripples across the surface. The silver braids were nearly breaking apart; while the one of scarlet light was contaminated by dark fissures.

It was the ring nicknamed Sparks that was the worst affected. The river of emerald and amber lights with their cometary tails were being flung out of their simple orbit by a single dark contortion, like ions waltzing around a magnetic anomaly. It took them almost an entire orbit to drop back into the plane, only to be slung out again.

“There’s our bad boy,” Ozzie murmured. The quantum scan showed him the pattern of elongated distortion fields radiating out from a single point as they spun slowly along through the coruscating ring. “A genuine spanner in the works.”

“Target loaded,” Mark said. “Effect field pattern selected. It’ll stand off five thousand kilometers and spike the heart of that bastard.”

“You’re the man,” Ozzie told him.

“Launching.”

The Charybdis gave the faintest shiver as the quantumbuster shot out of its launch tube. Ozzie turned the frigate around, and accelerated hard up through the lattice spheres.

***

Bradley landed in the shallow drainage ditch at the side of Highway One. The soil was damp and squishy, absorbing his impact. He folded himself into a cleft and froze. His suit’s external chromometic layer painted him with low-tone grays and greens to match the grass tufts and mud he’d settled in. Every other system powered down. Thermal batteries absorbed his body’s heat, allowing the suit skin to adopt the same temperature profile as the ditch. A tiny beam of light washed in through a slit in his visor, illuminating his eyes. Outside the armored cars were skidding around. One sounded in a bad way. Their engine noise dopplered away. His breathing was loud in his ears, challenged only by his heartbeat.

The light flickered. Soldier motiles were running past him, several splashing their way along the bottom of the ditch. They were centimeters away.

And fate—mine, the Starflyer, humanity, the Primes—is decided by that tiny distance. But then my fate has taken stranger turns than this in the past. Perhaps the dreaming heavens will smile upon me today.

The movement outside his suit ended. Bradley switched on a lone sensor, and scanned around. There was no immediate sign of the soldier motiles. He stood up, and watched the alien army charge away. Some distance farther along Highway One an armored car exploded.

Keeping the suit fully stealthed, Bradley hurried toward the giant alien starship. He opened passive sensors, knowing the signal he would receive.

Not a sound or an image, at first, more a mélange of feeling—to those who knew how to interpret it. The complex electronic song saturated the air waves, broadcast from every direction to engulf the valley. Together the harmonics that surrounded Bradley had a unity that was remarkable in its complexity. The tunes rose and fell, meshing into a cohesive mind. Bodies, alien and human, sharing every part of themselves: memories, thoughts, sensations. He moved among them, receiving their extended cognizance, drinking it in. Watching the three humans in armor suits running along the road as we chase after them—concern that the human warriors should not be able to interfere with the launch. Observing the many technological facets of the refurbished starship, adjusting the systems as they interact with each other—eager for the long exile to finally end. Maintaining the force field around the ship—determined that no weapon would penetrate. Reviewing the sensors covering the valley—alert for transgressions.

The location and purpose of each body were individual, yet their thoughts were homogenized, replicating their originator. Direction, purpose, came from only one source: the Starflyer.

It moved from the gantry lift into the starship, awakening the giant machine in its entirety. Soon it would leave to vanish amid the stars. Safe. Free.

Bradley told the force field around the starship to admit him. Compliance was a logical thing to expect, given the Starflyer’s ultimate origin. The immotile rules all, nothing deviates from that. However, as the Starflyer was more sophisticated than a standard Prime immotile, it didn’t have the same reticence in allowing electronics to have governing functions over machinery. Electronics were subsidiary to it in the same way as motiles; it programmed them, it set their parameters. They obeyed it.

That was its flaw, Bradley knew, the same as every Prime. It did not understand independence nor rebellion. Its motiles, whether grown in congregation pools from its own advanced genetically modified nucleiplasms, or humans whose brains had been surgically and electronically subsumed to host its own thought routines, were a part of it. Their thoughts were its thoughts, copied and installed from its own brain. None of them deviated. It couldn’t conceive deviation or betrayal, so neither could they.

Security was a one-dimensional concept for the Starflyer. It took precautions to guard itself physically and politically from native humans as it insinuated its human motiles within their Commonwealth society. That was the level of safety it determined it required to insure its survival, a strategy that had been successful.

No human could hack into the electronic network of the Institute valley; as the processors were an extension of the Starflyer’s own mind, they only acknowledged orders that had an internal heritage. What the network and its processors did not have was the ability to discriminate between an order from a genuine motile and a human who remembered the neural “language” of the Starflyer.

In front of Bradley the force field protecting the Marie Celeste realigned its structure to allow him through. He jogged along the bottom of the deep grassy scar that the vast alien ship had scored as it slid along the ground before finally coming to an ignominious halt. Several soldier motiles were patrolling the base of the starship. Their minds told him where they were, the direction they were looking in, where they would look next. Their sensors and eyes never saw his suit’s stealth coating as he hurried into the shadows cast by the big fusion rocket nozzles. Proximity alarms watched passively as he told their processors his presence was legitimate.

The ship had been lifted gradually out of the scar by motiles and civil engineering machinery. A wide pad of enzyme-bonded concrete had been laid underneath to support the weight. Cradles gripped the lower fuselage, holding it off the ground. Bradley walked up the metal stairs on one of the cradles. An access hatch to the fusion engineering bay opened for him, and he ducked inside.

The initial findings on the Marie Celeste published by the Institute were accurate enough. It was comprised of fusion rockets, their fuel tanks, environmentally maintained water tanks containing an alien amoeba-equivalent cell, and the force field generators. From that, public perception remained locked on the knowledge that there was nothing else inside; certainly it possessed no life-support section, no “crew quarters.” A more detailed examination showed (unpressurized) access passages and crawlways remarkably similar to those humans would design into any ship. No maintenance robots were ever found. The first conclusion was that the passages were used only for construction.

Right at the center of the tanks there was a chamber with a life-support system. The Starflyer lived in that, fed with base cells and purified water from the tanks. It didn’t need additional space to move about in; there were no leisure and recreational facilities that any human would have needed during a centuries-long flight. All it did was receive information and supervise the ship’s systems. When necessary it would ovulate nucleiplasms into a freefall vat to grow space adept motiles that would be dispatched on repair assignments. After they had completed their task they would be recycled into nutrients for the base cells in the tanks. Every century a new immotile would be created to house the Starflyer’s mind as the old body aged. All this in a chamber of thirty cubic meters. Easy for a preliminary examination to miss in a volume of twenty-five million cubic meters, especially as it had been badly damaged during the landing.

There were no lights inside the engineering bay, another aspect contributing to the myth of the ship being “solid machinery.” Bradley turned his infrared sensors up to full resolution, and made his way along the cramped passage. It branched several times, some openings like vertical chimneys leading up to the center of the ship. Climbing would take too long for him; he found a corridor leading toward the prow and moved as fast as he could. The corridor walls were open girders. Beyond them, the ship’s major segments were held together inside a simple gridwork. The individual beams of metal were shaking as the fusion drives worked down their ignition sequence. In two minutes the ship would lift from this world to the clean emptiness of space.

Bradley clambered out of the corridor and began to worm his way up through the narrow gap between a deuterium tank and some car-sized turbo pumps. The mindsong of the Starflyer remained perfectly clear to his receptors, even wedged into the lightless metal cavity.

“Remember me?” he asked.

Every motile in the Institute valley froze.

“You do, don’t you? I made sure you wouldn’t forget me.”

The mindsong altered, reaching out into the brains of each human motile contained within the Starflyer’s mental empire. Questioning. Processors ran checks on themselves to see where the aberrant harmonics were coming from.

“Oh, I’m in here with you.”

Outside the ship, the song faltered, withdrawing.

“You didn’t think I was going to miss this moment, did you? I want to be with you when we launch. I want to be certain. I want us to be together when we die.”

Suspicion strengthened until the mindsong became loud enough to exert a painful phantom pressure on Bradley’s ears.

“Bombs, kaos software, biological agents. I forget which. They’re hidden somewhere on board. I don’t remember where, or how long I’ve been here. Perhaps I never went away.”

Over the strident turmoil of the mindsong, Bradley could hear motiles scrabbling along passages. Thousands of them were set loose, swarming like rats, seeking any clue to his whereabouts.

Bradley waited in the pitch-dark as the Starflyer’s thoughts thrashed into doubt and wrath. Waited as the minutes ticked away. The fusion rockets held their ignition sequence.

“Will you launch? I wonder. Flee to the safety of space knowing I can’t survive long. Hope the redundant systems will suffice after the sabotage. Or will you stay? The damage can be repaired here on the ground. Of course, the Commonwealth elite know you exist now. They will be coming in their super-ships. You would not survive their vengeance.”

The mindsong rose to a howl of fury.

Bradley looked down. Below his feet, a motile was standing in the corridor, sensor stalks curving up to gaze on him. It exploded into motion, clawing its way up the girders.

“Too late, I’m afraid.”

Outside the starship, darkness fell.

Bradley smiled, the gesture’s warmth pouring like a balm into the discordant mindsong. “You can never know us. Only a human can truly know another human. The rest of the galaxy is doomed to underestimate us. Just as you have done.”

The hull sensors saw the solid wall of the megastorm sweep out of the High Desert. It towered briefly above the mountains before enveloping them and blasting down into the Institute valley. For a few seconds, the force field over the Marie Celeste resisted the savage assault, radiating a vivid ruby light until the titanic battering overloaded its generator. A sixteen-kilometer-high wave of sand and stone traveling at five hundred kilometers an hour crashed down on the naked starship.

“Farewell, my enemy,” Bradley Johansson said contentedly.

***

The two frigates hung side by side in space, completely invisible. One and a half million kilometers away, the Dark Fortress glimmered like a wan Halloween lantern. It suddenly flared blue-white, rivaling the nearby Dyson Alpha star in magnitude. The light faded as swiftly as it had risen.

“So there was some kind of matter at the core of the flare bomb to convert,” Mark said.

“Looks that way,” Ozzie agreed.

“Can’t see the barrier.”

“Mark, give it a minute, okay. In fact, give it a month. We’ve all been beating up on the Dark Fortress rather badly.”

“The lattice spheres are still there,” Nigel said with quiet admiration. “The damn thing survived two quantumbusters. The Anomines knew how to build to last.”

“No sign of the flare bomb’s quantum signature,” Otis reported. “Looks like you killed it, Ozzie.”

For five hours they waited as the plasma inside the lattice spheres cooled and dimmed. Then it vanished without warning.

“Hey, some kind of shell just appeared around the outer lattice sphere,” Otis said.

“Aren’t you going to say I told you so?” Nigel asked.

“Nah,” Ozzie said. “I figure I owe you one.”

“Something very weird is happening to space out there,” Mark said. “I don’t understand any of these readings.”

“Me neither,” Ozzie said. “How about you, Nige?”

“Not a clue.”

The light from Dyson Alpha faded away to nothing; with it went the radio cacophony of MorningLightMountain’s signals.

“Mission accomplished,” Nigel said. “Let’s go home.”

“Come on, dude, this isn’t the end of it. Nothing like. MorningLightMountain is still out there; it’ll be starting over fresh in a hundred star systems.”

“Ozzie, please, you’re spoiling the moment.”

“But—”

“Home. With one slight detour.”