Chapter One

Assistant far space controller Blenn stirred and came awake slowly. For several seconds he could not separate dream from reality. The dream had been nice, so nice. He slipped back into the dream and smiled as he recalled the way he and the fine, willing, dark-haired Lola from the robo-maintenance department had used her automated controllers to—

Blenn snapped fully alert when the warning gong sounded. He almost fell from his chair in his haste to face the probe screens directed to-ward the outer fringe of the system. Never in the three months he had been on duty for the sector had anything appeared more interesting than a small asteroid. Red lights blossomed like madness across his control board.

"Damned incompetents," he grumbled as he worked to cancel what had to be spurious read-ings.

"Nobody can repair anything right any-more. Whatever happened to good maintenance programmers?" His anger faded and his heart threatened to run away when he discovered a fully opera-tional board. He leaned back for a moment, barely understanding the magnitude of his problem. Then he spun and hit the supervisor alert button.

"Danil, I've got a thousand indications of pen-etration. It must be a comet that split apart. But what a comet!" His eyes flashed to the mass de-tectors. He turned cold all over when he saw the densitometer readings. This was no gaseous, half-frozen ball of ammonia that had split apart. His readings matched the transuranic el-ements.

He had detected a fleet of more than ten thou-sand vessels.

"Show me. Transfer to my board. I'm not get-ting anything," came the supervisor's irritable voice. He, too, had been disturbed and did not appreciate it. Danil hadn't been dreaming of Lola; he had been with her.

"Why can't you see it? It should have lit every board in the center." The far space controller fought to keep himself from shouting. He settled down and tried to think it through. Danil grum-bled constantly, even after the readings trans-ferred to his vidscreen.

"You're demoted one rank," snapped Danil. "There's nothing unusual on the readouts. Quit daydreaming on duty."

"But—" Blenn fell silent. All indication of an invasion fleet had winked off his densitometer and mass spectrometer readouts. He leaned back, sweating in spite of the cool wind blowing from the small room's air ducts. He had done the preliminary checks and his equipment func-tioned within design parameters.

"Damned if I know what's going on," he said to himself. Blenn began working through a full systems check. Fifty seconds after he started, his finger stabbed down on the supervisor's call button.

"What is it now?"

"The peripherals are malfunctioning. Run your own check. Something has circumvented them."

"Impossible. That would take weeks of work, even if someone knew where all the detectors orbited."

"Someone did it—and they were a fraction of a minute off in cutting in their own readings. We're getting recordings, not real-time pickup."

The irascible supervisor cursed, then chased Lola from his office and began his own circuitry check. The expression on his face gradually changed from irritation to disbelief. Then he turned and alerted his own superior.

Assistant Far Space Controller Blenn relaxed. He had done all he could to warn of possible trouble. He remained unsure what had oc-curred.

He remained unsure until the Death Fleet ap-peared in formation at a range close enough to rake his planet with their radiation cannons.

The boy should have been in school, but the afternoon was too warm to endure another in-stant of stuffy classroom. He had not bothered returning to his school console; it might be an hour before a random check showed he wasn't working. He leaned back, head resting on his folded hands. He had plugged in an old drill program he had finished weeks ago. Computer teachers were so dumb sometimes. Not that he minded. The warm air turned him drowsy, and the few breezes blowing up from the valley carried a hint of rain that might fall later. He remembered distant Earth with no real pleasure. The weather there was too pre-dictable. Anyone could vote on what they wanted. It seldom rained because everyone in-sisted on sunshine.

He liked occasional rain. It made him feel... sinful. That was the only way he could describe it. He wasn't supposed to get wet. His clothing disintegrated, and his mother had to reprogram and use precious ration units, but he didn't care.

He liked the feel of rain against his face.

He drifted, more asleep than awake. The roar like a million thunderclaps brought him bolt upright. His eyes widened as he stared at the cloud-specked blue sky. Huge patches of fester-ing black appeared everywhere. At first he thought it might be storm clouds forming. Then

he caught the glint of sunlight off flat black metal.

"Ships," he whispered, as if someone might overhear. "There must be a sagan of them up there." There weren't billions and billions; there were only ten thousand, but they worked in perfect coordination and performed the deadly work of orders of magnitudes more.

The boy grinned when he saw a rainbow arch down from a black ship. It was so gentle, so peaceful, such a promise of rain and freedom and everything he enjoyed so.

The grin faded when he realized that the rain-bow did not bring assurance but death. Any-thing living within the path of the rapidly sweeping shaft of radiant energy died horribly. He shot to his feet when he saw the black-ened grass appear at the base of the hill. A tree exploded and spewed boiling sap in all di-rections; the burned-out carcass looked like a black skeleton. One finger pointed at him, marking him for death. He didn't bother put-ting on his boots. Barefoot, he ran for his life up the steep slope.

The swath of death followed—too fast.

He never saw the lovely rainbow. The ionizing radiation from the Death Fleet's warship burst apart every cell in his body. He experienced a surge of pain and then infinite blackness and death. The rainbow scoured the hillside of all life

and rushed on, seeking anything living and leaving undisturbed all inanimate objects.

"They might as well be saturation bombing with neutron bombs," the scout-ship pilot told his three passengers. They crowded into a space cramped with only two. The pilot had been pre-paring to lift when the Death Fleet struck. He and three maintenance men had blasted into a low-planet orbit, escaping the first delicate and deadly rainbow touch by seconds.

"You mean, they're not blowing up anything? They're just killing anything alive?"

"Looks like," the pilot said. He worked on his small vidscreen. He made contact with a dozen checkpoints, but no human responded. All auto-mated transponders worked without a glitch, but the living controllers behind them did not answer.

Using both his optical-detection and syn-thetic-aperture radar-mapping equipment, he watched the progress of the destruction below. He felt like vomiting. Cities that had teemed with people now stood devoid of life. It looked as if the inhabitants had simply left, but he knew they were slumped over consoles and in lobbies and in transit equipment, fried beyond recognition. The rainbow weapon had not cared if they were newborn or old; all died under its implacable caress.

"Why didn't we have any warning? Those bastards in Far Space Control must have sold us out!" The maintenance man raged and tried to

swing his fist. The compartment was too cramped. The two beside him restrained him from further angry outbursts.

"The controllers? I doubt it. Why let in a fleet that's not likely to take any prisoners."

"They sold us out. What other explanation can there be?"

The pilot shrugged. He had no idea. He worked mapping the rocky outer planets in the system. Occasionally, he sent small detectors speeding on their way into orbit around the pri-mary. Ever since Mordred III had been devas-tated by the comet, all Earther colonies kept close watch for incoming cometary objects. A fleet this large could not have slipped by un-seen.

"They might have burned out the detectors," suggested another. "You know they're easy tar-gets for proton storms."

"If all the detectors went out simultaneously, there'd still be an alert. We got nothing. And why didn't someone spot such a huge fleet on radar? There's continuous scanning to keep our near-planet traffic under control."

"Good questions," the pilot said, his gorge ris-ing as he watched the efficient death meted out to his home world by the stark, black-metal-hulled fleet. He switched on all his recorders and got what information he could on the ships and their weapons. He knew it was pitifully small and insignificant. A combat scout might have discovered more. A combat scout might also have been destroyed. The pilot checked his energy leakage. The tiny scout might have been dead in space for all the power it consumed. Most of the power required went for air circulation and purification. He kept the engines on standby and used only mini-mal capacity for the radar spying.

He closed his eyes and rubbed them. Spying. That's what this was. An enemy had swept through the system and unerringly found the nerve center for the planet. He had seen the way the rainbow energy weapons sought out the de-fensive positions, the military complex, the places around the city where ships might be launched to defend a hapless world. He had been lucky.

He rubbed his eyes even harder. The heat in-side the ship from the four bodies overwhelmed the small exchanger unit's capacity. The air tasted stale and laden with sweat and fear. Was he really lucky?

"What are they doing now?" demanded one of the men.

"Can't tell," the pilot said. "They're systemati-cally beaming the surface. There's no way any-one will be left alive."

"Bastards."

"Who are they?" asked another. "This isn't some rebel group out to overthrow the Empire." The pilot shrugged. What did it matter? He doubted rebels had the support to build the im-mense fleet now orbiting the planet. If they did, they would directly attack the emperor on Earth. His own sympathies lay with the rebels rather than the genetically altered emperor, but

those were distant concerns now. He enjoyed living on the frontier, as primitive as it was, be-cause he didn't have to think about the strut-ting, prancing, superior men and women and... things. Here, he did his job and everyone left him alone.

Everyone except the people in huge black spaceships with radiation weapons efficiently killing every human on the planet.

He scowled when he saw a few hundred of the largest ships changing orbit. They moved into polar orbits with exaggerated eccentricity. He punched the data into his onboard computer. The ships maneuvered to give them the most time low over the major land masses. The pilot watched in fascination as the first of the im-mense ships dipped down and looked as if it fell apart.

"They blew up!" cried a man peering over his shoulder.

"No," the pilot said, thinking furiously. He worked on the computer, making sure he re-corded every instant of the strange operation. "They're landing. They're actually invading the planet."

"All the Empire Service officers say that's not possible."

"They're doing it." The pilot increased magni-fication and watched as massive land rovers spread out.

"What are they doing?" asked another.

"Can't say, but it might be that they're looting the planet." The pilot shifted the memory blocks from his mapping cameras into a safety vault,

then cycled in new cerampix to record every de-tail. "They used their radiation weapons to scour the planet of life. They want what's left."

"They're welcome to my vidset," grumbled the third man, who had been silent to this point. "Damned thing never worked right."

The pilot tried to make sense of what he saw. Until he had seen the efficient dark automated beetles moving out to scoop up the spoils of genocide, he had considered it possible that rebels really were behind the attack. No rebel needed the types of material disappearing into the automated maws below.

"Aliens," he muttered. "I'd heard rumors of a couple systems getting hit, but I thought it was all outgassing."

"I heard something similar in a bar. The Pro-teus, down by Jeffcan Supply? You know the place?" The pilot grunted noncommittally. The man rattled on about how a drunken coworker had told him of major destruction wrought farther out in the Orion Arm.

"We've got to get to another system. They took us by surprise. I don't know how, but they did. We can stop them. Look at those ships. There's not a one that can stand up to an Empire Ser-vice cruiser. All we need is time to prepare."

"So how are we going to do it? I'm getting damned hot in here. Can't you turn up the heat pump on this tub?"

The other maintenance men grumbled about the rising temperature, too. The pilot didn't bother telling them the scout ship was at the

limits of its operational capacity. They worked on ships similar to his every day and knew the workings better than he ever could. They com-plained only to assure themselves something was right in the universe.

For his own part, he wasn't sure. He couldn't take his eyes off the magnified image on his vid-screen showing the huge automated pirate fac-tories below reducing a planet's wealth to easily looted crates. The material went in the front end of the huge black beetles and came out the rear. Smaller ferries swooped down, grappled onto the crates, and lifted directly for the mother ships. The en-tire operation proceeded without mistake or missed signal. The coordination between the looters and the orbiting cargo ships was super-lative.

"They've finished bombarding the planet," the pilot said, a hollowness rising inside. That meant nothing survived below—except the alien looters. He didn't have a family to speak of on-planet, and he had just broken up with his girlfriend, but they were all dead now. His boss and the few friends he had made and even the most casual acquaintances—all gone. Dead.

Dead by alien hand.

His knuckles turned white as he clutched hard at the edge of the control panel. A strong hand on his shoulder brought him out of his emo-tional wasteland of loss and anger.

"What?" he snapped.

"We got to do something. We're not outfitted for a long trip, not with four of us aboard. There's nothing for any of us down there." The maintenance man pointed toward the vidscreen showing the voracious black beetle machines creeping through the city, tiny robot feeders scurrying back and forth to keep a steady flow through the packager. Crates dropped behind the machine and were hurried to cleared areas where the ferries swooped down for them.

"They've done this before," the pilot said, anger rising. "This isn't the first world they've destroyed and robbed."

"Space take 'em," the man said. "The world's gone. The whole damn colony has bought it. We've got to think about our own necks."

"We can't shift for another system. There's not enough fuel." The pilot laughed harshly. "There's not even enough oxygen, and we'd fry halfway there. It's harder to get rid of waste heat in shift space than it is in normal space."

"How many can this wreck shift safely?" the man asked in a low voice.

"Two. Maybe three, but that's pushing back the bubble's edge. Why do you—" The pilot watched with a growing sickness as the man swung around. A short punch with the tips of his fingers crushed one man's windpipe. Before the third maintenance man could re-spond, his nose had been driven up into his brain. Both had been killed with a minimum of fuss or mess.

"We'd better waste the air and jettison them. I don't want to share the compartment with two dead men all the way to... where?"

The brightness in the killer's eyes made the

pilot stammer. "Near. Lyman IV. Yes, Lyman IV."

The two bodies drifted just outside the scout ship. The pilot couldn't take his eyes off the near-view vidscreen showing hull conditions. The dead faces always seemed to swing around toward him, open and accusing eyes on him.

He began laying in a course through shift space—the only reason he still lived. The main-tenance man could kill him any time he wanted, but he needed piloting expertise. One vidscreen filled with two dead bodies and another show-ing massive plundering, he set the computer for the shift. He wondered how long he would live.

He wondered how long any human would.