Trooper Maleska led his squad down a dark, smoky stretch of Kinzhol’s main street. Broad scorches marred most of the buildings along this avenue. Not one had even a single window intact, and their façades were pitted with shrapnel scars and long trails of large-caliber bullet holes. Several had been reduced to broken-concrete foundations studded with shorn-off steel beams twisted in every direction.

He tuned out the slow-rushing roar of Venekan jumpjets cruising high overhead. Moments later, a loud explosion a few blocks away sent a glowing fireball mushrooming into the sky, followed by a plume of inky black smoke that melted into the night. The blast shook a cloud of dust off the ramshackle skeleton of a building on his left. He paid it no mind.

Debris was strewn in a chaotic jumble across the street. Maleska and his soldiers moved slowly, crouched low to the ground, their short-barreled rifles held level against their shoulders. The men on the sides of the formation crab-walked sideways while watching the flanks for any sign of enemy movement. All Maleska saw were civilians: some staggering aimlessly in shock; some cowering from him and his troops; some trying to preserve any semblance of their ordinary lives in the aftermath of a barrage of high-tech, pyrotechnic horrors.

A knot of twenty-odd X’Mari civilians drifted across the intersection ahead of the platoon. They were ragged and filthy, and they moved with a random, desperate curiosity as they sorted through the rubble and dirt, looking for who knew what. In the middle of the four-way intersection there was a crater where a bomb had exploded. As far as Maleska could see, the roads had been shredded, as if a fiery blade had shorn off the top layers of pavement. Twisted strips of the roads’ aluminum undergirders were scattered everywhere, wedged into vehicles and corpses, or jutting out of buildings they’d impaled.

A door banged open to his right. He turned and aimed his rifle. A X’Mari man backed carefully out of the doorway, helping another man carry a sofa. Behind them emerged a woman carrying an enormous duffel bag on her back and two large cases, one in either hand. Following her was a trio of children, the youngest barely old enough to walk, all clutching one or two favorite toys as they abandoned their home.

As Maleska and his squad neared the end of their patrol route, he thought he saw a discarded bouquet of white flowers on top of the overturned, blasted-out, carbonized frame of a car. As he passed the smashed vehicle, he realized that the bouquet was actually a dead, white bird.

The soldiers moved cautiously through a hazy wall of gray, fuel-smelling smoke and turned the corner to the checkpoint at the end of their assigned sector. As they broke through the veil of smoke, Maleska saw the street was littered with broken musical instruments. Standing in the midst of the shattered items was a lone X’Mari man who stared, silent and forlorn, into the hollow, charred shell of what had once been a music shop.

Maleska looked back at his squad. Yellik, who had been bringing up the rear, signaled all-clear. Maleska beckoned his radioman forward and accepted the radio handset from him. He punched in his security code. “Sync-Com, Five-Nine Jazim. We’ve finished our patrol. Sector masara all-clear. Over.”

“Five-Nine Jazim, Sync-Com,” came the staticky reply. “All-clear confirmed. Proceed due south on Genmeck Road and secure the river port with extreme prejudice. Over.”

“Sync-Com, Five-Nine Jazim. Secure the river port, acknowledged. Five-Nine Jazim out.” Maleska looked down Genmeck Road toward the river port a half-dozen tiliks away. There seemed to be nothing left intact between here and there.

He motioned his squad forward and began marching south toward the river. A light flurry of snow begin to fall. He watched the flakes melt before they reached the smoldering, scorched ground, and wondered if any part of this country would survive the Venekan Army’s dubious mission of liberation.

Ganag let his oar drag broadside in the water to the left of the skiff, turning the sliver-shaped watercraft neatly into the broad mouth of a corroded, half-submerged sewer drain. The stench of excrement and industrial waste assaulted his nostrils. He paddled the skiff slowly into the pipe. His paddle thunked against the sides of the pipe with a low, hollow metallic echo. The sound reverberated down the length of the pipe and back again, waking Lerec and Shikorn.

Shikorn swept his long, tangled bronze hair out of his eyes. “I dreamed I’d been buried in karg,” he said. He sniffed, looked around, and frowned. “I was right.”

“We needed to take cover,” Ganag said. “The sun’ll be up any minute.” He reached up and secured the anchor line to a protruding valve handle. Lerec failed to suppress a sick cough that sounded dangerously close to a retch. “Shut him up,” Ganag said, realizing only after he’d spoken that Shikorn was already placing a clean, folded cloth over Lerec’s nose and mouth, as a filter. Moments later, the young boy’s coughing ceased as he breathed through his covered mouth.

“Where are we?” Shikorn said, his near-whisper amplified by the close quarters of the pipe. Ganag pulled his own, threadbare blanket from his seat and unfolded it.

“On the outskirts of Lersset,” he said. “Maybe five tiliks from the edge of town.”

Lerec seemed calmer, but he was shivering now. “Why can’t we go and get some food?” he said.

Ganag wrapped his blanket around himself and huddled down into the stern of the boat. “Because you’ll be seen, we’ll get caught, and we’ll be killed,” Ganag said. He curled up for warmth and closed his eyes. “Now be quiet and go back to sleep. Save your strength.”

“I can’t sleep,” Lerec said. “I’m too hungry.”

“How hungry can you be?” Shikorn said as he crawled back under his own blanket. “You ate just yesterday.”

“No, the day before,” Lerec said. “And it smells here.”

Ganag sighed. He tried not to let his frustration with the boy prevent him from getting to sleep. He’d done most of the paddling since the bridge in the Scorla Pass, and his arms felt like knotty wood. He was hungry, too, but sleep was more precious to him than food right now.

“You’ll eat tonight, after we reach the Resistance,” Ganag said. “Now go back to sleep before we drown you.” Ganag didn’t enjoy making Lerec suffer, but right now it was necessary. Hungry, he reminded himself, is better than dead.

The pre-dawn sky was dark with clouds as Stevens, Gomez, and Hawkins crawled, side by side, up a snow-covered slope toward the crest of a hill. The gravity on Teneb was a bit more than Stevens was used to, and he felt as though he were dragging a large, dead weight behind him. He also could have sworn that the snow on this planet was colder than the brutal winters back home in the Rigel colonies, though that was probably only his imagination. As they inched over the top, they saw the brightly lit cluster of activity half a kilometer below.

A kilometer-long gouge in the soil, caused by the probe’s impact, had been cordoned off with what looked to Stevens like a lot of hastily erected, prefabricated metal fencing topped with razor wire. Dozens of technicians in bright orange, full-body protective gear paced back and forth inside the trench, stopping occasionally to take samples or examine small bits of debris.

Parked on either side of the impact scar was a fleet of vehicles ranging from several kinds of large trucks to assorted types of four-person utility vehicles to armored assault craft. Scores of uniformed Venekan soldiers milled about. Several of them patrolled the site’s perimeter.

Along the outer edges of the base camp, a large, fixed-wing aircraft with rotatable turbine engines split the air with a high-pitched roar as it made a slow, vertical landing. As its landing gear touched down onto the cross-marked landing area, its side hatches slid open, and another twenty-four Venekan soldiers bounded out and jogged in formation toward the camp’s central, tentlike command pavilion.

Stevens looked up as another pair of the same type of aircraft shrieked overhead. Gomez leaned toward Hawkins. “How many, do you figure?”

Hawkins narrowed his eyes as he studied the Venekan troops. “About two hundred on the ground,” he said. “Based on the number of landing platforms, I’d say there are three more of those aircraft in the area, counting the two that just flew over.”

Stevens checked his tricorder readout. “The probe’s stopped moving, four hundred eighty-two-point-seven kilometers from here, on bearing one-eight-four-point-two.” He looked down at the Venekan troops. “Think their buddies have it?” he said.

Gomez shook her head. “No, look at these guys,” she said. “If they had it, it’d be halfway around the world by now.”

Hawkins nodded in agreement. “Definitely,” he said. “They’d want it as far from here as possible. Same would go for any foreign powers trying to scoop it up. The fact that it’s as close as it is tells me the X’Maris have it.”

“Only one way to be sure,” Gomez said. “Let’s keep moving.”

Stevens followed Gomez as she turned to shimmy back down the hill. He stopped as he saw the barrel of a rifle pointed at his face from less than three meters away. “Halt!” an angry male voice said. “Hands in the air!”

Stevens waited until Gomez raised her hands over her head, then he did the same, followed by Hawkins.

Three Venekan soldiers, dressed in gray-and-white camouflage, kept their rifles aimed at Gomez, Stevens, and Hawkins while three more Venekan sentries, in the same winter gear, circled behind the trio.

Stevens’s pack was torn from his back and flung onto the ground, its contents strewn across the snow. Beside him, Gomez’s and Hawkins’s packs were given the same treatment. He looked down the snowy hill and followed the soldiers’ footprints.

All six soldiers had been concealed beneath the snow and soil, buried into the hillside itself. They must have been in position even before it snowed, Stevens realized. We crawled right past them on the way up.

He heard Hawkins fall to the ground, followed by Gomez. He tried to brace himself, but the soldier’s boot slammed into the back of his knee and his leg buckled beneath him. He was pushed face-first into the snow-covered dirt and winced as the Venekan’s boot pressed sharply on his neck. Another soldier searched through his pockets. They found his tricorder and pulled it out to examine it.

“Let me see those,” the soldier in charge said.

A moment later, Stevens heard the whisper-soft poof of his tricorder self-destructing at the molecular level, right in the Venekan’s hand. Two more poofs were all that announced the loss of Hawkins’s and Gomez’s tricorders.

The soldier in charge sounded very unhappy about having just inexplicably lost three very important pieces of evidence. “First squad, take ’em down to camp,” he ordered. “Second squad, police up the rest of their gear and log it in with the quartermaster. I’ll notify Sync-Com.”

Stevens felt the boot lift from his neck. He was yanked back to his feet. The flurries of snow that had followed them south from the beam-in point grew heavier as he, Gomez, and Hawkins were pushed forward and down the far slope of the hill toward the floodlit base camp below.