26JUNE 2148

Lander Dragon Three

New Sumer, Ishtar

0032 hours ST

The Dragon descended over the Legation compound, depositing the lander module on the broad plaza in front of the old xenocultural mission. The doors swung up, the ramps came down, and Garroway stumbled into the murky twilight of a city engulfed in battle. It was, he decided, a good thing that the landing was already under way and the situation well in hand; he was feeling dazed after the hurried evac and the destruction of An-Kur, and he would have had considerable trouble snapping to if there’d been anyone here to fight.

In fact, there’d been little fighting in the Legation compound. The first LMs had touched down twenty minutes earlier to find the entire walled-off area deserted. In fact, the purple-red nakaha vines and hairmoss-alga clinging to the facades of many of the buildings, the doorways still gaping open, the holes in walls and windows unrepaired, all contributed to an almost oppressively lonely feeling of utter desolation and abandonment.

A few Ahannu bodies lying in the courtyard behind the main gate gave evidence that the compound had not been completely undefended, but most of the Frogs who’d been here, seemed to have fled. Outside the compound it was a different matter. The city of New Sumer—Shumur-Unu, according to remembered downloads—was a vast and teeming sprawl of low buildings, conical huts, flat-topped pyramids, and labyrinthine walls of mud brick extending north and west of the compound on both sides of the slow meander of the Saimi-Id River. Though most of the native inhabitants appeared to have fled, a fairly steady gauss-gun fire from snipers in the tops of pyramids and the taller buildings kept things interesting for the landing force. Primitive rockets hissed through the early dawn sky, exploding randomly within the compound walls with loud reports and clouds of black smoke. Beyond the walls, smoke billowed skyward from five different locations where Marine assault teams or aircraft had already suppressed particularly annoying sniper strongpoints.

“With me!” a waving figure called. “Advance Recon Landing Team, with me!”

Garroway, Vinita, Garvey, and the rest from Lander Three jogged toward the figure, where the other ARLT Marines were gathering as well. Without the net to connect them on a subconscious level, Garroway couldn’t tell the man’s rank, but when the Marine reached up and removed his battle helmet, he recognized him.

It was Captain Warhurst, the ARLT CO.

“Listen up!” Warhurst called as they fell into ranks before him. His face looked haggard and pale. “The main assault force has the situation well in hand. We’re being put into ready-five.” That meant they were in reserve, ready to go into action on five minutes notice. “Your orders are…stay in armor, keep your weapons ready and powered up, and remain in this general area in front of Building 12. I’ll pass the word if we’re ordered up.

“I know you’re all wondering what the hell is going on since the net went down. I can’t tell you a whole lot myself, but here’s what I do know: theDerna has been damaged but is still in orbit. I don’t know how bad that damage is or whether it will affect the ship’s ability to transport us home, but I will remind you that we have an international relief force on the way in our tracks, maybe six months behind us. We are not —I repeat,not —stranded here, so you can belay that scuttlebutt right now.

“I’ve heard one piece of scuttlebutt to the effect that there’s not enough Earth-type food here. Although one of the robot freighters, theAlgol, was destroyed an hour ago, the other, theRegulus , is undamaged. We can assume she’s being unloaded now and that fresh supplies, food, and ammo are on their way.

“In addition, let me remind you all that there is a sizable human population here on Ishtar and has been for at least one hundred centuries. Our ethnoarcheologists have been telling us for some time now that most of the edible grain crops and domestic animals that appeared suddenly in the Middle East ten thousand years ago were gene-engineered by the Ahannu as a part of their colonization effort. Apparently, they use the same nutrients we do. There are Earth-native crops in the surrounding region, and we can eat most of the local food crops as well. We arenot —repeat,not —in danger of starvation.

“And finally, Marines, I have a special announcement.Comp ’ny, atten-hut!”

Garroway came to attention, along with the hundred or so other Marines in ranks.

“Attention to roll,” Warhurst intoned, his voice solemn, slow, and deliberate.

“Sergeant Alicia Jane Couture…

“Sergeant Kathryn DaSilva…

“Sergeant Nathaniel Easton Deere…

“Staff Sergeant Kenneth K. Feltes…

“Gunnery Sergeant Athena Horst…

“Lieutenant Joseph Edward Kerns…

“Sergeant Laurel Knowles…

“Sergeant Jacob Wayne Lowenthal…

“Corporal Jarrett Luttrell…

“Sergeant Abram Muhib…

“Sergeant Carol O’Malley…

“Staff Sergeant Krista Ostergaard…

“Staff Sergeant Frank Edward Stryker…

“Gunnery Sergeant Maria Ann Valdez…

“These fourteen Marines sacrificed their lives in order to safeguard theDerna and this mission. At tremendous personal risk, they reentered Objective Krakatoa when the enemy defense complex reactivated, in an attempt to reach and reprogram the nuclear device planted in Objective Krakatoa’s control center. When they could not reach the device due to time limitations and massive enemy assaults, they instead served as a communications relay for the triggering signal to detonate the weapon, destroying Objective Krakatoa.

“By calling friendly fire on their position, they saved the ISTDerna and all of the Marines and other assets still on board from near-certain destruction, at the cost of their own lives. We will observe now a moment of silence in the memory of fallen comrades.”

Garroway stood at rigid attention with the others. The silence was not complete, certainly. The cracks and bangs of scattered combat continued to sound beyond the compound walls, a freshening wind sighed among stone buildings, and, nearer at hand, NCOs bawled orders at running Marines. A pair of Marine Wasps, boldly painted black and yellow strike fighters, howled overhead, banking toward the sprawl of New Sumer on the far side of the river.

Somehow, the noise of battle was part of another world, remote in time and space. Here, there was only the still introspection honoring dead heroes and friends.

“It is my intention,” Warhurst said, breaking the moment’s silence, “to recommend all fourteen members of Task Force Kerns for the Medal of Honor in recognition of their bravery, self-sacrifice, and service above and beyond the call of duty, all in the finest tradition of the United States Marine Corps.

“That is all.Comp ’ny, dismissed!”

The ranks began to dissolve into individual Marines once more. Garroway turned then, looking west. He could see An-Kur, a slumped, black mound beneath a pillar of angry, gray-black ash dominating the horizon. The cloud nearly obscured the swollen globe of Marduk hanging above what was left of the mountain.

Gunny Valdez, dead? Goddess! He’d talked to her an hour ago…had wanted to join her. Shit, he’d known then that whatever she was doing, it was likely a one-way deployment. She’d turned him away, and somehow the rejection was a sour bitterness, burning throat and eyes. Of their whole squad, only he, Womicki, Dunne, Garvey, and Vinita were left. Five out of twelve. Shit, shit,shit. He felt as if he’d just lost his family.

And, he thought, he had. His mother was far away now and ten years older than when he’d last seen her. Goddess alone knew where Lynnley was. The only family he knew now was the Corps, and seven of his eleven closest relatives had just been whisked away in the space of a scant few hours. By what quirk of the universe, by whatright , was he still alive and breathing and, worst of all,thinking, while they were all dead? It wasn’t fair.

He felt as though the waves of loneliness just outside his circle of personal space were threatening to crash through and engulf him.

He became aware of a presence…no, of two presences, at his side—Garvey and Vinita, both still in armor save for helmets and gloves, their faces smudged with smoke and grime acquired at some unhelmeted moment in the past hour.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” Vinita said. Her grief was tangible.

“No one promised us fair,” Garroway said.

“Yeah,” Garvey said, “but you know? Sometimes the universe just outright sucks big, slimy rocks.”

“Maybe so,” Garroway said. “And maybe we just have to pretend it all makes some kind of sense.”

Trade Factor’s Quarters

Legation Compound

New Sumer, Ishtar

1015 hours ALT (Arbitrary Local Time)

Gavin Norris surveyed the mess that had been the PanTerran office with growing anger, then slammed his fist down on the already cracked case of a computer monitor. The large windows overlooking the compound had been smashed in, and the stringy-fuzzy purplish stuff that passed for vegetation here had invaded the open room. There was water pooled on the floor…and cabinets that once had held data storage crystals had been overturned and scattered everywhere. Mold grew on the walls and ceiling, and parts of the wall showed black streaks indicating an old, old fire. A desk safe gaped open and empty. If Carleton had left any corporate records here, they’d been utterly destroyed by Ahannu mobs and ten years of the wet local weather. Damn it, it wasn’tfair. …

Not that he’d been counting on Carleton’s efficiency. His briefings back in New Chicago had begun with the assumption that he would have to basically start over. But if the man had just thought to leave a note scrawled on a wall, perhaps with a clue or two as to the location of a fireproof lockbox with a stash of backup storage crystals…

He would have to begin again here, from scratch.

“Did you find what you’re looking for?”

He turned at the voice. Dr. Hanson stood in the doorway that had been smashed open a decade ago by rampaging alien mobs.

“No,” he replied. “My…predecessor didn’t keep a very tidy office, it seems.”

“Don’t blame him. Blame the company he kept. Looks like the Ahannu pretty well trashed the place when they broke in. I’m surprised they didn’t burn it to the ground.”

“They burned a number of buildings, I gather.” He looked around the office in disgust. “Damn it, what brought all this on? We had a solid rapport with the local nabobs. Things were going sowell! ”

“It’s beginning to look like a classic case of Alexander’s First Law.”

“Alexander’s…First Law? What’s that?”

“An important xenosociological concept,” Hanson replied. “Advanced by the guy who came to be known as the Father of Xenoarcheology, back in the twenty-first century. It states that the members of any given culture will understand the customs, attitudes, and worldview of another culture solely within the context of their own.”

“I don’t get it.”

“There were Native Americans who encountered Europeans for the first time who thought the foreigners were traveling inside gigantic black water birds with huge white wings. Sailing ships with sails, you see?

And the ancient Sumerians thought the Anunnaki—‘Those who came from the heavens to Earth,’ as they called them—were gods.”

“Well…sure. That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Primitive savages are going to think that a computer or a flashlight is magic direct from the gods, right?”

“If their culture allows for the possibility of gods and magic, yes. The point is,no culture is free of its own cultural bias. Including ours.”

“What are you getting at? I don’t follow.”

Dr. Hanson sighed. “No. You wouldn’t. I think your people are the ones who brought this on.” She held up the remnants of a notebook—a low-tech pressure-sensitive paper version. The cover was badly burned, the pages partially charred and water-soaked, but some words could be made out here and there. “I found this in Dr. Moore’s lab.”

“Dr. Moore?”

“One of the xenobiologists stationed here at the Legation. Looks like she took all of her electronic records with her, but I did find this. It says, ‘We’ve been suckered by Alexander’s First Law. The autos aren’t Aztecs and they’re not Chinese. Who do they say they are? Who do they say we are?’”

“‘Autos?’”

“Autochthons. The Ahannu. There’s been a major debate going on Earth for years now as to whether their culture could best be compared to that of the Aztecs, back in the early sixteenth century, or to the nineteenth-century Chinese at the time of their contact with modern Europeans. Dr. Moore is warning us not to let our culturally biased perspective distort our picture of who and what the Ahannu are.”

“That they’re not primitives?” Norris gave a dry chuckle. “They provedthat with that shooting mountain of theirs.”

“Their technology isn’t the point,” she replied. “It’s how we think of them…and how they think of us. We tended to see them as primitives compared with us, with a complex culture and some high-tech toys left over from the time when they were starfarers. They see us as the slave species they gave civilization to a few thousand years ago, maybe as slaves who got too big for our britches.”

“Yeah…okay. Who are you saying is right? Theyare primitives.”

“No. Neither viewpoint is right, because both viewpoints are locked up inside of the cultural context that created them.

“Look at their side of the equation. We might’ve been Ahannu slaves once, but we’ve grown a lot since then. We’ve changed. But they still see humans as ‘Blackheads,’ as they call us, because of our hair. As Sag-ura, the creatures they domesticated to work in their mines and farms.

“But it goes the other way too. Our understanding of the Ahannu is going to be crippled from the start because we see them in ways that make sense to us. As primitive savages. As a culture that has somehow lost its moral authority because it lost its technology, as ifthose two ever had anything to do with one another.”

“Are you saying they’re some kind of super race? They’re so advanced they don’t need technology?”

“Not at all. I’m saying they’re alien, and we shouldn’t assume we know the first damned thing about them. The nature of their technology may have changed. Or the way they think may be so different from us that we can’t recognize their technology when we see it.”

Norris laughed. “Honey, you’re giving the Frogsway too much credit. We’ve seen their technology, measured it. Stuff like those planetary defense systems and the few guns they have obviously are leftovers from ten thousand years ago. What they have, what they understand today, is spears, clubs, and knives. The mission here was brought down by overwhelming numbers, not some sort of magic, alien tech that we can’t even recognize!”

She shrugged. “Have it your own way. But you’re being anthropocentric. You’re measuring everything by the standards of Homo sapiens, as though we were the pinnacle of creation. We’re not, you know. The Ahannu are notlower than us; they’re different.”

“Great. I’ll remember that when I start negotiating with the High Emperor and the DesFac.”

“DesFac?”

“The Destiny Faction. What we’re calling the group that rebelled against the original government here. According to the data transmitted back before things turned nasty, it was led by a Frog named Geremelet. They were promoting the idea that the Frogs were gods.”

“I remember the briefing,” Hanson said. “But think about what you just said. We don’t know how the Ahannu think of themselves in groups, so we don’t really know that there was a ‘faction’ that differed from the government. We don’t understand what they mean by ‘government,’ so we’re probably wrong when we think in terms of rebellions, High Emperors, or what they mean by being led. We don’t know if they think in religious terms, the way we do, so we don’t know what they mean by ‘god.’ Hell,

‘Geremelet’ isn’t a proper form for Ahannu names, so we don’t even know who we’re dealing with here. Do you see? The Ahannu arealien . We’re not going to be able to communicate with them meaningfully until we know exactly what that means.How are they alien, different from us?How do they think? How do they think differently? You know, human psychologists are still debating what the word‘intelligence’

means. If we can’t define it for ourselves, how in blazes are we supposed to define it for something as other as the Ahannu?”

“Maybe,” Norris said, “it’s not going to be that complicated, you know? Europeans didn’t understand the aboriginal Americans either, but between firearms, horses, and smallpox, they managed to wipe them out pretty handily. The bleeding hearts might wish it was different, but mightdoes make right, you know. It’s the winners in any clash of cultures that write the books and program the downloads afterward. Which means it’s the winners who decide who gets defined in whose image.”

“Does everyone who works for PanTerra have such a wonderfully bleak understanding of intercultural relations?” Hanson asked. “Or is it just you?”

“I’m a realist, Doctor. The people I work for are realists. And we believe in making things happen…our way,objective worldview, not subjective, not blinkered by sentiment or sentimentality.”

“I see. I hope you live to enjoy the fruits of your philosophy. Of course, that’s not likely now, is it?”

“Of course it is. The Joint International Expedition will be along in another six months, and that’ll be our ride home. The Marines will keep us safe until then.” He grinned. “Better living through superior firepower.”

“Goddess,” Hanson said, shaking her head. “You just don’t get it, do you?”

“I was going to say the same about you, Doctor. You worry about Ahannu culture and psychology. Make your notes and collect your data. I’m afraid the natives on Ishtar are about to go the way of all primitives once they come in contact with a technically superior culture. It might be that a thousand years from now the only thing people will even know about the Frogs is what you record here now.”

She turned and strode from the room then, angry.

Norris chuckled, then returned his attention to the shattered office of his predecessor. Nothing…nothing. Stooping, he scooped up a double handful of computer memory chips and let them clatter on a tabletop. Some of the scattered mems might be salvageable, but he didn’t have the equipment or the time to find out. Finding the one mem in hundreds dealing with Ahannu slavery was worse than looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Besides, what he needed was probably encrypted, and he didn’t have the password.

No matter. Things would have been much easier if Carleton had left behind a note for those who might come after him, but in fact its absence changed nothing. The Marines would do their job, crushing the Geremelet faction or whatever the hell it was really called…and then he would step in and dohis job, happily earning his billion-dollar paycheck along the way. Full payment was contingent on a successful outcome in the negotiations with the Ahannu leadership, so he was determined that nothing would interfere with PanTerra’s plans, or with his.

Explosions thundered in the distance, and he walked across to the shattered window. Marine Wasps circled, floated, pounced, raising more explosions and additional pillars of greasy-looking smoke into the early morning sky. Beneath the window, Marines lounged in the courtyard, unconcerned by the aerial barrage taking place less than a kilometer away. On the Legation walls, other Marines stood guard, as a patrol passed through the North Gate into the Ahannu district.

At this rate, the city would be secure within another few hours.

He decided that he’d better talk to King about prisoners. He would need one, preferably a high-ranking one, to carry his negotiation demands to Geremelet.

Marine Bivouac

Legation Compound

New Sumer, Ishtar

1625 hours ALT

Thin red sunlight streamed across the city at rooftop level, touching the roofs and upper portions of the higher structures, leaving the streets still in deep shadow. The Llalande sun, little more than a bright ruby spark, showed itself through a narrow slit between the eastern horizon and the cloud deck. The clouds overhead were slate-gray, heavily striated by high-altitude winds into swirling streaks and arabesques. At ground level, though, the air was calm, hot, and moist. It had rained several times in the past few hours, and the streets were wet. Marine working parties continued to move among the nanocrete domes of the mission compound, bringing the bodies of Ahannu and Sag-ura to a central collection point and collecting scattered weapons and equipment for cataloging and study. Garroway and the other survivors of the squad had drawn light duty—standing guard over the alien bodies to keep the morbidly curious and the souvenir hunters at a distance. At the moment, Garvey had the duty. Dunne, Womicki, Vinita, and Garroway had joined him, though. No one felt like sleeping. The air was too charged, too pregnant with unrealized promise and danger.

“There,” Womicki said. “You feel that?”

The others shook their heads. “I think you’re imagining it, Womicki,” Garroway said.

“Fuck you. Here. Look.” Womicki pulled a canteen from a hip pouch in his armor, pulled off the cap, and dribbled a bit of water into it. Carefully, he set it on the ground. “Watch.”

The other Marines stared at the cap for a moment. Sure enough, minute ripples were stirring the surface of the water. Garroway held very still, trying to feel it.There . A faint, faint quivering vibration through the pavement stones at his feet.

“Earthquakes,” Womicki explained. “They’re almost continuous but so faint you can hardly feel ’em. Once in a while they get strong enough to notice.”

“Not Earthquakes,” Vinita said. “Ishtarquakes?”

“Seismic events,” Dunne suggested.

“Yeah,” Garvey agreed. “I wonder how all these buildings stay standing so long with this kind of shaking going on all the time.”

“That’s why the locals build pyramids and domes,” Dunne pointed out. “And nothing over a couple-three stories tall, except for the big pyramids.” He joined his hands together, steepling his fingers in a rough pyramid shape and working it back and forth. “The stones tend to fall together and hold one another up. Unless areally big quake hit, the buildings stay stable.”

“I remember something from a download,” Garroway said, “about there not being any major fault lines on Ishtar, so you don’t get the sudden slippage that makes major earthquakes, like in California. You just get a lot of little tremors from the tidal flexing as Ishtar goes around Marduk.”

“Y’know,” Garvey said, “if we had the damned net online, we’d be able to link in with the data feed from orbit and all the ground stations and see how widespread it was, where the center of it was….”

“Shit,” Garroway said. “We’re doing okay without the net. We just don’t have as many people looking over our shoulders as we used to, is all.”

His own words surprised him. For a time there, back on the mountain, he’d felt nightmarishly alone and isolated without the MIEU Net, much as he’d felt when they’d deactivated his Sony-TI 12000. The nanohardware in his head handled a good many minor and routine tasks—math coprocessing and direction sensing, for instance—and all he was really missing was the ability to download large amounts of data with a thought-click or talk to other Marines with an inner voice akin to telepathy. He was just now realizing, though, that losing his high-powered hardware in boot camp had gotten them all used to making do with whatever was at hand. Womicki’s trick with the canteen lid, for instance. That was damnedclever …and didn’t require data feeds from orbit or the local node to tell him what he wanted to know.

Maybe people were getting too damned reliant on their techy toys.

But then again…

He stole a glance at Kat Vinita. She seemed okay now, if a bit distant, a little floaty, a bit too placid. She was riding high on NNTs, he guessed, holding her emotions at bay, anesthetizing them until professional psychs could help her deal with them. The tech was holding her together now, but what would the cost be later on?

“Halt!” Garvey called out. “Who goes there?”

A woman, a civilian in a dark green jumpsuit emblazoned with the Spirit of Humankind logo, had approached the group. “I’m Dr. Hanson,” she said.

“This is a restricted area, ma’am,” Garvey told her.

“And I have authorization,” she replied, holding up a scrap of white paper. Garvey accepted the paper clumsily in a gauntleted hand and peered at the writing. “Signed by Colonel Ramsey,” he said, handing the paper back. “I guess it’s okay.”

“Goddess, ofcourse it’s okay,” Hanson replied. She sounded tired and on edge. “What did you think, I’m here to steal the bodies?”

“No, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

“Feeling a bit low-tech, there, Gravy?” Womicki asked with a chuckle.

“It’s a hell of a lot easier when you can interrogate the net for pass authorizations,” Garvey replied, stepping aside. “How are we supposed to know that pass is genuine?”

“Don’t sweat it, kid,” Dunne said with a shrug. “She don’t look like the kind t’want to cut off Frog ears for souvenirs. Let her do her job.”

“Frogs don’t have ears,” Garvey said. “Just those damned big staring eyes.”

“The civilians are here to study the Ahannu,” Vinita said. “We’re just supposed to keep other Marines away from this stuff.”

Hanson was picking her way through a triple line of bodies, each lying on its own length of plastic tarp.

“Can I give you a hand with anything, ma’am?” Garroway asked her.

“I’m looking for signs of rank,” she told him. “You’re sure these bodies haven’t been tampered with?

Stuff taken?”

He shrugged. “Not since they were brought here. I can’t speak for what happened when the collection parties picked them up.”

“They should have left the bodies in place,” Hanson said, grimacing with distaste. “How are we supposed to learn anything with you people pawing over them and going through their stuff?”

“We’reMarines , ma’am,” Garroway said, his voice stiff. What the hell was thiscivilian implying?

She looked up at him, then stood. “I’m sorry, Marine,” she said. “It’s been a rough day. No offense.”

“None taken, ma’am.” He relaxed a little then, but only a little. “Just what is it you’re looking for?”

She sighed. “Anything the leaders might use to mark them as leaders,” she said. “I don’t know…a badge, a medallion, special markings on their armor, anything to make the boss Ahannu stand out from the rest.”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” he said. “The ones I’ve seen have come in all different kinds of armor, different weapons. It’s more like fighting a mob than an army.” He pointed at a partially charred body twice the size of the others lying nearby…one of the big Ahannu the Marines had begun callingtrolls . “Even their soldiers are different from one another, you know, in size and color and stuff. Maybe those big guys are the leaders?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Those appear to be specially bred mutations, a warrior class, if you will. They’re not very smart. How about some sort of baton or staff?”

“Ain’t seen nothing like that,” Womicki said, joining them. He pointed to a pile of weapons and standards lying on the ground nearby. “Unless you mean those battle flags some of them carry.”

“No,” Hanson said. “Those appear to be clan insignia of some sort, but the ones who carry them aren’t leaders. The thing is, we think the Ahannu passed on a lot of social conventions to our ancestors back in ancient Sumeria besides agriculture and hygiene…things like kingship and caste systems and the idea that someone has to be on top. If that’s so, we’d expect to see some emblem of rank among them, some way they could recognize one another and know who was in charge.”

“Well, some of them do have fancier body armor,” Garroway said. He pointed at another Ahannu body.

“And some don’t have any armor at all.”

“Hell, I thought the Frogs weren’t supposed to have any sex,” Garvey said, amused. He poked at a tentacular, bulb-headed member between the legs of the Ahannu corpse with the muzzle of his rifle.

“What’s this?”

“Oh, they have sex,” Hanson said. “Our first contact with them here at the mission was just with drones, and we thought they were hermaphrodites. But there are males and females too.”

“No balls,” Womicki observed.

“Internal gonads. Apparently, they’re like some species of fish on Earth, and change sex when they need to, either because there aren’t enough of the opposite sex available at the moment, or maybe it’s part of a regular cyclical life-change.” She shook her head. “There’s sodamned much we don’t understand about them.”

“Maybe the sex differences are what you’re looking for,” Vinita suggested. “You know, the males are the leaders? Or the females?”

“No. We haven’t been able to correlate sex with their social ordering yet,” Hanson said. “Although it is possible there are other sexes or somatypes we haven’t seen yet.”

Garroway noticed something and stooped, awkward in his armor. Reaching out cautiously, he touched the head of the Ahannu corpse, turning it to the side.

The head was long and narrow, gray-green in color and very lightly scaled, with a bony ridge across the top of the skull that extended over the nasal opening all the way to the lipless mouth. There were no external ears, though a bone-ringed opening behind the jaw showed where the hearing organs were located. The golden eyes, each the size and shape of a pear, dominated the upper face, with jagged, horizontal slits for pupils.

This one had taken a death wound to the right side of its skull. A ragged gash opened the head from the deeply cleft chin almost to the skull crest, revealing white bone, yellowish blood and tissue, and a stringy mess of red-purple jelly slowly oozing from the wound onto the pavement.

“Look at this,” Garroway said. “Is that blood? Brains?”

“No,” Hanson said, immediately interested. She knelt beside the body, looking closely. “Their blood is yellow-orange. See that yellow liquid? I don’t knowwhat that is.” She pulled a vial from a jumpsuit pocket and began collecting some of the purple jelly.

“Careful, ma’am,” Dunne said. “We don’t know about their chemistry yet, and you don’t have gloves.”

“Ahannu body chemistry is pretty much compatible with ours, Marine,” she said. “If this stuff didn’t poison him, then it shouldn’t poison me.”

“You can’t be sure of that, ma’am,” Womicki pointed out. “Some toxins will poison one species and not another. These creatures aren’t evenmammals .”

“I think it’s safe enough,” Hanson said. Still, she used care in securing the sample, wiping the vial carefully on a rag when Dunne offered one to her. “This stuff is organic, but it’s not part of normal Ahannu biochemistry, as far as we know. Damn, I wish I had access to the net! This is important! I think—”

A sharp crack sounded across the courtyard and something struck the front of Building 10 across the street, striking sparks bright against the shadows.

Garroway lunged forward, knocking Hanson off her knees and flat on the pavement, covering her with his armored body. Another crack sounded, closer this time.

“The east pyramid!” Womicki yelled, raising his laser rifle to his shoulder. “It’s coming from the top of the pyramid!”

The other Marines brought their weapons to bear, triggering a barrage at the presumed sniper’s nest. The white-stone pyramid—Garroway remembered it was called the Pyramid of the Eye—glowered down into the Legation compound from the eastern edge of the city, offering a magnificent view of the goings-on within.

“Now hear this, now hear this!” came over Garroway’s armor radio receiver. “Battle stations, battle stations! We are under attack!”

And then the first crude rockets began arrowing into the compound. 22

26JUNE 2148

Marine Bivouac

Legation Compound

New Sumer, Ishtar

1642 hours ALT

Garroway rolled off Hanson, snatching up his rifle and taking aim at the pyramid to the east. Linking his helmet display to the LR-2120’s optics and damping the input down to infrared, he could see movement in the small peaked hut high atop the building’s truncated tip. He magnified the image and caught a glimpse of a face, ahuman face, strangely painted in the yellows and greens of the heat-sensitive sight, leaning into a bulky gauss rifle as the sniper took careful aim. It looked like he was drawing a bead directly on Garroway’s faceplate.

But Garroway was faster by a fraction of a second, his thought-click triggering the laser and loosing a five-megajoule pulse. The enemy soldier’s head exploded in a burst of brilliant yellow and green, and the figure toppled backward into the purple and blue shadows of the building. Something hissed into the courtyard, trailing a streamer of white smoke, struck the side of a building, and exploded with a sharp bang. Bits of metal pinged off Garroway’s armor.“This way, lady!” he yelled, grabbing Hanson’s arm above her elbow and bodily dragging her across the pavement.

“Let go! Letgo! ” she yelled. “I can move by myself!”

Pivoting, he propelled her forward, sending her flying into the open doorway of Building 10. Another rocket exploded behind him, picking him up and catapulting him sideways into the street. His armor absorbed the punishment and he lurched to his feet, laser at the ready. Where the hell was that fire coming from?

Over the wall. Rocket contrails were arching high above the northern wall as projectiles came raining down on the Legation compound. He jumped into the open doorway himself as part of the roof crumbled in a savage blast, showering onto the street in an avalanche of debris, water, and smoke.

“Are you all right?” he asked. The woman nodded. Her eyes were wide and there was a bloody scratch on her cheek, but she appeared unhurt. “Good. Stay here, stay down!”

He ran into the street again, where other Marines were gathering, moving in a running surge of armored shapes toward the northern wall.

At first he thought they were going to go out through the high, arched gate on that side and find the rocket launchers, but a Marine with a massive handgun waved them toward a flight of stone steps leading up the inside of the wall. “To the parapets!” he yelled, using his suit speakers to boom the command out across the courtyard. “Repel the assault!”

Garroway pounded up the steps and took his place alongside a half dozen other Marines already there. The Legation compound wall was broad and heavy, four meters tall, five meters wide at the base, and nearly four wide at the top, the faces slightly concave to render them quakeproof, with a meter-high crenellated parapet along both the inner and the outer sides. Crouching behind the low outer barricade, he peered down into the northern quarter of the city.

Marine Wasps were already zeroing in on the launcher positions, smashing them with deadly accurate missile and Gatling laser fire. There was no need for ground troops to go beyond the walls. But the streets were filled with Ahannu god-warriors and their Janissary slaves, a vast throng of figures crowding toward the northern wall and gate beneath a small forest of black and redmon banners. He didn’t need a target lock; he rested his 2120 on the crumbling stone parapet and began triggering the weapon, cycling in quick, sharp, three-pulse bursts, sweeping the front ranks of attackers as they thundered down the streets leading toward the gate.

Those front ranks wavered as the laser fire from the wall before them grew heavier in volume, more concentrated. Ahannu god-warriors crumbled, staggered, or burst into flame beneath that deadly caress of coherent light. A pair of Marine plasma gunners joined the line, and the brilliant blue-white sparks of energy tore gaping, fire-laced holes in the charging masses.

The ranks behind began slowing as they were forced to scramble over the high-piled bodies of their comrades. Many crouched behind those grisly barricades in the streets, firing up at the Marine defenders with gauss weapons or rising briefly to hurl spears or rocks.

A handful of human Ishtarans rushed the wall carrying four-meter poles with notches chopped along their lengths—makeshift scaling ladders. Laser bolts snapped and hissed through the crowd, setting ladders and warriors alike aflame and scattering survivors in shrieking retreat. Two ladders slammed up against the northern slope of the wall and as quickly toppled again as the defenders at the top shoved them back with rifle butts.

Garroway paused, surprised. The shakiness, the nightmare fear he’d felt earlier, was gone, replaced by a steady, almost preternatural calm. At first he wondered if the NNTs he’d popped were helping to steady him, but decided that it was simply training kicking in. Hell, it didn’t matter—training or nanoneurotransmitters. He was a Marine rifleman, crouched shoulder-to-shoulder with other Marine riflemen, doing what he’d been trained to do.

Join the Marines!he thought with an edge of hysteria as he recalled the old Marine-recruiting joke.Travel to exotic places! Meet fascinating people! Kill them! Kill them all!

Another rush, more humans with ladders accompanied by a surging gray-green mob of Ahannu god-warriors, many holding makeshift shields above their heads to ward off the deadly bolts from above. The shields, made of wood, hide, and sometimes sheets of thin metal, only extended the life expectancy of the attackers by a few precious seconds; shields exploded into flying splinters or caught fire, but the attackers beneath them kept coming. Many Marines switched to RPG smart rounds, detonating them beneath the shields with bloody effect.

Garroway saw the Marine who’d led them onto the parapets off to his right, recognizing him by the massive pistol—a Colt 15mm Puller firing explosive rounds—in one gauntleted hand. The guy was standing in full view behind the parapet, coolly snapping off rounds at the attackers at the base of the wall. When more Marines clambered up the steps, he turned his back on the fighting long enough to direct them to weak points on the wall, then returned to the fighting with a businesslike demeanor that was positively inspiring.

A warning tone sounded in Garroway’s helmet, accompanied by a flashing yellow light. His laser’s power supply was being overtaxed. His backpack power unit needed to be recharged. There wasn’t anything to be done about that now, though. He thought-clicked an override command and kept firing, trying to fire more slowly, more deliberately, and making certain that each shot counted. Another rocket streaked in, slamming into the middle of the wall twenty meters to Garroway’s left with a roar, flinging two Marines into the street. Both landed on the pavement in front of the surging tide of Ahannu, one lying motionless, the other trying to stand, obviously hurt. Without orders, the defensive fire from the wall shifted to cover the two stranded Marines, burning down warrior after warrior as they ran across the broad promenade that surrounded the outside of the Legation compound. That open stretch, perhaps ten meters wide, became a bloody killing zone as more and more Ahannu tried to reach the two wounded Marines.

Garroway’s HDO was flashing red at him now. He had only a few dozen shots left before his power pack went completely dead. He switched to RPG fire from his M-12 arpeg-popper, giving his power pack a chance to recycle. Other Marines were making the same decision, apparently, as guided 20mm RPGs streaked overhead, exploding among the attackers in stark, blood-splattering detonations. Laser and plasma gunfire burned broad swatches of death through the enemy warriors, while Marine snipers armed with high-energy gauss rifles marked down every Ahannu carrying a firearm they could see. A pair of Wasps joined the battle, circling low overhead, blazing away with Gatling lasers, until the enemy ranks broke and tumbled back in wild disorder.

To his left Garroway spotted a couple of ropes uncoiling as they were tossed over the parapet and into the street at the base of the wall. An instant later two Marines appeared, the two of them rappelling down the face of the wall as the laser fire from overhead increased in intensity to a savage crescendo. They reached the stranded, injured Marines in seconds. One scooped up the unconscious Marine in his arms while the other helped the wounded one along in a one-arm carry. The enemy, seeing their prize on the point of escaping, surged forward again, venting war cries that grated eerily on the nerves like the shrill wail of steam whistles. Again the barrage of laser and plasma-gun fire from the ramparts cut them down, sending the survivors tumbling backward in headlong retreat.

More Marines were dropping down the ropes over the wall now, surrounding the rescue effort, helping the wounded personnel back toward the northern gate. The gates swung open, spilling more Marines into the kill zone to cover the retreat of their comrades.

All of this played itself out on the periphery of Garroway’s awareness. His entire universe had narrowed down to his HDO’s target picture. With the mass charge broken now and his backpack power coming back online, he’d reverted to a sniper’s role, using the magnified image on his helmet display to pick out individual Ishtarans armed with weapons more effective than spears and cutting them down. If enough of the enemy’s gauss gunners died, maybe the rest would get the idea that it was extremely unhealthy to carry those things anywhere within range of a U.S. Marine.

More minutes passed before he realized that there were no targets left he could see, and that the fire from the wall was beginning to dwindle away.

The Marine he’d seen earlier, the one with the 15mm Puller, held up a gloved hand. “Cease fire, Marines! Hold your fire!”

An eerie stillness descended over the north wall then, broken only by the crackle of flames in the kill zone, the rush of a freshening wind, and the whimperings and isolated cries of wounded Ishtarans. The Marine with the pistol reached up, unfastened the catches on his helmet, and pulled it off. Garroway recognized him, now—the close-cropped, sandy hair, the sweat-streaked features. It was Colonel Ramsey.

He’d suspected that it might be Captain Warhurst. The idea of a regimental CO taking part in a firefight was startling, well outside the perimeter of approved doctrine in modern combat. Colonels were supposed to lead from the safety of a command center. Hell, he hadn’t even realized the Old Man was on the ground yet. TAV-S Dragonflies were still shuttling between New Sumer and orbit, bringing down the rest of the MIEU; he’d expected the command constellation to stay on board theDerna until the last possible moment.

The discovery filled Garroway with an inexplicable but undeniable surge of pride, esprit, and camaraderie, and with the feeling that he would follow Colonel Ramsey anywhere. Damn, they were going tobeat the Frogs, starship or no starship!

“Good work, Marines,” Ramsey called out, his voice booming out across the compound. “Everyone on the north wall, sound off by threes!”

“One!”

“Two!”

“Three!”

“One!…”

Each Marine in turn called off a number. Garroway was a “three.”

“Okay!” Ramsey bellowed. “Ones, stay on the wall! We’ll get recharges up to you that need them. Twos, you’re ready reserve! The rest of you, fall in down below in the courtyard. We’re going to get this walking cluster-fuckorganized! ”

Garroway grinned behind his helmet visor. Pretty slick…and straight out of boot camp. With a working net, an AI would have sorted the Marines out, perhaps keeping those with the most fully charged power packs on the walls while directing the rest to other duties. Without the net, they would have to rely on older, more traditional techniques—like the handwritten paper pass the civilian woman had carried earlier.

Heart pounding, he fell into line and filed down the stone steps into the courtyard, following the colonel. Beneath the Pyramid of the Eye

Shumur-Unu

First Period of Early Light

Tu-Kur-La slipped again into the comfortable embrace of the living, sentient sea. TheAbzu-il flowed softly over his skin, penetrating his ears and nostrils, seeping in through the spaces between and beneath his scales, and as key connections were made within his brain, new vistas of sight and sound and sensation unfolded within his mind.

He sensed the presence of at least two sixties of other Keepers of Memory and of the souls and awareness of thekingal , Gal-Irim-Let, of Usum-Gal, and of other elders of theAn-Kin , the Council of the Gods. As more and more minds entered the far-flung organic web of theAbzu , awareness expanded, the sense of self dwindled, and Tu-Kur-La again approached the single-minded unity of consciousness of theZu-Din , the Godmind.

He became other minds. In particular, he felt a Keeper of Memories, a drone named Zah-Ahan-Nu, crouching in the shadows of the Chamber of the Eye, peering out through the opening and down into the walled-in rectangle of the offworlder compound. The bodies of several Ahannu and Sagura lay sprawled about on the stone floor, testimony to the deadly accuracy of the Blackhead warriors below. Slowly, Zah-Ahan-Nu raised its head, surveying the alien compound. It appeared to be filled to overflowing with Blackheads—wild slaves escaped from Ahannu care. These would be the remote descendants of the Blackheads left behind on Kia after the coming of the Hunters of the Dawn. Its horizontal, slit pupils widened until nearly the entirety of the golden eyes showed glassy black. Zah-Ahan-Nu had become the eye of theZu-Din .

Regimental HQ

Building 5, Legation Compound

New Sumer, Ishtar

1920 hours ALT

“Attention on deck!” Captain Warhurst called, standing. The several dozen Marines in the room came to attention as Colonel Ramsey, Major Anderson, and General King strode in.

“As you were, as you were,” King said, waving a hand. “This is your HQ, Colonel?”

“Yes, sir. It’s not much, but it’s home.”

Until a few hours before, the former supply room had been an empty, junk-filled shell. Working parties had cleared out the debris and brought in chairs of various descriptions salvaged from other parts of the compound, which were set up around a makeshift boards-on-nanocrete-block map table. Someone had painted sheets of plyboard white and drawn rough topo maps on them using colored markers. Chips of painted wood with unit designations printed on them were scattered about the board, blue for Marine forces, red for known or suspected concentrations of the enemy.

Most of the men and women in the room were still in their armor, with their gloves, helmets, and weapons stacked in military order along the wall next to the smashed-open door. The only civilian present was Gavin Norris, and he was wearing a greenDerna jumpsuit with the Spirit of Humankind patch on the front.

Captain Warhurst stepped to one side, making room for the newcomers. He could sense the tension in the air; Ramsey was making nice to the general, but the politics of the situation were obviously costing him in stress.

“Thisis your answer to the noumenon?” King asked, looking down at the table. “How the hell can you see what’s going on?”

“It’s not as bad as you might think, sir,” Ramsey replied with a thin smile. “It’s true, without remotes giving us data from all over the battlefield, without linked-in team leaders, this is the best we can manage. But Marines were playing war games on computers, on paper, and with sticks in the sand long before we had noumenal sims.”

“Show me.”

“We’ve reorganized the MIEU in order to spread out the effect of casualties from the initial assault. Five companies in two lightweight battalions—768 Marines altogether—plus our air wing, another twenty-three. The rest—about two hundred, including both physical and psych wounded—have been assigned to an ad hoc reserve company.”

He began pointing out the different features on the map: the walls of the Legation compound, the city proper, the river, and, squarely to the east, a black square representing the Pyramid of the Eye.

“Right now we have the walls secured and patrols inside the compound. This,” he said, tapping the representation of the pyramid to the east, “is our big problem.”

“The so-called Pyramid of the Eye,” King said. “That thing has a Priority One for this mission, you understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Damn it, it should have been among the first objectives taken.”

“That possibility was discussed, General. It was decided, you’ll recall, that it was more urgent that we take Objective Krakatoa before the main landing, and it seemed unwise to divide our forces among too many targets.”

“I amnot senile, Colonel. I remember the briefings, even if theywere ten years ago.” The weak attempt at humor fell flat.

“Yes, sir. In any case, we had no way of knowing how strongly held the pyramid was when we made the landings inside the Legation compound.”

“Some of your men reported taking fire from it.”

“Yes, sir. We think the Ahannu may have tunnels or secret passageways inside the structure. Our spotters have seen some movement up there during the past few hours and have taken a few shots. We believe they’re using it to watch us, rather than as a strongpoint. At least so far.

“That could change, however, at any time. And, as you’ve pointed out, General, the pyramid is a high-priority target.”

“It’s more than high priority, Colonel,” Gavin Norris said from the back of the room. “It’s our only hope for communicating with Earth. We need to reestablish FTL communications with the folks back home.”

“That would be desirable, of course, Mr. Norris, but that’s not a good reason for risking additional casualties. The International Relief Force is six months behind us. There’s nothing Earth can do to speed them up…or even to warn them if something goes wrong here.”

“The FTL link is vital to our work here, Colonel.”

Who the hell had the bright idea of inviting a freaking civilian on this joyride? Warhurst thought, angry. He’d had his fill of micromanagement and ROEs—the ubiquitous Rules of Engagement—in Egypt. He’d expected eight light-years to be more than enough breathing room, at least when it came to interpreting orders. Evidently, he’d been wrong.

He was tired. His body ached inside the unrelenting embrace of his armor. The Mark VII’s microtubule filtration system was supposed to suck up the sweat he’d been dumping into the suit, but he still was sticky, hot, and miserably filthy, and he felt damned close to being ready to negotiate a deal involving his soul and a hot shower. During the attack earlier on the north wall, he’d been in the Lander One CP, trying to coordinate communications…and perhaps drag the makeshift net online, without success. And, damn it, he was jealous of Ramsey. The colonel had seen some of the fighting, and he’d been stuck in the damned LM.

He wasn’t Wayning this thing, he didn’t think. It was the principle involved. Half of his assault force had been killed taking that mountain. He was a company commander, not a REMFing general. And he thought he saw a way that would let him set things straight.

Listening to King’s petty bitching and Norris’s corporate kibitzing, Warhurst wished he could scratch beneath his armor or, better, peel it all off and take a long hot soak.

“Another thing, Colonel,” Norris was saying. “Your men reported firing on the pyramid. If a stray round hits the Eye, that could wreck the facility’s usefulness. I’d like you to pass the word to your troops not to fire into the Chamber of the Eye.”

“Again, Mr. Norris,” Ramsey said quietly, “we’ll do our best…but no promises. So far as I’m concerned, your precious FTL communicator is not worth the life of a single Marine. But it is my intention to take that pyramid in order to deny its use to the enemy.”

“I can’t say I’m impressed with your spirit of cooperation, Colonel. General? You know what I’m talking about.”

“Yes, Mr. Norris. I do. And I remindyou , sir, that Colonel Ramsey is in operational control of this MIEU, while I have responsibility for the overall mission. At this point, until we can induce the Ahannu leaders to begin negotiations with us, or unless we regain a significant orbital capability or an operational Net, I’m just along for the ride. I can offer criticism, I can offer advice, buthe is in charge of the routine operations on this beachhead. Is that clear, sir?”

Warhurst opened his eyes at that.This was new. Maybe old King wasn’t such a flaming son of a bitch after all.

“Thank you, General,” Ramsey said. “Captain Warhurst? You have an operational plan sketched out, I gather?”

“Yes, sir. I think we have the means for a vertical envelopment.”

He began laying out the plan he’d worked out during the past few hours. It was risky in some ways but held a fair promise of success.

City fighting—close-quarter combat in built-up urban areas—was the dirtiest, nastiest kind of fighting there was, with every building a potential bunker, every wall a stronghold, every window a possible sniper’s nest. Multistory buildings were the worst, with attackers having to fight their way up each stairwell against a well-covered enemy who had gravity on his side. Modern combat doctrine stressed attacking strongly defended buildings from the top down, when possible—vertical envelopment, it was called—using VTOL/hover landers like the Dragonflies.

“We employ two Dragons,” Warhurst explained, moving four wooden chips, stacked two and two. He placed one on the pyramid, the other nearby. “One for the assault, one in reserve. I have some of my people working now on rigging a bunch of twelve-pack sling harnesses with quick-release catches. Secure a couple to the tail boom of each TAV, and we can have twenty-four Marines on top of that pyramid—forty-eight if we need them—in a couple of minutes. We place our snipers inside the compound—here…here…here…maybe on the rooftops of some of the Legation buildings—and have them cap anything that moves on the pyramid during the Dragon’s approach.”

He continued moving other squares of blue-painted wood. “Meanwhile, we push a team of gunwalkers around to the east side of the pyramid…here, to give us a tacsit on that side. It’ll help compensate for not having remote probes, and they’ll be in a position to intercept enemy reinforcements moving to the objective.

“At the same time, we’ll have two full companies on the ground, ready to roll at the east end of the compound. As soon as the lead Dragon makes its move, they rush the base of the pyramid and start moving up. They’ll throw up a defensive perimeter around the pyramid itself and catch any Frogs coming down the pyramid trying to escape the airmobile assault.”

“I wish to stress that the taking of prisoners is vital at this stage of the mission,” General King said. “We need to capture and identify their leaders if we wish to open negotiations with them.”

“Does anybody know what their leaders look like yet, sir?” Warhurst asked with a smile.

“We’re…working on that,” Ramsey replied. “If we can take some live prisoners this time and if our Sumerian experts can talk with them, we have a chance. Ideally, we’ve hurt them bad enough already that we can negotiate a truce, hang on to what we have here, until the relief expedition arrives.” He looked squarely at Norris. “That assumes, of course, that the Ahannu can be reasoned with.”

“I’ll be blunt, gentlemen, ladies,” King said. “This is the critical stage of Operation Spirit of Humankind…critical to our survival, not just the success of the mission. Most naval personnel have remained on board theDerna, with Admiral Vincent Hartman directing salvage and recovery operations. However, it is unlikely at this juncture that they will be able to repair the ship’s main power plant. With luck, they may regain sensor and communications capability—which means access to the net once again. We cannot afford to wait for that eventuality, however.

“With the destruction of theAlgol , our supply situation is precarious at best. I believe Major Anderson has some figures for us?”

“Yes, sir. From what I’ve been able to ascertain so far, water supplies in the city are adequate. We have access to the Saimi-Id River at the west end of the compound, and nanoprocessors are being set up to filter out pollutants…and to watch for any unpleasant surprises the natives may slip into the water upstream.

“Expendable ammunition is tight on the ground right now, especially smart-grenades and DNM-85, but the situation will ease as more supply LMs come down from theRegulus . Total expendable ammunition is not a problem at this time.

“Food, however, is. We have enough packaged food for perhaps six weeks, mostly T-rations and hotpacks. I’m told that with strict rationing, our nanoprocessors may be capable of extending that limit to two, maybe three months, but they have a limited daily output…not enough to handle over a thousand people for six months.”

“There you have it,” King said. “If we are to survive until the relief expedition arrives, wemust gain access to native food sources and ascertain which ones are safe for human consumption. That means we either capture and hold the region surrounding the city in order to forage for our own supplies, or we negotiate with the locals for native food shipments.”

“Assuming we can trust them not to poison us,” Master Sergeant Vanya Barnes said, a growl in her voice. “You ask me, the only way to secure this fucking mudball is to wipe ’em out to the last freakin’

Frog.”

“That will do, Master Sergeant,” Ramsey said sharply. “The Corps is not in the business of genocide.”

He looked at Norris. “However, we will employ whatever level of force is necessary in order to safeguard the mission and our personnel.”

“That’sobvious,” Norris said with a bitter laugh. “You’ve already used nukes.”

Ramsey ignored the comment. “Captain Warhurst. It appears to me you’ve already made personnel selections for your operation.”

“Yes, sir. First and 3rd Companies for the ground assault. The airmobile element will be volunteer, of course.”

“Who do you have in command of the air assault?”

“Me. Sir.”

Ramsey raised an eyebrow at that. “Not exactly according to doctrine.”

“With respect, sir, there’s damned little about this operation that’s going down according to doctrine. I can’t ride herd on my people through the net, can’t maintain a coherent picture of the battlefield from my LMCP. So I’m going along. Sir.”

Ramsey nodded. “Very well, Captain. I understand. And…good luck to you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Timing. Have you worked out a timetable yet?”

“Since it’s going to be daylight for the next three days, sir, the light’s not an issue. I would like to give all of our people time for some shut-eye, though.”

“Agreed. Shall we say, H-hour in…twenty hours from now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. I’ll leave the final planning with your staff—code names, communications protocols, and so on. Just one more thing, though. Do you have a designation for the objective? The command constellation has been calling that thing ‘the pyramid.’ Shall we name it Objective Giza, after the Great Pyramids?”

“I’ve been at Giza, sir.” He shook his head. “Those pyra-mids are nothing like this one. Actually, I have another suggestion.”

“And that is?”

“We’ve been calling it Objective Suribachi, sir.”

Ramsey smiled, then chuckled. “I like it. Objective Suribachi it is.”

Suribachi was the volcanic mountain on the south end of a black speck of an island in the Pacific Ocean where six thousand Marines had given their lives two centuries before, a place called Iwo Jima. Mount Suribachi had been the site of the famous flag-raising during the battle, a Corps icon. Watching from a ship offshore, James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy at the time, had declared to General Holland Smith, “The raising of that flag on Suribachi means there will be a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

Well and good. Allthis Suribachi would determine was the survival of the MIEU for the next six months. 23

27JUNE 2148

Marine Bivouac

Legation Compound

New Sumer, Ishtar

0053 hours ALT

He wasLance Corporal Garroway now. Funny. He’d not even gotten used to being a PFC, and now he’d been advanced to pay grade E-3.

The announcement had come down from HQ with a blizzard of other announcements and promotions. Sergeant Tim Logan and Hospitalman First Class “Doc” McColloch—one of the Navy corpsmen assigned to the Marines as medics—had been put in for Medals of Honor for their daring rescue of two wounded Marines at the north wall earlier that day. And the newbie PFCs had all gotten their promotions…not, as it turned out, by being Van Winkled, but as meritorious field promotions. Van Winkling would have required confirmation from Earth; Colonel Ramsey had chosen to make those promotions immediate.

It didn’t matter, really. The experience of combat, of surviving his first firefights, had changed Garroway far, far more deeply than any bureaucratic waving of the wand possibly could. Out of his armor at last and clad in Marine utilities, Lance Corporal Garroway stood beneath the Ishtaran sky. It was, for him, the end of a very long day, even though technically the sun was still rising. This was his down time; in a few minutes he would try to go get some sleep. First, however…

Facing east, in the direction of the red-spark sun close beside the towering pyramid at the edge of the compound, he held the athame, ritual blade high, point toward the sky, and intoned the old formula.

“Brothers and sisters of the east, spirits of air, spirits of mind and intellect…hail, and welcome.”

Sketching the outline of a pentagram in the air with the blade, he then turned in place to the right, drawing an imagined quarter circle of blue fire. “Brothers and sisters of the south, spirits of fire, spirits of directions, of paths, of passions…hail, and welcome…”

It had been a long time since Garroway had performed ritual and cast a circle. He had been raised Wiccan by his mother, though he’d lost interest in all religion and drifted away until about four years ago, when the workings of the craft had become yet another way to defy his staunchly Catholic father. “You won’t practice that pagan crap in my house!” the elder Esteban had stormed…and so he’d taken warm satisfaction in holding ritual outdoors in secret, at a private stretch of the Guaymas beach. Often, his mother had joined him.

“Brothers and sisters of the west, spirits of water, spirits of emotions, of relationships, of family…hail, and welcome…”

The beings he invoked, spirits representing the traditional elements of air, fire, water, and earth, he understood as metaphors that let him grasp the unknowable; if they had any objective reality at all, they were not bound by the limits of time and space. Still, the hard, rationalist, left-brained part of him questioned if the ritual made any sense at all.

If there were such things as elemental spirits, or gods, or guardians of the soul…could they hear him out here, so far from home?

He felt a bit self-conscious, aware that there were Marines lounging nearby who could see him. The hell with them. Freedom of religion was an absolute and basic right in the Corps, even back in boot camp. Lots of the other men and women in the MIEU were Wiccan, World of the Goddess, or pagan of various other stripes, and he knew he could have found others to join him in this ritual. But he wanted to do this one solo, just him and the universe. Normally, he would have performed it inwardly, a simulation within the noumenal world, but with the net down he was left to do it in the phenomenal world instead. His father hadn’t allowed him to use the Sony-TI 12000 for Wiccan rites either, so he’d learned how to do it the traditional way, with athame blade and imagination. He’d found as private a corner as he could, off on the south edge of the open compound area they were now calling

“the grinder,” an out-of-the-way spot for the ritual that would make this patch of ground sacred space.

“Brothers and sisters of the north, spirits of earth, spirits of practical things, of daily life…hail, and welcome…”

He completed the imagined circle of blue fire, a perimeter around him now sealed by four pentagrams. Stooping, he touched the ground with the point of his blade.

“Great Mother…Goddess…Maiden, Mother, and Crone, I invite you to this circle. Be here now.”

In many Wiccan traditions the Goddess represented Gaia, the spirit of Earth herself. Could she find her way across the light-years? Or did Ishtar have its own goddess spirit? The thought stirred sudden inspiration, and he added, “Goddess of ancient Sumeria and Babylon, Goddess who is called Inanna, Astarte, and Ishtar…Goddess of Love and Goddess of Battles, hail and welcome.”

Standing, he raised his blade high. The gas giant Marduk hung vast and banded in the west. “God of Light, God of the Sun, known as Utu, Shamash, and Marduk, be here now. Hail and welcome.” He wasn’t entirely sure that Marduk could properly be linked mythologically with the earlier Mesopotamian gods of the sun, but it didn’t matter. It was the idea behind the words that mattered. He closed his eyes and imagined Ishtar and Marduk, queen and consort, standing within his circle within a blaze of radiant light. A small but rational part of his mind noted that those deities likely had their origins with the An colonists in ancient Sumer ten thousand years ago. Most of the oldest Sumerian gods, it seemed—Utu and Enki, Ea and An and Nanna—had been real beings, or at least personalized composites drawn from actual encounters between early proto-Sumerian nomads and the Anunnaki,

“Those Who Came from Heaven to Earth.”

Not that this mattered either. Humankind had long ago refashioned all of the gods in its own image. He doubted that the modern Ahannu would recognize what he called upon now. More disturbing, the rational part of him thought, was the idea of a twenty-second-century high-tech Marine invoking spirits in a ritual two centuries old, one drawn, it was claimed, from beliefs and practices thousands of years older—older even than the starfaring gods of ancient Sumeria. He pushed the intruding thought aside, focusing instead on the inner pacing of the solitary ritual, on the metaphors that allowed him to tap deep, deep into his own unconscious, to draw on the guidance, the symbols, the energy residing there. Religion, the religious impulse, whatever its outward trappings and whatever its origin, was undeniably as much a part of humankind as language, politics, or even breathing.

“By the earth that is her body, by the air that is her breath, by the fire of her bright spirit, by the living waters of her womb, this circle is cast.”

He opened his eyes, turning them toward a momentarily clear, crystalline blue-green twilight sky alive with pale auroras and the banded beauty of ringed Marduk. A meteor flared briefly at the zenith. “I stand now between the worlds.”

He smiled at that. In a sense, hewas between the worlds. But more…he might be light-years from Earth, but the connection he sought with the divine was something he carried within himself, the god and goddess both parts of his own being. The deities he called to this place were not so distant after all. They were a part of his own noumenal world, as opposed to the phenomenal world of sight, sound, and matter.

Facing east once more, he concentrated on raising inner energy for the working he had in mind. He heard laughter and opened his eyes. Yeah…he was being watched. A group of Marines offloading supplies from a cargo LM nearby were taking a break, and several were watching his ritual. Let them. This washis time, his sacred space, and their laughter meant nothing. The spiritual feeding of the men and women of 1 MIEU was an undertaking nearly as complex and as daunting as feeding them physically. There were a number of chaplains with the MIEU, all of them tasked with multiple spiritual duties. Captain Walters, for instance, served as priest for both the Catholics and the counter-Catholics, as well as the Episcopalians—a reconciliation of viewpoints that, Garroway thought, must require a fascinating set of mental gymnastics. Lieutenant Steve Prescott was chaplain for the less fundamentalist Protestants, the Church of Light, the Spiritualists, the Taoists, the Neo-Arians, and several other faiths, while a staff sergeant from C Company named Blandings took care of the fundy sects, Four-Squares, Baptists, and Pentecostals. There were two rabbis for the Jews, two imams for the Muslims, a priest for the Hindus, and a young lieutenant named Cynthia Maillard who watched out for the spiritual needs of the pagans, the Native American shamanic traditions, the Mithraists, and five different ancient astronaut sects. He’d heard somewhere that there were all of sixty-five different faiths represented among the MIEU’s personnel complement, not counting the atheists, agnostics, and personal faiths. Arguably, the only major religionnot represented were any of the radical Anist sects. While the Corps was enjoined by law not to discriminate on the basis of religious belief, people who believed that the An were literal gods or that humankind was intended to be a slave race were not the best recruits for a Marine deployment to an Ahannu world.

If he needed counseling during the deployment to Llalande, Garroway’s assigned chaplain was Lieutenant Maillard. He doubted that he would need to talk with her, however. Wiccans, for the most part, handled their own priestly duties without the need of clergy. He did wonder why this ritual, this time set apart, was so important to him now but decided he didn’t need to look further than the bewildering avalanche of sights, sounds, emotions, and impressions of the past twenty-some hours. Pressley’s shocking death…the news that theDerna had been crippled in orbit…the destruction of An-Kur…the battle at the north wall…He felt as though he’d lived years in a day’s span of time.

Nowthere was an interesting twist on the whole question of objective versus subjective time. An old, old saying held that religion was for those who feared Hell, whilespirituality was for those who’d been there.

He felt the faint, nails-on-blackboard tingle on his spine that he thought of as energy rising from the earth, filling him, recharging him. He needed this as much as he needed sleep; it was a reminder of who he was, ofwhat he was, and why. An old military saying held that there were no atheists in foxholes. If his religion had not been important to him before, save as a weapon to wield against an abusive and drunken father, it was vitally important to him now.

He was scared. Alone and scared.

The word had come down from the LM command post earlier that day, along with the news of the promotions and medals. They were looking for forty-eight volunteers for an airborne assault on the pyramid in the east. He’d given it some thought, then decided to put in his name. He still wasn’t entirely sure why he’d done it. Hell, “never volunteer” was the unwritten cardinal rule for all enlisted personnel, a rule probably going back to the time of Sargon the Great. But he was still feeling a bit…detachedwas the only way he could phrase it. Numb. The loss of so many men and women he’d come to know over the past subjective days had left him feeling as though he needed to reach out and reattach himself, to put down new roots, forge new bonds.

Volunteering for what they were calling Operation Suribachi seemed the best way to do that. Of course, they might turn him down for lack of experience, the way Gunny Valdez had. Somehow, though, he felt now as though he carried an entire world of experience squarely on his back. The Wiccan ritual was a good way to ground himself with earth and withnow as well.

“God and Goddess, Marduk and Ishtar…speed the passing of friends and comrades from this world to the next. Make bright their ways. Strengthen those they’ve left behind…”

A long time later—all of thirty minutes, perhaps, though it seemed like hours—Garroway closed his circle and returned to the phenomenal world of space and time.

He still felt numb, but he did feel stronger. A little, anyway.

He sheathed his athame—a standard Corps-issue Mk. 4 combat knife once again—and returned to the patch of open ground in front of Building 12, where he’d stowed his sleep roll and gear. Now, he thought, he might be able to sleep.

MIEU Command Center

Legation Compound

New Sumer, Ishtar

1545 hours ALT

“The walkers are through the east gate,” Major Anderson reported. “No contact.”

“Very well, Major,” Colonel Ramsey said as he continued watching the big monitor screen mounted on one bulkhead of the command LM. The view was of a dusty New Sumer street, a view that lurched unsteadily from side to side as the camera platform stalked ahead on two scissoring plasteel and carbon fiber legs. The legend at the bottom of the screen reported that the image was being transmitted from Gunwalker Seven. A red crosshair reticle floated about the scene, marking the aim point of the walker’s Gatling laser.

To Ramsey’s left a line of seven Marine technicians sat at a long, makeshift console with bread-boarded processor blocks and salvaged monitors. Each watched his or her own screen closely, making moment-to-moment adjustments on the joystick controls in front of them.

“So far, so good,” General King said, edging up beside Ramsey and peering up at the big screen. “How much farther?”

“Half a kilometer, General, thereabouts.”

“Coming up on East Cagnon and Rosenthal Street, Colonel,” one of the techs said. “Making the turn north onto Rosenthal.” The image on the screen swung sharply as the teleoperated walker veered left; Ramsey caught a glimpse of another walker making the turn—an ungainly looking device that reminded him of a neckless ostrich cast as modern sculpture. The Gatling laser, slung beneath the body and between the legs in blatantly phallic display, pivoted left and right, seeking targets. “Still no contact.”

Ramsey checked a small, hand-drawn map taped to the console in lieu of a noumenal map feed. The streets around the Pyramid of the Eye had been given names for ease of navigation—Souseley, Block, Cagnon, Hayes, Strank, Bradley. Those six were the names of the men—a PFC, three corporals, a sergeant, and a Navy corpsman—who’d raised the famous flag on Suribachi on 23 February 1945. Rosenthal was Joe Rosenthal, the Associated Press photographer who’d snapped the icon photo. Other streets—Schrier, Thomas, Michelis, Charlo, Lindberg, Hansen—were named for the Marines who’d raised thefirst flag on Suribachi, before Rosenthal had arrived on the scene. Marines remembered their own, with a body of histories, parables, and mythologies as passionate as that of any religion.

Ramsey felt a small shiver of presentiment at that thought. Men of Third Platoon, E Company, of the 28th Marines, had raised both flags on Suribachi. Of forty men in the company, only four had avoided being wounded or killed in the fighting. Three of the six photographed by Rosenthal that morning—PFC

Souseley, Corporal Block, and Sergeant Strank—were later killed on Iwo. Of the six who’d raised the first flag, three had been killed and two wounded; only Lieutenant Schrier emerged from the fighting unscathed.

A small bit of Corps trivia, that…and a testament to the ferocity of the fighting on Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest amphibious assaults of World War II. But a bit of superstitious worry gnawed at Ramsey as well. The Pyramid of the Eye was a natural defensive position.

Might that damned pyramid turn out to be a second Suribachi, in bloody kind as well as in name?

Something clanged from the side of Walker Seven, sending the image lurching heavily to the side.

“Contact!” the technician announced. “We have hostiles inbound, moving in from north, east, and south.”

The monitor image jarred again, nearly falling over, then pivoted sharply, the crosshairs locking onto a running, human figure. The Gatling fired with a shrill whine, and the running figure exploded in a gory red spray.

“Walkers One, Three, Five, and Six, move to block east and south,” Ramsey ordered. “Two, Four, and Seven…keep moving north, double-time. Punch through them!”

One of the technicians gave a loud exclamation, something between a curse and a groan, and threw up her hands as her screen went dead. “Walker Two is down!”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Ramsey told her. “Stand by your station, please.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Walker Six is out of the running, Colonel,” another technician said. “They’re nailing us with high-velocity gauss rifles.”

“Understood.”

“This is too expensive,” General King said. “We don’t have the gunwalkers to spare for this sort of thing.”

Ramsey looked at King. “Better this than sending Marines out there, sir. I do not want to send in the airmobile detachment without seeing the east side of Suribachi.”

“Agreed,” King said, though with some reluctance. “But they’re a damned expensive substitute for floater remotes.”

Ramsey smiled. King was painfully aware of the logistical limitations 1 MIEU faced. With a small supply of teleoperated gunwalkers on hand, there were none left when those were gone. After flirting with robotic weaponry for almost three hundred years, the American military still maintained a remarkably tentative relationship with military robots. Arguing that only a human could make kill-or-spare decisions in combat, true robot soldiers, running sentient AI programs, had never been wholeheartedly embraced, even though robot mines, robot bombs, antimissile guns, even robotic fighter aircraft all had been employed in combat since the end of the twentieth century. The fact of the matter was that robotic senses were far superior to those of human warriors in the smoke and confusion of a firefight, their reaction times were far shorter, and they were unaffected by shortcomings such as fear, pain, anger, or traumatic shock. Fearful that general purpose military robots could be hijacked by a technically proficient enemy and turned on their creators, the Pentagon had rejected sentient robotic soldiers time after time. The closest thing to a true robot so far adopted were robot sentries, which guarded set fields of fire and couldn’t move, and hunter-killer gunwalkers, which had only a limited decision-making capacity. Walkers had extremely quick reactions and a deadly aim, but they were best employed as teleoperated weapons…with a human driver behind the lines, piloting the machine through a link via the net.

With the net down, of course, they’d lost full function on the walkers, but by posting Marines on the far northern and southern portions of the compound’s east wall, they were able to maintain line-of-sight communications with the walkers. The reception was good enough that they were running seven walkers at about eighty percent of their usual performance capacity.

Correction.Five walkers.

“I’ve got the objective in sight, sir,” one of the techs called. “Walker Four.”

“Punch it up,” Ramsey told Anderson. “Let’s see it on the big screen.”

The scene shifted to the vantage point of another walker, farther up Rosenthal Street. The walker had halted in the middle of the street and was rotated slightly to the left, looking up at the gleaming white slope of the Pyramid of the Eye.

The pyramid was enormous. It measured 106 meters along each side at the base and was nearly sixty meters tall, which made it almost as broad and as tall as the smallest of the Great Pyramids at Giza. The slope of the walls felt more like that of a typical Mayan pyramid, much steeper and more precipitous than the slopes of the pyramids at Giza. The five-tier construction was reminiscent of the step-pyramids or ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia. Broad, half-meter-high stone steps ran up the center of each of the four sides.

From the vantage point of the HK gunwalker, the Pyramid of the Eye seemed to tower overhead, giving the vertiginous impression that it was about to come crashing down on the street. The walker’s point of view dropped back to street level, focusing on a handful of human Sag-ura rushing toward it armed with clubs, spears, and gauss guns. The Gatling laser opened up, shredding the charge in bloody disarray.

But more and more rounds were striking home, knocking the walker to left or right. Walker Four took another dozen steps forward, then the screen filled with static and went black.

“Four is down,” Anderson said. “Bringing up Walker Seven.”

“Walker One is down. Enemy forces advancing from the east.”

“Damn them,” King muttered as the camera view of the last remaining northbound walker winked on.

“Why gauss rifles when the sons of bitches are still carrying spears? Why not black powder?”

“Gauss guns are remarkably simple in concept, General,” Major Anderson pointed out. “And pretty hard to break. A hollow tube with a mechanism for sending a powerful electromagnetic pulse down the barrel at high speed…as long as they have a way to recharge the power pack, they could store those things for thousands of years. Gunpowder would go stale before too long, especially in a humid climate like this one.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Ramsey added. “What about plasma guns and lasers, though? Those don’t require chemicals that would go unstable after a few centuries.”

Anderson shrugged. “They may have some, and we just haven’t seen them yet…lasers, anyway. Plasma guns require a pretty sophisticated mechanism for fusing water or some other projectile mass, though, and they need to operate at such high temperatures and muzzle velocities that a primitive culture simply couldn’t support them. That’s just a guess, though. Gauss guns…all you need for a projectile is something with iron in it or wrapped around it. A nail would work. And you don’t need really high muzzle velocities. A few kilometers per second would be just fine for a nail or a small iron slug.”

“Coming up on the east side of Suribachi, sir,” the Walker Seven technician reported. “But I’m taking some damage.”

On the big monitor, the watching officers had a clear view now of the pyramid from street level, with no intervening buildings. The steps leading up the steeply sloping east face were clear, and there was no sign of any enemy warriors at the top.

“That’s what we needed to see,” Ramsey said. “No nasty surprises waiting for us on the side we can’t see from here.” He looked at King. “General? Permission to commence the assault on Suribachi.”

King looked at the monitor a moment, then sighed. “Permission granted, Colonel. Give ’em hell.”

“Aye aye, sir!” Ramsey picked up a microphone. “Dragon Flight, this is Dragon Nest. The word is go!

Go! I say again, go!”

“Roger that, Nest,” a voice came back over the speaker system. “Dragon Flight One, en route.”

“Here we go, then,” Ramsey said. “Watch that first step!”

Dragon One

New Sumer, Ishtar

1557 hours ALT

Garroway was snapped into the air, the ground dropping away beneath his dangling feet. He closed his eyes until he could get used to the sharp, stomach-dropping feeling of acceleration, then opened them again. They were airborne.

Encased in full armor, his LR-2120 strapped across his torso, Garroway was suspended from the tail boom of the Dragonfly by a harness securing his thighs, back, and shoulders, with a quick release at his waist. Twenty-three other Marines dangled with him, two by two, facing outward as the Dragonfly canted nose down and streaked low across the eastern reaches of the compound, banking sharply toward the Pyramid of the Eye. Looking down, he saw the streets and buildings and the eastern wall of the Legation blurring past less than a hundred meters below.

He was hanging literally shoulder-to-shoulder with Corporal Womicki and a sergeant from First Platoon named Couch. He could hear a retching sound over the squad tactical net and knew someone was being sick inside his helmet, with its sound-activated mike. He tried not to think about that.

“Hey, the Marine Corps is great,” he heard Dunne say as the retching subsided. “First-class accommodations all the way!”

“Cut the chatter, people,” Master Sergeant Barnes said. “Jennings! Cut your damned mike so we all don’t have to listen to you and your breakfast!”

The Dragonfly went nose high and started to climb sharply. Garroway wished he could tap into the net for a camera feed to his helmet display…then thought better of it. There were some things he might be happier not seeing.

“Okay, people,” Captain Warhurst’s voice said over the tactical channel. “I can see the objective…range, another two hundred meters. No sign of bad guys on the top.”

Garroway heard a loud clang from somewhere forward and above him and realized they were being shot at. There were bad guys down there, and they knew the Marines were coming.

“I think the gunwalkers drew off some of the pyramid defenders,” Warhurst went on, his running commentary oddly comforting. Garroway closed his eyes and focused on the captain’s words. “I see two…three humans on the south steps, halfway up. There are some Annies inside the Chamber of the Eye on the west side. I can see them peering out at us.”

Garroway felt momentarily weightless as the Dragonfly began descending. Looking down past his feet, he saw the gleaming white stone of the pyramid’s south slope fifty meters below, coming up fast…. The Pyramid of the Eye had a broad, open, truncated peak fifteen meters across, with a small temple or sky observatory, a dome-topped building rising from the center. Despite the obstruction, there was plenty of room for the TAV-S to set down, but the operational plan called for a quick drop-and-go so the Dragonfly was free to become a ground-support asset as soon as the Marine assault force hit the pyramid roof.

“Twenty seconds, Marines,” Warhurst called. “Remember. Keep your knees loose. Don’t lock ’em. Fifteen seconds…we’re at thirty meters…get ready. Five seconds…four…three…two…release!”

Garroway stabbed at the quick-release buckle on his waist and felt the suspension harness open around him. He dropped, a dead weight, falling perhaps three meters to the stone surface of the upper platform of the pyramid. His armor took the shock of the landing, cushioning him as he fell into a loose-kneed tumble-and-roll.

He came out of the roll with his laser rifle at the ready, bracing himself on his elbows as he scanned the pyramid roof. The twenty-four Marines had dropped in a ragged double row on the south side of the upper tier. The Dragonfly hovered just overhead, its thrusters shrieking as the pilot gunned it into a swift climb away from the drop zone.

“On your feet, Marines!” Warhurst yelled. “Perimeter defense!”

Hot wind swirled clouds of dust about them as the Dragonfly gained altitude. Garroway leaned forward into the blast and started moving. He heard shouts and the snap of laser fire but could see no targets ahead of him.

To his right, five meters away, was the small domed structure at the center of the pyramid’s peak, a kind of cupola with four arched, wide-open entryways facing the four quarters of the compass. And then he saw the large, hulking figures spilling out of the building. “Trolls!” he yelled, bringing his 2120 to his shoulder. “Trolls at three-six-zero!”

There were a lot of the creatures, and they all appeared armed with massive gauss weapons at least two meters long.

“Fire at will!” Warhurst yelled…and the Battle of the Pyramid began in earnest. 24

27JUNE 2148

Lance Corporal Garroway

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1612 hours ALT

“Let’s go, Marines! Take ’em down!”

Garroway triggered his 2120, sending a burst of rapidly pulsed laser fire through the tangle of Ahannu trolls spilling from the domed building. Overhead, the Dragonfly circled, banking hard, bringing its chin Gatling to bear on the threat. The trolls were still falling into a ragged line, aiming their weapons together in a fair re-creation of a musket firing line from the eighteenth or nineteenth century on Earth, when the deadly scythes of coherent light sliced through them in bloody execution. Firing as he moved, Garroway jogged across the stone platform, while the enemy line—what was left of it—dissolved and rolled back. Parts of the domed building flared into an incandescent spray of molten stone as Sergeant Tomlin, the assault team’s plasma gunner, turned his weapon on the archway. Scattering beneath the onslaught, Ahannu troll-warriors shrieked and burned in the deadly cross fire between air and ground, and the central building collapsed in smoking ruin. And not the building alone. A portion of the stone pavement beneath the building canted suddenly, spilling debris into a gaping hole that rapidly grew larger. More and more stone blocks fell into the widening gap beneath a boiling cloud of dust and smoke. Garroway skidded to a stop at the edge of the dropoff. The collapse of a portion of the pyramid’s roof had revealed a sunken, open chamber five meters across, partially filled now with fallen blocks of stone and with a squirming, crawling mass of Ahannu struggling up out of the pyramid’s depths and into the light. Dropping to one knee, he brought his laser rifle up and began triggering it…before switching to RPGs with the idea that repeated explosions would cause more damage to that writhing mass and concuss the survivors.

The other Marines in the charging line had the same idea, concentrating their grenade fire, and in seconds the crater in the pyramid’s roof was a thundering, bloody pit of chaotic flame and detonations, blast following savage blast with murderous effect. The circling Dragonfly added to the slaughter hovering above the pit and spraying the opening with Gatling fire.

“Cease fire!” Warhurst commanded. “Marines, cease fire! We want prisoners!”

Most of the movement within the pit had stopped now, but a few dazed survivors were pulling themselves out from under shredded Ahannu bodies and fallen stone blocks. Garroway grabbed one by the wrist, pulled him roughly to the pavement, and pinned him there facedown while Corporal Hazely tied his hands.

The second Dragonfly was inbound now, with twenty-four Marines dangling two by two beneath the slender, slightly arched boom between its forward fuselage and the power plant at the tail. It settled toward the smoking pyramid roof, nose angling up, belly thrusters shrieking, coming to a hover two meters off the pavement.

The Marines dropped from their harnesses in a ragged spill and spread out, joining the first section. The Dragonfly continued its descent and gentled onto wide-splayed landing jacks on the roof.

“Section Two,” Warhurst ordered the newly arrived Marines. “On the perimeter, south and east sides!

Section One…1st Squad, take the north side. Second Squad, keep digging out those Annies.”

More and more Ahannu warriors were dragging themselves up the fallen blocks of pavement stone to the pyramid roof, where 2nd Squad Marines grabbed them, pushed them down, and used plastic stripper-ties to secure their hands behind their backs. None appeared to be in any shape to put up a fight, but as quickly as each was secured, a couple of Marines would drag the captive across the roof to the grounded Dragonfly and secure the prisoner to an open harness. In moments they’d collared five of the regular Ahannu, two trolls, and three human slave-warriors.

Garroway was 1st Squad, so he joined the others and trotted across to the northern edge of the pyramid roof. From that vantage point, he had a spectacular view of the city of New Sumer and the Legation compound to the west. Marines were spilling out through the east gate in the wall, sixty meters below, and rushing toward the pyramid’s base. Ahannu warriors were everywhere down there. The sudden attack on the Pyramid of the Eye appeared to have had the effect of kicking over an anthill, sending the defenders scurrying. The movement seemed random at first, but as moment followed moment, it was clear that the enemy was gathering for a concerted rush of the pyramid. Garroway joined the eleven other Marines in his squad, marking down individual running Ahannu. If enough of them died, shouldn’t the others scatter?

Perhaps that was what was written in the manual, but the Ahannu, evidently, hadn’t read it. From the top of the pyramid it appeared that a black tide was surging up the north and west faces of the structure.

“Pour it on ’em!” Sergeant Barnes bellowed, and the volume of fire from the pyramid’s top swept through the climbing horde with hot-burning fury. Dozens of the Ahannu and Sag-ura in the leading ranks toppled backward, but there were hundreds, thousands, more to surge forward, scrambling over the bodies, snatching up banners and weapons, keening a piercing battle cry that was part hiss, part shrieking wail.

For Garroway, the universe again seemed to dwindle to a tiny slice of its former scope and depth and richness. He heard the infernal noise—the screams, shrieks, battle yells, the incessant snap and hiss of lasers and plasma bolts. His awareness narrowed down almost solely to the enhanced and magnified image projected within his helmet visor, to the faces—human and nonhuman—scrambling up the steps of the pyramid in a headlong charge.

He fired…fired…fired again, sweeping his weapon back and forth as he loosed triple bursts into the oncoming horde, confident thatany bolt loosed at the attackers would find a target, if not in the front rank, than in the one behind…or the one behind that. Ahannu god-warriors stumbled and collapsed as they advanced, the bodies crumpling onto the steps and immediately engulfed by the surging rush of Ahannu and Sag-ura still living, still howling and hissing their battle rage. The pyramid steps, he noticed with detached interest, were each a half meter high…higher than most of the diminutive Ahannu could manage comfortably. Those precipitous steps were wearing even on the trolls and humans in the attack…though they were quickly outdistancing the Ahannu god-warriors in their mad race up the sides of the pyramid. More and more of the front-rank attackers glimpsed through the magnified HDO scope projection were screaming, grimacing, tattooed human faces, mingled with Ahannu troll faces, blunt, thick, and heavy, or the visages of a few of the hardier or more determined of the Frog god-warriors. For a time, Garroway tried to spot the ones with god-weapons—gauss rifles or other modern weaponry, some of it obviously of recent human manufacture—and kill the ones carrying them. Before long, though, all he could do was point and fire, point and fire…until the red light on his hel met display winked red, warning of power drain and overheating. He switched to smart RPGs to let the weapon cool.

With a shrieking roar of high-pitched thunder, one of the Dragonflies howled low overhead, arrowing toward the Legation compound. Garroway glanced up and noted that it was the TAV-S bearing Ahannu and Sag-ura prisoners from the initial fight atop the Pyramid of the Eye. The other Dragonfly orbited slowly over the alien city north of the pyramid, turning its Gatling laser on the hordes at the pyramid’s base, burning down the attackers in broad, scything sweeps of destruction. As he watched, oily black smoke began spilling from the forward fuselage of the second Dragonfly. Ahannu gauss gunners must have been concentrating their fire on it from across half of the city. The TAV-S started to turn back toward the compound, then appeared to stagger in mid-flight, its bank turning into an ungainly roll. It crashed half a kilometer north of the pyramid, throwing up a tremendous pillar of smoke and cascading debris.

There was no time to think about that, however, beyond a numb acceptance of the fact. Ahannu and Sag-ura were more than halfway up the north side of the pyramid now. As quickly as the Marine defenders could burn them down, more appeared to take their place.Where were they all coming from?

Radio chatter crackled over his helmet earphones. “Hey, it’s another great day on the firing range! Let’s have some more targets!”

“Can that, Lassiter.”

“Yeah, these targets are shooting back!”

“This is Nakamura, on the west side! We need more people over here, ASAP!”

“Nakamura, Warhurst. Roger that. Hold your line.”

“We’re not stopping them! We’re not stopping them!”

“Lower your fire, people. Aim for the front ranks!”

A cascade of rockets sprayed into the sky on twisting white contrails, arcing over, descending. Several exploded inside the compound to the west. Others detonated on the sides of the pyramid, hurling chunks of broken stone into the crowds below. One exploded squarely atop the pyramid, and Garroway heard a Marine scream with pain.

“Hell, I think we went and made the bastards mad at us,” Sergeant Dunne said at Garroway’s left.

“What makes you think that, Sarge?” Garroway asked. His helmet warning display shifted from red to amber, and he thought-clicked back to his laser to save his fast-dwindling supply of RPGs.

“I dunno. Something about the hate mail they’re sending us.”

The screaming over the radio net abruptly stopped. Either someone had killed the wounded man’s open mike or the wound had been fatal.

“Whose bright idea was this, anyway?” Lance Corporal Jennings asked. He was kneeling at Garroway’s right, calmly pumping laser pulses into the oncoming warriors.

“Beats me,” Garroway replied. “If you find him, let me know so I can thank him personally!”

The idea had been to land on the roof of the Pyramid of the Eye and fight down, a vertical envelopment, in classic Marine tactical doctrine, while Marines from the Legation compound emerged from the east gate and fought their way up, trapping the Ahannu defenders between the two groups. Somehow, though, things were going badly awry. There were way too many of the Ahannu god-warriors, hordes threatening to overwhelm the human defenders in a black, rolling tide. A volley of gauss-gun fire from the north ripped through the line of Marines. Three fell. Lance Corporal Jennings tottered a moment, fist-sized holes in his faceplate and the back curve of his helmet spilling smoke and a splatter of blood. He started to fall over the edge, but Garroway snagged him by his power pack harness and yanked him back. Fighting down the urge to retch, he pulled the RPG magazine pouch from the right side of Jennings’s armor. He also checked the backpack power indicator on Jennings’s 2120. Hell, Jennings wasn’t much better off than Garroway in the power department. Garroway continued to fire his own weapon, alternating now between laser pulses and M-12 RPG

rounds. He tried to slow the pace of his fire; the temptation was to blaze away as quickly as possible, but that, he reasoned, was a great way to end up dry and empty by the time those hordes reached the top of the structure.

And theywould reach it. He had no doubts whatsoever about that. If anything, there were more Ahannu god-warriors, trolls, and Sag-ura slaves below than there’d been at the beginning of this engagement. Garroway accepted that with a Marine’s stoic inner shrug. Either the Ahannu would break themselves on this rock, or the Marines themselves would be broken.

If there were other alternatives, he couldn’t see them at the moment. MIEU Command Center

Legation Compound

New Sumer, Ishtar

1635 hours ALT

Ramsey listened to the incoming radio messages from the top of the pyramid. The battle was not going well…not going well at all. Task Force Warhurst was on top of the building, but a major enemy counterattack was developing. The Marine company deployed through the east gate to relieve the Suribachi assault force had met heavy enemy forces and been stopped cold. This he thought, was the make-or-break moment.

King looked at him, arms folded, his face bleak. “Well, Colonel? What’s your call?”

“Only two ways to play it, General. We reinforce Suribachi or we pull them out. Recommendations?”

King shook his head. “This one is yours, Colonel. Purely tactical. If you’re asking foradvice , I’d say we’ve obviously kicked them where it hurts, so keep on kicking.”

Ramsey nodded. “That was my feeling, sir. We—”

“Colonel!” Major Anderson called from one of the communications consoles nearby. “Heavy enemy forces approaching the north wall. It looks like they’re making an attempt to overrun the compound!”

“Acknowledged.” He cocked his head, listening to the radio chatter for a moment.

“Godawmighty, lookit ’em come!”

“Pour it on ’em, people! Burn ’em down!”

“I’ve got Frogs coming in on the northwest corner! There’s too many! We need help!”

“Let ’em come! Let the bastards come!”

“Pick your targets, Marines. Make every shot count!”

“Fox Seven! Fox Seven! We’re being flanked!”

“Tomlin! Get the pig up there on the northeast corner! Move it! Move it!”

“Dragon Nest, Dragon Nest, this is Echo Two! We have Frogs, lots of Frogs, rushing the north gate!

We’ve got humans with climbing poles down there! They’re rushing us! They’re…”

The situation was growing increasingly desperate. If he didn’t reinforce Task Force Warhurst atop the Pyramid of the Eye, he could lose all forty-eight men up there. But if he took men out of the compound to reinforce Warhurst, he would weaken the defenses here and open the MIEU to the possibility of being completely overrun.

He realized that King, Anderson, and most of the others in the cramped combat center were watching him.

“Major Anderson.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pass the word to Captain Sanders,” Ramsey said, naming the Bravo Company commander. “He’s to reinforce the attack at the east gate.”

“Aye aye, sir!”

He locked gazes with King. “Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb,” he said. “We win this thing here and now.”

“I concur,” King said. “And God help us all.”

Lance Corporal Garroway

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1645 hours ALT

Odd. Garroway felt as though he were two people…one very present, completely engulfed in the sound and fury of the battle, the other detached…not numb, exactly, but not entirely present, not connected to what was happening. His body went through the movements of aim-and-fire automatically, with mechanical precision and almost completely unconscious control. He responded to orders, hearing the radioed shouts of comrades and officers, and yet he heard them all as if from a tremendous distance. At first he wondered if he were still feeling the effects of the NNTs, but those should have been broken down and reabsorbed by his body long ago. It was…interesting to be engaged in the firefight, yet without the nearly paralyzing fear that had gripped him the day before.

The panorama view from the top of the pyramid, the detached portion of his mind thought, was an eldritch scene from some old-fashioned Christian hell, brooding, a red-lit nightmare sprawling beneath ominous black clouds, rising pillars of smoke, and the swooping drift and stoop of Marine Dragonflies. The loss of one TAV-S, Garroway was delighted to see, had not deterred the others. Four of the aircraft were in the air, laying down heavy close-support fire despite gauss-gun volleys and rocket fire from the city streets below. Their efforts seemed to be stemming the flood of enemy reinforcements from wherever they were coming from and zeroing in with laser-targeted accuracy on the launch sites of those primitive rockets.

“Fall back! They’re coming over the edge! Fall back!”

Garroway had dropped his own overheated LR-2120 and picked up Jennings’s weapon, the cables still attached to the backpack of the dead Marine. Now, though, the order had come to fall back from the rim of the pyramid roof. He didn’t want to leave Jennings’s body…but he couldn’t handle that and both weapons as well.

The Ahannu warriors were nearly at the top of the pyramid, scrambling ever higher despite devastating losses to their ranks. He could see their huge, golden eyes shining in the red light as they climbed. To his left Garroway sensed a wild, swirling struggle as the Frogs reached the top and began spilling onto the paved rooftop of the pyramid, grappling hand-to-hand with the defenders. He triggered another couple of bursts into the Ahannu god-warrior horde, then tried to wrestle with Jennings’s body. Shit, thiswasn’t going to work.

“I’ve got him.” Sergeant Dunne stooped, grabbing the body by the handhold on the back of Jennings’s power pack, and started dragging him across the pavement. Garroway picked up his own laser, checked temperature and power supply, then backed up alongside Dunne, covering the other Marine as he retrieved the body.

Marines didnot leave their own behind, whenever that was humanly possible. The Ahannu reached the north edge of the pyramid roof and started scrambling over the rim, hundreds of them, most waving scythe-tipped lances, elaborate war clubs, or curved-bladed iron swords. Many carried black and red banners, while a few had gauss guns.

One Ahannu god-warrior in green and black leather armor brandished a particularly grisly trophy—a mutilated human head spiked on the end of a long spear, the mouth and empty eye sockets gaping. It must, Garroway thought, be the head of one of the Marines lost yesterday inside An-Kur, when the Frogs overran the relay inside one of the tunnels and killed the people guarding it. Or…was that the preserved head of one of the Marines who’d died defending the Legation compound ten years ago? Either way, it was one reason why Marines did not abandon even their dead. Furious, he triggered his 2120, sending a burst of coherent light through the Ahannu’s armor and setting it ablaze. The Frog shrieked and fell backward off the edge, dropping its trophy into the crowd of its comrades. And there was another trophy, of sorts…an Ahannu wearing a Marine-issue power pack and awkwardly lugging a Sunbeam LR-2120 in splayed, six-fingered hands. Half a dozen Marine lasers cut that warrior down before it had a chance to fire.

The Ahannu, obviously, were technical enough to be able to use captured Marine weapons, though it seemed a bit reckless of them to risk losing them again in front-line combat. Maybe they were getting desperate, throwing everything they had into a do or die effort.

Well, the Corps could play that tune as well. Slowly, begrudging every step, the Marines fell back across the top of the pyramid, continuing to rake the oncoming enemy with volley upon volley of laser, plasma gun, and smart-grenade fire. As their perimeter contracted, they began crowding one another, armored shoulders bumping shoulders as they created a solid and unbroken wall of polylaminate Mark VII armor. They backed to the place where a portion of the roof had caved in and swiftly began dropping down onto the canted stone blocks, using the crater and broken slabs as cover as they continued to burn down the charging Ahannu god-warriors.

There was no place else to go.

Kneeling in the crater, his laser dangerously overheated, Garroway kept firing. He’d switched to single shot when his breech core temperature redlined and his coolant reserve began steaming, but he knew he didn’t have many shots left before the weapon malfunctioned.

He had two magazines of smart grenades left. He snapped one into the magazine receiver and chambered a round.

The Ahannu god-warriors rushed forward, keening their shrill battle cries…. Captain Warhurst

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1650 hours ALT

“Dragon Nest, Dragon Nest, this is Suribachi,” Warhurst called over the command channel. “Come in, Dragon Nest!”

“Suribachi, Dragon Nest. Go ahead.” It was the colonel’s voice.

Warhurst stood on the steeply canted slab of cut stone, balanced on the edge of the crater atop the Pyramid of the Eye. The Ahannu and their human slave-warriors were scant meters away, rushing the Marine perimeter from north, west, and south.

“Dragon Nest, they have us pushed into a pocket. We’re taking heavy casualties. Request air strikes, repeat, air strikes in close support of this position.”

“We copy that, Suribachi. Our air reports it’s hard to see what’s happening up there. They don’t want to cause friendly fire casualties. Over.”

“Fuck that!”Warhurst yelled into his mike. He was firing his laser rifle in quick, steady pulses, burning down the charging Frogs one after another, andstill they kept coming.“The Annies are all over the fucking pyramid! Dust the whole area! Now!”

There was a brief hesitation. “Roger that, Suribachi. Dragons deployed in close support. Keep your heads down!”

He didn’t answer. The wall of Ahannu hit the western arc of the Marine perimeter first, then the north, god-warriors leaping high above the line and coming down behind and among the struggling Marines. Suddenly, the fight was a swirling hand-to-hand melee at knife-fighting range, as the Marines at the edge of the pit battled for survival.

Lance Corporal Garroway

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1657 hours ALT

An Ahannu god-warrior hit Garroway full-on, knocking him backward. He dropped his laser but was able to hold the writhing Frog off long enough to drag his combat knife from its sheath on his chest and plunge it up to the hilt into the being’s throat. He turned the blade and slashed to the side, and the Ahannu’s head flopped back, gape-mouthed, in a spray of pale blood. Garroway rolled to the side, scooping up his laser in his left hand, clutching the bloody knife in his right. He was shoulder-to-shoulder with Garvey as a dozen Ahannu closed on them from all sides. More god-warriors were emerging from inside the crater, clambering up out of the shadows of a small tunnel. Damn it, they were everywhere, and the Marine line had dissolved into tiny and isolated teams of squad mates fighting hand-to-hand. More Marines were falling as impossible numbers overwhelmed technology, swords and lances piercing armor joints. Sergeant Couch vanished beneath a thrashing pile of Ahannu warriors. Tomlin’s plasma gun fell silent as the Marine gunner was torn to pieces. Half the assault force at least was down now, and the rest would be dead in seconds.

Garroway raised his laser and triggered it as an enemy warrior rushed him; the weapon gave a crackling hiss and failed as status lights on his helmet display warned of power failure, overheating, a ruptured coolant coil, and a burned-out feed coupling. Pivoting sharply, he brought the 2120’s butt up and around sharply, connecting with the side of the Frog’s head. He felt rather than heard the satisfyingcrunch as the skull caved in.

He swung again, taking down an Ahannu waving a wickedly curved sword. And again…and again…

“John!…”

Four Frogs swarmed onto Garvey, knocking him down. Razor-tipped lances and swords plunged, seeking the flexible joints between hard-shelled carbon-polylaminate sections, at shoulders, neck, hips, and waist. Garvey shrieked….

Garroway swung his rifle level, like a baseball bat, connecting with one of the Ahannu and knocking it away from his friend. Something struck him hard in the left arm, spinning him back and away. “Gravy!”

he shouted. “Hang on!”

Garroway tried to swing his rifle again and found his left arm heavy, numb…he couldn’t move it. Awkwardly one-handed, he tried swinging the battered weapon and saw it shatter against the breastplate of a looming Ahannu troll. He dropped the weapon, reached for his knife…and realized he’d dropped it somewhere in the last few seconds. Screwing his face into his best boot-camp war mask, he screamed a Marine battle cry as he charged the towering creature.“Ooh-rah!”

He collided with the thing and drove it back, toppling it over. It vented a throaty, hissing grunt and twisted, knocking him aside like a discarded rag doll. It stood then, over two meters tall even when stooped forward, its golden eyes deeply recessed in heavy bony orbits that gave it a hulking, Neanderthal look as it raised a two-meter club edged with razor-sharp shards of volcanic glass.

“Duck and cover, Marines!” Captain Warhurst’s voice yelled over the tactical channel. “Everybody down and freeze!”

Garroway was already down and unable to move. The troll shrieked, its club raised high…. And then the sky flashed, brighter than Earth’s sun. The troll stood transfixed for an instant as flesh and armor dissolved in searing white flame.

Somehow, Garroway managed to roll to the left as the burning carcass crumpled and fell forward, landing on the spot he’d occupied an instant before. All around him other Ahannu were burning…burning…falling, running, shrieking and burning, as fiery death exploded from the sky. Take something flammable—fertilizer will do—in finely powdered form. Disperse it in air and ignite it. The result is a fuel-air explosive, or FAE, a weapon first developed two centuries before, occasionally referred to as a “poor man’s nuke,” or as a “daisy cutter” for its ability to quickly clear large areas of forest.

The upgraded version of the FAE were Dispersed Nano-munitions, in the form of DNM-85 thermal microbomblets. Each bomblet, accreted from supplies of thermite, aluminum, magnesium, and trace elements, was smaller than a grain of sand, and individually, each carried less explosive force than an igniting match.

Disperse millions of DNM bomblets from delivery canisters set to explode two meters above the ground, and the air itself burns, briefly, at a temperature of well over a thousand degrees. A pair of Marine Dragonflies howled low across the top of the pyramid, racing west to east scant meters above the corpse-littered pavement, scattering DNM-85s into the Ahannu swirling hordes. For an instant the top of the pyramid blazed in unholy flame. Dozens of Ahannu caught fire or exploded in that deadly incendiary storm.

“Stay down, Marines!” Warhurst yelled over the tactical channel. “Friendly fire incoming!”

A second pair of Dragonflies shrieked in from north to south, scattering more bomblets in a deadly, burning footprint, setting fire to stacked heaps of bodies, causing broken pavement stone to crack and explode. Garroway pressed himself to the pavement as hot gravel rattled off his armor, as his suit’s internal temperature briefly soared in the inferno. Designed to withstand high temperatures, even Mark VII armor could not shed that kind of heat for more than seconds without melting. Most of the firestorm burned itself out a meter or more above the pavement, though, and as the fireball rose, temperatures on the surface of the pyramid fell. Garroway heard the laboring of his suit’s refrigeration and drew a hot breath of relief as his HDO’s temp gauge dropped from the unbearable to the merely uncomfortable.

Looking up, he saw Garvey lying on his back a meter away; he crawled that meter and threw himself over the unmoving Marine as the first pair of Dragonflies swung around for another pass.

“Corpsman!” he yelled. “Corpsman!” But there were no medical corpsmen in Task Force Warhurst, and Gerrold Garvey was already dead.

Garroway lay there, stretched across his friend’s body, waiting for the world to end…. 25

27JUNE 2148

Lance Corporal Garroway

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1705 hours ALT

But it didn’t end.

The thunder, scorching heat, and whirlwind of death, however, faded. Garroway looked up, astonished, in a numb and distant way, at being still alive. Somehow, the airstrike had burned over the upper reaches of the pyramid, and yet he and a scattered handful of other Marines were still moving, standing slowly and looking about, all with the same dazed and lost demeanor.

The Ahannu were dead…their bodies stacked and scattered and strewn in grotesque and interlocked tangles across the upper surface of the pyramid, most of them charred into unrecognizable abstracts of ash and cinder, many still burning.

No…not all were dead. As Garroway turned, he saw several Ahannu at the bottom of the crater, wiggling into the darkness of a small, open tunnel. They must have been coming up inside the Marine perimeter at the same time they were breaking the line. He looked around for a rifle but saw only the twisted fragments of his own lying on a black-scorched chunk of paving stone. An Ahannu lance, three meters long and tipped by a curving blade, lay nearby. He picked that up in lieu of any more modern weapon.

But it didn’t look as though he would need it. The Ahannu in the crater had vanished down their hole, and the only ones atop the pyramid now were dead. He walked unsteadily across to the western edge of the pyramid roof and looked down. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Ahannu and Sag-ura bodies were strewn up and down the broad steps, but that fiery rain of airborne death had left none alive. In the streets below, Ahannu were fleeing as the Marine relief force out of the compound rushed the base of the Pyramid of the Eye.

The enemy attack had been broken,decisively broken.

Another Dragonfly was angling in out of the west, but this time coming in nose high on a landing approach instead of in attack attitude, with twenty-four more armored Marines slung from the harness on its spinal strut. Reinforcements…a little late, perhaps, but unexpected and very welcome. He looked about, wondering. Forty-eight Marines had landed atop the pyramid a little over an hour ago. He saw only eight others standing now in the swirling gray smoke, all looking as isolated and as lost as he felt. He saw an LR-2120 on the pavement and walked over to pick it up. His left arm, he realized, wasn’t working…a dead weight. Exploring the surface of the armor with his right hand, he found a hole punched through the thickly layered body glove fabric at the shoulder, but he couldn’t feel a thing. Training told him he should seek medical assistance, perhaps lie down to avoid the effects of shock…but in his current state of mind, that level of coherent thought simply wasn’t possible. Instead he stood at the edge of the pyramid roof, leaning on his captured spear and watching as the incoming Dragonfly drifted lower on whining belly thrusters. The double line of Marines harnessed to its spinal boom dropped free in a ragged spill. The armored forms hit the ground, rose to their feet, and began spreading out across the pyramid.

“Marine! Hey, Marine!”

A gloved hand slapped his right shoulder, startling him. “Wake up, son.”

He turned quickly, dropping into a defensive crouch before he saw that it was Captain Warhurst, his helmet tucked under one arm.

“Sir!” Garroway came to attention.

“At ease, at ease,” Warhurst said. “I just wanted to requisition your pig sticker.”

“My…what?” Then he realized Warhurst was talking about the three-meter spear he carried. Several other Marines had gathered nearby…Corporal Womicki, Sergeant Schuster, Sergeant Dunne, Lance Corporal Vinita. Kat Vinita was carrying an American flag, still folded in a tight blue triangle with the white stars showing.

“Flag-raising time,” Warhurst said. “Gotta let ’em know down below we’re all right.”

Schuster and Dunne attached the flag to the butt end of the spear. Together, then, the six of them planted the spear tip in a crack between paving stones close to the western edge of the pyramid’s top, wedging it in tight. They stepped back and came to attention as the flag unfurled in the freshening Ishtaran breeze, thirteen stripes and fifty-eight stars representing the United Federal Republic. Captain Warhurst saluted for the six of them.

Those stars, arranged in three concentric circles on the blue field, suddenly and irrationally and almost painfully reminded Garroway of home. The referendum to determine statehood for Sinaloa and the other three Mexican territories had been scheduled for six years ago. He wondered if this flag with its fifty-eight stars was out of date now.

It still represented home, no matter how many stars it bore.

He felt something catch in his throat and swallowed to clear it. Flag-raisings. There was a particularly emotional connection with this one, as he remembered photos of two other similar flag-raisings, one at Cydonia on Mars during the UN War a century ago, and the one on the original Suribachi a century before that.

His ancestor, Sands of Mars Garroway…what would he think if he were here now, watching this simple ceremony?

Garroway’s helmet external mikes were picking up a strange sound. He tried to identify it—a low-pitched rushing or roaring—and failed. Damn, if he just had a link to the net….

“Detail, dismissed!” Warhurst said.

Garroway unfastened his helmet and pulled it off one-handed, trying to make out the source of the sound with his own ears. It was coming from…

Ah. That was it. Looking down on the Legation compound from his vantage point atop the Pyramid of the Eye, he could see a huge crowd of Marines in the courtyard near the north gate. The sound…he was hearing cheering, the sound of hundreds of Marines cheering the flag atop this alien Suribachi.

“I need volunteers,” Warhurst said. “We’re going down to the Chamber of the Eye. Who’s with me?”

The other four all had their hands up, and Garroway raised his own. His arm was beginning to hurt now, a dull, pounding throb in his shoulder, but nothing serious. He felt fine…maybe a bit light-headed.

“Where’s your weapon, Marine?” Warhurst asked him.

“It kind of got bent on a Frog’s skull, sir,” he replied.

“Is your arm okay? There’s blood on your armor.”

“I think I got winged by a gauss round, sir. Doesn’t hurt, but I’m having a little trouble moving it.”

“Okay. Here.” Warhurst unholstered his sidearm, a heavy, 15mm Colt Puller, and gave it to Garroway. He unslung his other weapon, a Sunbeam LC-2132 laser carbine, a lightweight weapon that was low-powered compared to a 2120 but didn’t need the three-cable connection with a shoulder-carried power pack. “Okay, Leathernecks. Move out!”

Together, they began descending the pyramid’s western steps. Behind and above them the flag continued to flutter in the breeze.

Chamber of the Eye

Pyramid of the Eye

Shumur-Unu

Third Period of Brightening Day

Tu-Kur-La emerged through the inner passageway from the Deeps, stepping into the Chamber of the Eye. He felt a bit light-headed, mildly dizzy, almost, with the shock of the past few periods. The Memories had not prepared him for this…not at all.

The Ahannu were gods.Gods . Beings who once had strode among the far-flung stars, wielding lightnings that could render whole worlds barren and lifeless. How was it that these Blackhead warriors—these Marines , as they called themselves—could defeat the combined will and consciousness of the Zu-Din?

He found the charred and broken corpse of Zah-Ahan-Nu near the outside entrance to the Chamber. The Blackhead fliers had seared this entire side of the pyramid with their light weapons, burning down hundreds of god-warriors swarming up the steps. Zah-Ahan-Nu, the Keeper of Memories serving as an eye of the Zu-Din, had gotten too close to the sky outside and been caught in the firestorm. Tu-Kur-La began reestablishing his own connections with the Abzu-il, slender threads of organic molecules trickling down his back and seeking companion threads growing in the cracks between the stones of the chamber. As the Abzu-il made its myriad interlocking connections, Tu-Kur-La again felt his own personality fading, felt again the growing awareness of the Godmind, of thousands of other Keepers of Memories joining with him, mind to mind to watching mind.

Cautiously, he peered from the open doorway. Blackhead Marines thronged within the walled enclosure below, shouting madly. The Ahannu attack on their fortress had failed, as had the counterattack against the pyramid. The enemy warriors, evidently, were celebrating their victory. Victory. Against thegods .

The thought was almost literally unthinkable, a concept not easily put into words. Not since the time of the Hunters of the Dawn had such a concept even been considered.

Uneasily, the eye of the Godmind watched the Enemy thronging below. Lance Corporal Garroway

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1736 hours ALT

They made their way down the steps as quietly as they could manage, no conversation, with each step past crumpled, charred Frog bodies carefully considered before the step was actually taken. Two Marine Dragonflies circled at a distance, ready to provide close support should that be necessary. Half a dozen more Task Force Warhurst Marines had joined the six of them descending the west face of the pyramid. Twelve of them had survived the Ahannu attack, it turned out…exactly twenty-five percent of the original forty-eight. Garroway remembered General King’s ill-advised pep talk before the landings…was it only yesterday? Marine losses on Suribachi had been high, higher in terms of percentages, certainly, than those Army Rangers had suffered at Pointe du Hoc. He caught himself wondering if King had somehow jinxed the assault with his speech. Superstitious nonsense, Garroway thought with wry amusement.Might as well blame the fucking apricots

.

The entrance to the Chamber of the Eye extended from the center of the pyramid’s western steps, a squared-off white stone structure with ornate, apparently abstract designs engraved in the sides. The carvings looked like they might represent something—beings, perhaps? But they followed an artistic tradition alien indeed from both human and Ahannu thinking. It was difficult to make sense of the swooping, curving, interlocking knots and patterns.

It was possible, even probable, that Ahannu warriors were inside. The chamber provided too valuable an observation post overlooking the Legation compound for the enemy to have left it unoccupied…especially since there apparently were hidden tunnels and passageways within the pyramid’s massive structure. God-warriors had emerged from the pyramid’s interior during the battle…and done so in surprisingly close support of the attackers outside. That suggested sophisticated lines of communications, a high degree of efficient command control, and the Ahannu equivalent of scouts and officers overseeing the unfolding battle. With the top of the pyramid under Marine control and the sides scoured clean of the enemy, the Chamber of the Eye was the only vantage point the Ahannu had left on the pyramid.

Following Warhurst’s silent hand gestures, Garroway, Dunne, Schuster, and Vinita had moved around to the left, coming up on the entrance from its southern side. The rest approached from the other side, squeezing up close against the comforting stones for cover. This, Garroway thought, would be a great situation for smart grenades…except that you had to show the RPG a target for it to lock onto and follow. And standing orders for Task Force Warhurst were not to use explosives inside the Chamber of the Eye.

Again following Warhurst’s signed commands, he crouched beside the entrance, pistol in hand, ready to move. On the other side of the door, Warhurst apparently had decided to ignore his own orders. He took an RPG from one of the other Marines, twisted its tail-fin assembly to manually arm it, and gently tossed it around the corner. There was a loudbang as the 20mm grenade detonated inside. Garroway rolled around the corner and into the cool darkness of the entranceway…

…and found himself face-to-face with the enemy.

The Ahannu was sprawled on the floor of the chamber, just rising, as though it had been knocked down by the grenade blast. Its eyes—huge, pear-shaped, and golden in the poor light—blinked rapidly as the creature held up one splayed, six-fingered hand. Other features—lipless mouth, twin-slit nostrils, finely scaled skin, bony head crest, the lack of any external ears at all—all added up to something that looked far more reptilian than human, despite the humanoid number and arrangement of limbs and other body parts.

Strangest, perhaps, was the mass of purplish, translucent jelly riding on the creature’s shoulders and the back of its slightly elongated neck. A thin slime of the stuff coated the being’s skin and seemed to be leaking from nostrils and the openings at the base of its jaw that must be its ears. Threads of the gel stretched from the Ahannu’s shoulders to the floor and the back wall of the room, like a spider’s web made of glistening mucus.

Garroway brought the Colt Puller up, aiming it at the creature’s flat face, his finger tightening on the trigger.

“Nu!”the creature shrilled.“Sagra nu!”

Without the net, there was no hope of a translation. What the hell wassagra nu ?

But as near as Garroway could tell, the being was unarmed. It wore torso armor that looked like green-stained leather, and some bangles on its arms that might have been gold. Unless that purple crap on its head and shoulders was dangerous…

“Sagra nu,”the Ahannu said, still holding up its open hand.“Ga-me-e’din!”

Primitive the being might be, but it was afraid of the pistol. “You’d better not even twitch, Frog,”

Garroway said. He knew damned well the Ahannu couldn’t understand, but he tried to throw enough authority and menace into his voice to get the message across anyway.

“I…no…twitch…frog…” the Ahannu said, its voice raspy and hard to make out, but intelligible all the same.

“Jesus!” Sergeant Dunne said at Garroway’s side. “The thing speaks English!”

“We…thing…speak…” it said. “A few of…we…thing…speak….”

“Who are you?” Captain Warhurst demanded, keeping his laser carbine aimed at the Ahannu’s chest.

“What do we call you?”

“We are…Zu-Din,” the being replied. “We are…the Mind of God.”

“No weapons,” Garroway said. “He must either be a scout…”

“Or what?” Warhurst asked.

“Or an officer, sir. I don’t think he’s a regular warrior.”

“We’ll let Intelligence sort that out,” Warhurst said. “Schuster! Evans! Dumbrowski! March our friend here up to the top. Ride with him back to the compound and tell the colonel it speaks English. Sort of.”

“Aye aye, sir!” The three Marines led the Ishtaran out.

Warhurst, meanwhile, was studying the only piece of equipment in the small, black-walled stone chamber, a football-shaped object two meters wide suspended from the ceiling by a cable that appeared too slender to bear its weight. A dark red cloth had been draped over the top, covering it. Carefully, he used the muzzle of his laser to tug the cloth off.

Underneath, an oval screen glowed softly deep within black crystal. A human in civilian clothing was visible on the screen, apparently reading an e-pad in her hands.

“Excuse me,” Warhurst said. The woman didn’t react. Warhurst reached out and touched the bottom of the device with his gauntlet; there was supposed to be a touch-sensitive volume control there. “Excuse me,” Warhurst said again.

This time the woman jumped. She turned her head and stared at the Marines with eyes widened in shock.“Mon Dieu!” she exclaimed. She launched into a torrent of something sounding like French.

“Whoa, whoa, there,” Warhurst said, holding up his hands. Reaching up, he removed his helmet. “We do not have net access here, so I can’t understand you. Uh…non comprendez. Do you read me?”

The woman blinked. “I understand,” she said in heavily accented English. “I am Giselle Dumont of the Cydonian Quebecois Research Team. And you are…?”

“Captain Martin Warhurst, First Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit, 1st Division, 44th Regiment, UFR Marine Corps,” he replied. “Can you patch me through to the UFR Military Communications Network, Code one-five-alpha-three-echo, Priority One, please?”

“I am sorry, sir, but the WorldNet interplanetary relays are offline at this time. We have had a period of bad solar weather….”

Garroway stood to one side of the chamber, beyond the FTL communicator’s pickup field. It figured. Communications between Llalande 21185 and the vast underground facility on Mars were obviously crystal clear. The ordinary speed-of-light channels between Earth and Mars, however, seemed to be out of commission.

Or…was that really the whole story? The woman was Quebecois, and the nation of Quebec was allied with the EU, had been ever since the UN War. What if there’d been some political or military changes back home in the past ten years? What if the Cydonian complex was under EU control now? Hell, how were they supposed to knowanything was as it seemed?

As Warhurst continued speaking with the woman, Garroway noticed something on the floor…a folded piece of fabric that apparently had been pulled from the top of the FTL comm device when Warhurst had dragged the red cloth cover off. Stooping, he picked it up.

It was a small, folding monitor display, fifteen centimeters by twenty-one, with a tiny camera woven into the smartthreads of the upper border. Printed on the bottom were the wordsSURVIVALCAM: UFRS

EMISSARY .

“Emissary,”he said aloud.

Warhurst turned from the screen and looked at him. “What was that, Marine?”

He looked up. “Sorry, sir.‘Emissary.’ I found this on the deck.”

Warhurst took the cloth and studied it.

“Emissary,”Kat Vinita said. “That was the Terran Legation ship, wasn’t it? The one that was destroyed?”

“That’s the one. I wonder who—” He stopped. “My God!”

Warhurst stepped beyond the FTL unit’s pickup field, holding the display screen taut in his hands. Garroway was close enough to see a face, a human face looking up out of the cloth, a face as surprised as the captain’s and perhaps even more delighted.

“You came!” the face said, the voice thin and reedy over the folding screen’s smarthtread speakers but clear enough to be understood. “My God, you came! Weknew you would!”

“I’m Captain Martin Warhurst, UFR Marines. Who are you?”

“Uh…sorry, sir! Master Sergeant Gene Aiken, UFR Marine Corps! Currently assigned to the Terran Legation, Ishtar!”

“Goddess!Where are you?”

Aiken grinned. “The Ahtun Mountains, sir. Roughly fifty klicks east of New Sumer. We’ve been holed up here ever since the Frogs chased us out.”

“Ten years…?”

“I reckon so, sir. But we knew you wouldn’t forget us. We’ve just been waiting for the Marines to land and put the situation well in hand!”

“Stay on this line, Master Sergeant,” Warhurst said. He handed the cloth to Garroway, then stepped back in front of the FTL screen. “Um, Madame Dumont?”

“Yes, monsieur. I could not catch what you were just saying. Is there interference at your end?”

“My apologies, Madame Dumont. Something urgent has come up. We’ll be in touch shortly.”

“But, monsieur—”

“Let’s go, people.”

Wondering just what the hell was going on, Garroway followed Warhurst and the others out of the Chamber of the Eye.

Regimental HQ

Building 5, Legation Compound

New Sumer, Ishtar

1924 hours ALT

“This Dumont person didn’t tell you anything more?” Ramsey demanded.

“No, sir,” Warhurst replied. “She seemed helpful enough and surprised to see me. But she would not make the connection for us with Washington.”

Ramsey rubbed his chin. “Shecould be telling the truth, of course. Solar weather does play hob with the comm relays sometimes. But I don’t like this.”

“Neither do I, sir.” He pointed at the unfolded screen on the table beside them, with Aiken’s bearded face looking up at them. “That’s why I decided to keep this quiet, at least until you decide otherwise.”

“Well done, Colonel.” Ramsey looked at General King. “General? I suggest we defer further communications with Earth until we can transport the Legation survivors back here.”

“I agree, Colonel. A communications malfunction right now is just a little too convenient.”

“So, Master Sergeant,” Ramsey said, looking down into Aiken’s face. “How would you like to come back to the compound?”

“We’ll have to bum a lift, sir,” Aiken replied. “We got all our people out here on board three old Starhauler TAVs. We had to make a bunch of trips, though, to get everyone out, and ten years sitting in the jungle afterward didn’t do their power plants any good. They’re just rusty junk now.”

“Not a problem. We can deploy a Dragonfly with a landing module and bring at least some of you back. How many survivors are there?”

Aiken pursed his lips. “Well, sir…our current roster has eighteen Marines and 158 civilians. Twenty-seven of those last are children.”

“Children?” Ramsey exclaimed. “Whatchildren?…Oh.”

“Yes, sir. Ithas been ten years.” He grinned. “And the natives are friendly.”

“Natives?”

“Yes, sir. We’re living at a village of…well, they call themselvesdumu-gir . It means a native child in the Ishtaran common tongue…but it means ‘freeborn.’”

“You mean these are humans?Free humans? Escaped from the Ahannu?”

“Some are runaways, yes, sir. Most of them have always been free. They’re descendants of humans who got away from the Frogs, oh, over the past few thousand years, I guess. Maybe going all the way back to when humans were first brought here as slaves. A few must have escaped even back then and set up communities out in the jungle. The Ahannu…they don’t come out in the wild all that much. They tend to be content to stay where they are, inside their cities and tunnel complexes.”

“The Ahannu try to recapture them, surely.”

“Oh, once in a while. Sometimes the Frogs band together and try to catch them or stomp them out, but thedumu-gir have learned a few things, living out here in the jungle all these years. Sir, they’regood . The Marines could learn a few things from them.”

“How many natives are there?”

“Oh, about a hundred at last count. In this village, anyway.”

“A hundred? A hundred free Ishtaran humans?”

“There are other villages, of course. No one knows how many. They don’t go in much for governments and such here. Nothing more than a tribal council, anyway. They took us in when we got out of Dodge…uh, I mean, when we retreated from New Sumer. We’ve been teaching them a few tricks, helping them develop weapons and tactics against the Frogs.”

“You speak the local language, then?”

“A bit, sir. Our expert is Dr. Moore. She was our xenosoc expert, and she’s gone on to learn a lot about the Ishtarans, both the humans and the Ahannu. And a lot of thedumu-gir speak pretty good English now. They’ve been learning it for ten years.”

“Master Sergeant, you may have just saved this expedition’s collective ass. Whose bright idea was it, anyway, to leave a survivalcam screen in the Chamber of the Eye?”

Aiken grinned. “Mine, actually, sir. I figured the Marines would be coming, and one of the first things they’d do was get the Chamber of the Eye back, so they could talk to Earth. One of our locals, Kupatin, volunteered to sneak in and put it in place, since he could look the part of a Sag-ura, with all those tattoos and stuff, and I couldn’t. That was maybe…oh, a year ago, maybe. When we began to think that you guys would be showing up any day now. And actually, sir, to tell the truth, I was under the impression that it was you who were saving our ass.”

“Either way. That was damned good thinking on your part. We’re sending a Dragonfly for you. Please report to me…with your Marines and any senior Legation people who want to come. We’d particularly like to see Dr. Moore, if she’s available.”

“She sure is, sir.” He grinned. “Happens I married the lady, a few years back.”

“Ah! Well. Congratulations.”

“Thank you, sir. But our people have been intermarrying with the locals too. There haven’t been any problems at all in that regard. The biggest difference between Earth humans and Ishtaran humans is in the psychological conditioning. And thedumu-gir have managed to break most of that conditioning.”

Gavin Norris had been watching and listening in silence to the entire exchange. Suddenly, he stepped up close to the table. “Master Sergeant Aiken,” he said. “Is Randolph Carleton among the survivors, by chance?”

“Who are you?”

“The PanTerra Dynamics trade representative on this planet.”

“I see. Yeah, Carleton’s here.”

“Tell him to come along as well.”

Aiken looked at Ramsey, who nodded. “Tell him, Master Sergeant. We’ll see you in a few more hours.”

“It’s gonna be good, Colonel. Damned good! Five years we were here sinceEmissary arrived, and then ten more out in the sticks. I tell you, sir, we’ve gotten more than a little tired of the same old faces!”

“We’ll see you soon, Master Sergeant. New Sumer out!” He turned to Warhurst. “Quite a stroke of luck,” Ramsey said. “If one of your men hadn’t spotted that comm cloth…”

“Yes, sir. Although Master Sergeant Aiken indicated that they have been expecting us. They’ve probably had locals watching New Sumer for our arrival and would have been able to contact us sooner or later.”

“Right. But we’re in contact now. And we need people who speak the language.” Ramsey looked across the room. Their most recent captive, the unarmed Ahannu taken in the Chamber of the Eye a short while ago, was tied to a chair, his face and expression unreadable.

“You said you did hear that Frog speak English?” General King asked. “I haven’t heard anything from him except gibberish.”

“Yessir. Clearly. He hasn’t spoken since we got him back down here?”

“Not since I ordered some of our people to clean him up.”

“Sir?”

“That purple jelly. It must’ve been rolling in the stuff, or something. I thought at first that it might be blood and had a corpsman start washing—”

Warhurst’s eyes widened. “General…I don’t know what that purple stuff is, but we’ve found it on several Ahannu corpses. Not on all of them, but on a few.”

“You think it’s something for communication?” Ramsey asked.

“Yes, sir. I do. Look, for primitives, these guys have been doing pretty damned good at coordinating their attacks. Up there on top of the pyramid, they started coming up out of a hole behind us at the same instant they were coming up over the sides of the building. Some of their other attacks have shown a high degree of synchronization too.Somehow they manage to talk to each other. That guy was up in the Chamber of the Eye, which gave him a perfect OP from which to watch us. He wasn’t armed. He wasn’t a sniper…which means he was watching us and passing on information to his HQ.”

“But how would that help him speak English?” King demanded.

“Well, we know some Ahannu spoke English ten years ago. They learned it from the Terran Legation, right?”

“Right.”

“So…what if the Frogs have something like our net? A means of transmitting data among themselves very quickly? An Ahannu who knew English could have been listening in when we captured this one and been telling him what to say.” Warhurst shrugged. “Or maybe the purple gunk is just the local equivalent of a computer translator. Whatever it is, we’ve got to be damned careful not to make assumptions about things we don’t understand based on our human experience.”

“Good advice, Captain,” Ramsey said. “What do you suggest so far as talking with our friend here goes?”

“Well, sir, like you said, we have some people coming now who speak the lingo. But if you want to talk to the Ahannu leadership, our best bet might be to take our friend here right back up to the Chamber of the Eye.”

“Hmm.” Ramsey considered this. “I’m not sure I want to trust him up there. Like you said, we can’t afford to make assumptions about things we don’t understand. That includes what passes for their technology. We’ll wait and see what a translator makes of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ramsey stared long and hard into the unblinking golden eyes of the prisoner. What was it thinking?How did it think? Like humans…or in some way utterly and fundamentally different—alien, in other words?

What did it know?

And would it ever be possible to communicate with something that alien?

26

15JULYTHROUGH23

JULY2148

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1930 hours ALT

“You know, they used to call this kind of party a steel beach,” Dunne said.

“Steel beach?” Garroway asked. “How do you mean?”

“Navy and Marine personnel on big, oceangoing ships,” Dunne replied. “Like aircraft carriers, y’know?

They’d have some time off, they’d go out and sun themselves on the deck, maybe smuggle in some liquid contraband.” He raised a can of beer in explanation. “They called it a steel beach ’cause all there was to lie on was steel.”

“We’re not on a ship, Sarge,” Vinita pointed out.

“Sure, Kat. But remember your basic Marine terminology. It’s a ‘hatch,’ not a ‘door,’ a ‘ladder,’ not stairs. Even ashore.” He waved the beer can to take in the Legation compound, the alien green sky, the distant purple jungle, the untidy sprawl of New Sumer. “We’re ashore. We treat the place like a ship, anyway. Hence…‘steel beach.’”

“With not a single bit of steel in sight,” Womicki said, looking around at the flat expanse of the pyramid’s top. “Makes as much sense as anything in the Corps.”

“Fuckin’-A!” Dunne exclaimed. He drained the last of the beer, then smashed the can against his forehead, crumpling it flat. A small pile of flat, crumpled disks on the ground in front of them paid mute testimony to beverages already consumed.

Garroway still wasn’t sure how they’d managed it. Dunne claimed that he and Honey Deere had smuggled a couple of cases of brew onto a supply pallet destined for theRegulus before their departure from Earth. Those cases had been hidden inside supply containers marked “dietary supplements” and seemed to have survived the four-years-subjective voyage in reasonable taste. Beer smuggling was by now a grand tradition in the spacefaring Corps. Old-timers liked to regale newbies with the exploits of a Marine unit at Cydonia seventy years ago. Some of old Sands of Mars Garroway’s Marines, it seemed, had managed to smuggle a few cases of beer to Mars. Garroway’s famous ancestor had appropriated it and turned it into makeshift chemical weaponry against the occupying UN forces. Modern Marines delighted in finding new and original means of smuggling beer to remote duty stations, an activity still listed as very much a crash-and-burn in both Navy and Marine Corps regulations. If they were caught, the standard excuse was, “We were just following Corps tradition,sir! ”

Sometimes it even worked.

Garroway took a sip from his can, grimacing. He didn’t really like the taste of the stuff but didn’t want to admit it to the others. Besides, it was a kind of honor, a right of passage, even, to be included in this simple Corps ritual.

And itwas a ritual, one every bit as meaningful and as sacred as anything Garroway had performed as a Wiccan. With each can opened and held toward that glorious sky, the name of another fallen comrade was toasted. Dunne had toasted Valdez and Deere, and Kat Vinita had remembered Chuck Cawley and Tom Pressley. Womicki toasted Brandt and Foster, while Garroway saluted his two comrades from boot camp, Hollingwood and Garvey.

The four of them were seated on the pavement atop the Pyramid of the Eye, in armor because they were on call, but with gloves and helmets off. They’d been reorganized once again into a new unit—First Platoon, Alfa Company—all from veterans of the fight for Objective Suribachi three weeks before. Members of the company had taken to calling themselves the “Pyramidiots,” and the name had stuck. Garroway turned his head, studying the darkening panorama around them as the eclipse slowly deepened. He thought-clicked his visual center, opening his nano-enhanced irises wider to suck in more light. Other members of the company stood guard around the top of the pyramid or lounged in front of the nanocrete dome erected beside the crater as a firebase HQ. The American flag fluttered from a much taller mast now, above the HQ building. Native workers,dumu-gir from the free village of Ha-a-dru-dir, continued to clear the crater of loose stone and rubble under Marine engineer supervision. In the distance, a pair of Wasps circled high above New Sumer on ever-vigilant patrol. Somehow, he managed to gulp down the last of his beer and hand the empty across to Dunne.

“Ooh-rah!” Dunne said, and crumpled the can flat.

“Your turn for a toast, Gare,” Womicki told him, handing him another can from the opened supplement container.

“What?” He almost didn’t recognize his Corps handle. “Gare Garroway” wasn’t all that inspired, but for him it was a final break from his old civilian identity as “John,” a name he hadn’t used, it seemed, in centuries.

“Your turn. Who’s next?”

Shit, who was left? They’d toasted all of the fallen in the old assault force squad. And there were so many more…Marine men and women he’d never gotten to know but who’d fought and died for this small and distant patch of alien soil. “I think you’re just trying to get me drunk,” he told them.

“Of course,” Dunne replied, grinning. “That’s part of the ceremony.”

“Well…” He thought for a moment, then popped the tab and raised the can. “To fallen comrades, past and future,” he said. “Andto the cease-fire. Long may it hold!”

“Amen!” Womicki called.

“Most righteous,” Dunne added, raising a new can of his own.“Ooh-rah!”

They chugged the toast. Dunne accepted Garroway’s empty can and smashed it against his forehead.

“How do youdo that?” Vinita asked.

Dunne grinned. “Got an implant here,” he said, running a hand across his forehead. “Solid nanochelated carbotitanium replacing a chunk of my skull. From a little present I picked up in Colombia, y’know?” He knocked his forehead with a fist. “Hard head.”

“Figures,” Womicki said. “Heis a Marine, after all.”

The sky was rapidly darkening as the Llalande sun settled behind Marduk in its once-in-six-days eclipse, scattering brilliant sunset colors halfway around the gas giant’s full-circle horizon. Theoretically, this was the third eclipse since their landing twenty-one days ago, but thick clouds and rain had blocked both of the others.

Yeah, like they said. If you didn’t like the weather on Ishtar, just wait a minute. The cease-fire still seemed too good to be true. Three shipboard days after the fighting on Suribachi, however, Sumerian-speaking Marines from the old Legation expedition had met with a delegation of Ahannu leaders, a meeting arranged by the Frog they’d captured in the Chamber of the Eye. They said his name was Tu-Kur-La.

According to Tu-Kur-La, the Ahannu had been terribly hurt by their failed assault on the pyramid, a battle that had cost the Marines fifty-one dead and thirty-eight wounded, including the casualties in the compound fighting as well as those at the top. Exact Ahannu casualties were unknown but were believed to exceed twelve hundred Ahannu god-warriors, seven hundred Sag-ura, and nearly two hundred of their specially bredkur-gal-gub , the “mountain-great-warriors” the Marines called “trolls.”

Twenty-one hundred dead Ishtarans at least; the full number might never be known, since so many bodies had been utterly destroyed in the fighting. After the first arranged truce meeting ten days ago, a vast panoply of Ahannu warriors had appeared north of the Legation compound, holding high a forest of urin battle standards and keening in their strange, rasping voices. The Marines learned later that the Ahannu song had bestowed an honor of their own upon the men and women of 1 MIEU, as well as a new name.

They called the Marinesnir-gál-mè-a , which according to Aiken and the other old Ishtar hands, meant

“respected in battle.” The Fighting 44th had immediately adapted the name to its own use—the Nergal May-I, or Nergs for short.

Garroway smiled at that. The Corps carried a number of nicknames handed to it over the centuries. Leathernecks, for the stiff collars worn by Marines in the nineteenth century, supposedly to protect the throat from sword cuts but actually a means of making recruits stand up straight. Jarheads, a pejorative for the “high-and-tight” haircuts of the twentieth century. Devil Dogs, from Teufil Hundin, a name bestowed on them by their German enemies after the Battle of the Marne, originally as an insult, since hundin meant “bitch,” but ever after one of the proudest of the Corps’ noms de guerre. And now they were Nergs.

The Marines had made their mark, it seemed, out here among the stars. The folks back home would never understand, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore.

The folks back home. Garroway swallowed and bit back the stinging in his throat and eyes. Two days after the fight on Suribachi, communications had at last been established with Earth through the FTL

screen in the Chamber of the Eye. There’d been all kinds of scuttlebutt flying through the MIEU about mysterious delays or problems in opening the channel, but the link had been established at last, with an instantaneous two-way connection with Mars, and an added twenty minutes for the Mars-to-Earth link one-way. Regular calls for the Marines hadn’t been authorized yet, but a few familygrams and special messages had been routed through from Quantico.

And one of them had been a ’gram for Lance Corporal John Garroway, from his aunt in San Diego. His mother was dead.

He was still having trouble wrapping his mind around that one. According to the brief message, limited to a barren and emotionless twenty-five words or fewer, she’d been found dead a year after theDerna had boosted out of Earth orbit. The death was listed as accidental, of course…a fall down the steps in front of the Esteban home.

Garroway didn’t believethat for a moment. He knew she’d gone back to Esteban before he was shipped up to theDerna . He’d dreaded this very possibility, that she would go back to that abusive bastard one time too many….

There wasn’t a lot he could do now, except grieve. His mother had died nine years ago, while he’d still been asleep in cybehibe on board theDerna , outbound from Earth. As for his father, well, apparently there wasn’t much news. According to CNN briefs relayed over the net from home, the abortive Aztlan Antistatehood Insurrection of 2042 had driven the ringleaders into hiding. Carlos Esteban among them, apparently.

Garroway found himself fervently hoping his father was dead.

No…No, on second thought it would be better by far if the bastard were alive. That way, he might be able to present his biological father with a bill of reckoning someday. He looked down at his hands, flexing them. His left arm—broken by a gauss round in the battle—was still sore, but it was working now, thanks to the calcium nanochelates and fastheal the corpsmen had given him. He was going to survive this deployment, and he was going to get back home.

And someday, he would meet his father again.

Someday…

He looked up into the darkening sky. The brightest stars were beginning to show as the eclipse deepened the twilight. He uplinked to the net to check which stars were visible and where. At least the netwas working now. The Navy personnel left on board theDerna , plus the command constellation’s AI, had brought the full net back online only three days ago. Garroway and the others were still getting used to having that much information a thought-click away once more. In some ways, things had been simpler when they’d had to rely on their own memories and on such primitive-tech anachronisms as radio, human and robotic scouts, and sign language. Data flowed through his thoughts. Yes…that bright one there, low in the north. The brightest star in what at home would be the constellation Scutum, just north of Sagittarius. The sun of home.

Yeah. Someday.

Gavin Norris

Chamber of the Eye

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1935 hours ALT

Gavin Norris was puffing hard by the time he clambered up the last step and leaned against the entrance to the Chamber of the Eye. A Marine sentry was there, but he thought-queried Norris’s e-pass, snapped to attention and said, “You are recognized, sir.”

Good. He’d not expected trouble, but you never knew with these damned jarheads. Portable lights illuminated what had been the black interior of the Chamber of the Eye. The Eye itself was aglow, showing the interior of the so-called Cave of Wonders at Cydonia, eight light-long light-years away. As promised, theQuebecois Giselle Dumont was on duty at the other end.

“Hello, Madame Dumont.”

“Ah, Mr. Norris,” she said, turning to face the screen. “I was told to expect you about now. Is everything in order?”

“It is. I think we’re finally ready to begin.” He stepped aside as the others filed into the chamber behind him—Carleton, Dr. Hanson, and Tu-Kur-La the Frog.“Friar Tuck,” Norris had been calling the thing, making a joke of the alien name. The Ahannu didn’t appear to care.

“I’m still not convinced this is a good idea,” Carleton said. “I don’t trust the Frogs. Not after ten years in that damned jungle.”

“That’s not your concern, Carleton,” Norris said. “Tell Tuck to do his thing.”

Carleton grimaced, then gargled something at the Frog. It gargled back, then sat itself on the chamber floor, holding both six-fingered hands out above one of the cracks between the polished stone blocks.

“What’s happening?” Dumont said. “I can’t see.”

“Sorry,” he told her. “We have with us the Frog we used to make contact with the Frog leadership. He’s going to connect himself up to a kind of organic computer network the Frogs have grown all throughout this part of the planet. They call it the…what was it, Dr. Hanson?”

“‘Abzu-il,’” Hanson replied. “The ‘Gateway to the Sentient Sea.’”

“Yeah. Abzu. He’s going to put us in touch with the Frog High Emperor, and we’re going to pitch the deal straight to him.”

Dumont cocked her head. “An organic computer? PanTerra would bevery interested in that.”

“Sure, sure…but the real payoff’s going to be in the human natives. Right, Carleton?”

The other PanTerran executive nodded, though he kept watching Tu-Kur-La with a suspicious glare.

“It’s like we thought, Madame Dumont,” he said. “The humans they brought back here from Earth ten thousand years ago have been bred for all those centuries as slaves. Docile. Completely obedient. The wild ones, the ones who couldn’t be easily trained, kept running off into the jungle, and it’s a damned good thing they did or I wouldn’t be here now. But the ones who stayed with the Frogs, they’ve been conditioned to do anything their masters tell them.Anything .”

“He’s right,” Norris added. “It’s no wonder the Ahannu didn’t let us see much of the Sag-ura slaves when we first came here. They’ll do whatever their ‘gods’ tell them to do, and like it. Their warriors are absolutely without fear. The women…well…” He chuckled. “The Frogs don’t go in for that sort of thing, of course, but the women do whatever they’re told. They’re totally centered on pleasing their master. It’s almost like they don’t have a will of their own. They’re brought up that way from birth. I guess that’s why things haven’t changed here at all in a hundred centuries. It’s the status quo from Hell, only it’s going to be pure heaven for PanTerra.”

“Yes, but will the High Emperor go along with what you tell him?”

“He has to,” Norris said. “He agrees to sell us Sag-ura slaves for technology, and we promise not to unleash our Marines on him. My God, you should have seen the slaughter! Over two thousand Frogs killed in that last battle, against fifty Marines! And that’s not counting all the Frogs that were killed in the first assault. Yes, I think the Frog Emperor will bevery willing to listen to reason.”

“And PanTerra ships a few thousand agreeable domestic servants back to Earth for a most tidy return on their investment.”

“But that…that’sslavery !”

Norris turned to face Hanson, who was staring at him in horror. “Let’s not use such loaded terminology, my dear,” he told her. “They are slaves now, under the Frogs. We’re here tohelp them.”

And he smiled.

Dr. Traci Hanson

Chamber of the Eye

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1944 hours ALT

Hanson could not believe what she was hearing. The bastards! The unmitigated, grade-A scum-gargling bastards!

“The people of the Terran Commonwealth want the slaves freed and repatriated to Earth,” Norris was telling her. “That is exactly what we are doing. But think about the poor Sagura. They know nothing but slavery…ten thousand years of it, in fact. They’ve been raised thinking of themselves as slaves. The best thing we can do is acclimate them gradually to a new way of life. Letting them work as domestic servants, trained and hired out to certain wealthy clients by PanTerra, seems a most agreeable and decent way of breaking them in, don’t you think? I mean, Jesus, they don’t even understand the concept of money here. They know nothing except doing what they’re told. How do you expect them to live on Earth? How are they even going tosurvive unless we provide this working shelter—this work assistance program, if you will—for them?”

“You bastards,” Hanson said quietly. “You fucking bastards! You’re going to buy them from the Ahannu, hire them out on Earth, and pocket the profit. That’s slavery, no matter what weasel words you attach to it!”

“Nonsense. PanTerra paid for this expedition and helped put together the international coalition behind it. We are going to assume the costs of shipping all those freed slaves back to Earth and for training and feeding them until they can decide what they want for themselves. And PanTerra is paying me—and you, for that matter, Dr. Hanson—veryhandsomely indeed to put this deal together. They deserve a return on their investment.”

“You also know that those poor Sag-ura are never going to get free. How are they supposed to be reintegrated into human society when you have them working for new masters eight light-years from their homes? Are these rich clients you talk about going to just let them go? Or are you going to start shipping slaves from Ishtar on a regular schedule?”

“Dr. Hanson, please,” Carleton said. “There’s no need for emotional outbursts. A free market, a free economy, finds its own morality.”

“Morality!” Hanson screamed. “Goddess!” She held up her right arm, pinching the skin.“What fucking color is this?”

“Brown,” Carleton said, puzzled. “Dark brown. You look Latino, or maybe—”

“My ancestors wereslaves , you son of a bitch. I was born in North Michigan, but some of my ancestors came from Gambia, Ivory Coast, Brazil, and Haiti! Some of them wereslaves , Mr. Carleton, and you expect me not to be emotional?”

“That will be quite enough, Dr. Hanson,” Norris said. He’d produced a small, 8mm handgun and was pointing it at Hanson. “I’m disappointed in you. I thought you were a loyal PanTerran employee.”

“There are some things even a billion newdollars won’t buy.”

“Really?” He shook his head in amusement. “Who’d have thought it? Guard!”

The Marine sentry stepped inside. “Yes, sir?”

“Please put Dr. Hanson under protective arrest. I have reason to believe she is in the pay of radical anti-Ahannu church elements.”

“It’s a lie, Marine!” Hanson cried. “These bastards are trying to—”

“I don’t much care what they’re trying to do, miss,” the Marine said, pointing his laser carbine at her. With his free hand, he reached up and pulled off his helmet.

It was General King.

“You!”

“Of course.”

“Traitor!”

He scowled. “That’s a negative, Doctor,” he said, his voice sharp. “A traitor betrays his national allegiance. I have done nothing of the sort. The Federal Republic, in its infinite wisdom, decided to send me out here because I was acceptable to all Commonwealth political factions. To do that, I had to leave my wife and my children on Earth…people who have not seen me now for ten years and who will not see me for another ten.” He shrugged. “This is my last command, obviously. I have only retirement to look forward to. PanTerra is providing me with my retirement package, that’s all. A nice set of investment portfolios at home. The promise of a well-paying job when I get back. And anti-aging treatments for my wife and kids. The deal was too good to pass up.”

She sagged. “But…they’re going to—”

“As I said, I don’t really care what these gentlemen do. They are not harming the Corps, and they are not threatening the government. If you’ll step back against that wall, please?”

She did so, thoughts whirling. The net. Her only chance was to uplink to the net. Hanson blasted out an electronic cry for help.“Colonel Ramsey!”

Gavin Norris

Chamber of the Eye

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1948 hours ALT

“Fuck! She’s using the net to call for help!” King yelled. He raised his carbine. “Stop it, bitch!”

Norris spun, raising the 8mm and pulling the trigger. The weapon’s sharp report rang from the polished black stone of the chamber, and Hanson was slammed a step backward into the wall.

“Damn it,” King shouted. “You didn’t need to shoot her!”

“Fuck her,” Norris said. “You get back out and stand guard. Make sure she didn’t put out an alert.” He turned to the screen. “Madame Dumont? Sorry for the delay. We had a…situation.”

“So I gathered. What the hell is going on? Have you made contact with the Ahannu leadership yet?”

Norris looked at Tu-Kur-La. The Frog was seated, cross-legged, in the back of the chamber, his hands still outstretched, his huge, golden eyes nictated shut. Something was growing rapidly up from the crack in the stone flooring before him, something like the uncoiling head of a fern but a deep and translucent purple and moving with a most un-plantlike agility. Parts of the purplish mass were flowing up the Frog’s arms, pooling on his shoulder, gathering at the back of his neck.

“Not yet,” Norris replied, “but any minute now….”

Cassius

ISTDerna,in Ishtar orbit

1948 hours ST

Artificial intelligences were not necessarilysuperior to organic intelligence, but they were different…and immensely faster. On board theDerna , Cassius had been engaged in monitoring and upgrading the newly restored Ishtar Data Net when he heard Dr. Hanson’s uplinked cry for help. In point of fact, he recognized that something was wrong as her first shrill word came through—“Colonel…”

Stress levels in her mental voice spoke volumes, alerting Cassius to the fact that this was a serious emergency. He required .03 second to isolate that one voice out of the babbling sea of hundreds he was monitoring at the moment and to narrow her position to the general area of the Pyramid of the Eye. There was a slight speed-of-light time delay, but he downlinked with her neuralink hardware, pinpointing her location and seeing the situation through her eyes. A total of 2.4 seconds passed before Cassius sounded the…

Lance Corporal Garroway

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1949 hours ALT

…alert.

Garroway’s eyes came wide open as the thought exploded in his brain. The company was going on full alert. Was it a Frog attack?

“Okay, you Pyramidiots! Fall in on the double! We’re rolling!”

It was Captain Warhurst, wearing his armor sans helmet and rushing across the top of the pyramid from the firebase HQ. Garroway and the others scrambled to their feet, snatching up weapons, gloves, and helmets.

“What the hell?” Dunne exclaimed.

“You four!” Warhurst snapped. “Grab your weapons and follow me! You three over there! With me!”

Garroway uplinked a query and was met with a terse“Net silence!” Something big was going down, but damned if he could figure out what. Warhurst was gathering in more and more Marines, dragging them along in his wake as he raced toward the western edge of the pyramid roof, then started down the steps. Garroway snapped his helmet latch to the locked position and brought up the helmet display. Fifteen Marines showed on the little map view in the corner, racing down the pyramid’s western stairs. His 2120

was at full power, his Mark VII systems all green.

“Here’s the straight download,” Warhurst’s voice said in his mind as he ran. “Hostage situation in the Chamber of the Eye. The PanTerran people are trying a fast one. The orders are to take them down. Alive if possible, but take them down! We don’t have time for finesse. Just move in and knock them down. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” the Marines chorused back.

They approached the entrance to the Chamber of the Eye from above. A lone Marine in full armor raised a laser carbine. “Halt!” he called, using his external speakers. “Don’t come any closer!”

“Stand down, Marine!” Warhurst ordered, raising his own 2120. “Safe your weapon and stand down!”

“I…can’t do that, Captain.”

“General King?”

“Trust me, Captain. I know Dr. Hanson got a partial message out. She became…unstable. You don’t understand the situation here.”

“The hell I don’t, sir!” Warhurst said.“Stand down!”

“Who’s going to make me, Captain? You?”

“No, sir. Someone named Cassius.”

It was not something the Marine Corps spoke of publicly or discussed with recruits. NCOs and officers were aware of the technology, of course, but rarely thought about it. Why should they? Mark VII suits required sophisticated arrays of microprocessors to sense and follow the wearer’s movements. Though built of ultralight alloys, carbon fiber, and plastic laminates, a Mark VII suit was heavy and required considerable power to enable the wearer simply to move, even tostand without becoming exhausted. It was a simple thing for Cassius to take every microprocessor in King’s Mark VII offline, turning it into an inert mass of very heavy metal and plastic.

And General King collapsed on the steps like a sack of meal, just like a simulated casualty back in boot camp.

Gavin Norris

Chamber of the Eye

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1951 hours ALT

Norris crouched next to the Frog, sweat beading on his forehead. “Yes, you understood me,” he said.

“We’ll give you technology for your Sag-ura slaves, as many as you want to send us.”

“What…would we want with…Blackhead technology?” the Frog said, its English broken and hesitant, but understandable. “We are the Godmind. Weare your gods.”

A clatter of falling armor made Norris look up. “Shit. What’s going on out there?”

“I’ll check,” Carleton replied, hurrying toward the door.

There was no time for this ponderous back and forth. Norris had watched Friar Tuck make his connection, allowing the purple goo to flow over his neck and head. It was unappetizing, sure, but no worse than a lot of things he had done. Suddenly, impetuously, he shoved his left hand into a mass of the translucent jelly and pulled a glob of it to the side of his face.

The Abzu-il was not intelligent, of itself. It was, in fact, a gene-tailored organism created by the Ahannu many thousands of years before, a living creature without a mind of its own, which could connect the minds of the gods.

The Sentient Sea itself, however, a kind of internal dreamscape of melded minds and stored memories, had its own intelligence, its own awareness.

And it was utterly unlike anything Gavin Norris had ever seen or felt before. He felt…tendrils of writhing ice penetrating his ears, his nose, the pores of his skin. There was a piercing stab of agony across the left side of his head as the thing worked its way through bone with lightning speed and settled into the contours of Norris’s brain.

Norris’shuman brain. Humans and Ahannu were much alike in many ways, but they were not the same species or even remotely related. Aspects of their biologies, which they shared, by chance or design, included such basics as a shared left-handedness in amino acids and a shared right-handedness in sugars. They could eat many of the same foods…a fact that the ancient Ahannu had taken advantage of when they’d enslaved early humans to raise crops for them in the fertile river valleys of distant Kia long ago. But the thought processes were mutually alien, so much so that very little of the Abzu was at all intelligible to Norris.

He saw—felt,rather—fragments of Memories…a whirling chaos of thoughts and alien language and symbologies so distant from his ken he could perceive it only as a kind of storm of color; of nightmare shape; of violent and throbbing scent and taste; of shrieking atonal chords of sound; of a prickling rain of fire across his skin; intense sexual lust; of sadness, fear, joy, despair, greed…

He heard the colors, shrill blues and reds and purples.

He smelled the music, alien and deafening, a cacophony of odor.

He heard the touch of living flame as his skin charred.

He screamed….

Lance Corporal Garroway

Pyramid of the Eye

New Sumer, Ishtar

1951 hours ALT

Warhurst and another Marine tackled the civilian outside, dragging him down, as Garroway spun around the corner of the entranceway and jumped into the cool darkness of the Chamber of the Eye. He wasn’t sure at first what he was seeing…one of the civilians lying on her back by the wall, blood on the front of her coverall; a Frog seated cross-legged at the back, his head encased in purple goo; another civilian kneeling next to the Frog, head back, eyes wildly staring, shrieking at the top of his lungs as purple gunk rippled over his face.

That civilian held a small handgun. Garroway nearly threw himself across the chamber, swiping at the gun with one gauntleted paw and sending the weapon clattering in pieces across the floor. The civilian—Norris—kept screaming, oblivious to the Marines now crowding into the chamber. “What do we do, sir?” Garroway asked Warhurst. “It’s killing him!”

“No.” The single word came from the seated Ahannu. It raised a hand, and the purple mess began draining from Norris’s ears and face. Flowing from his skin. “No. We are…sorry. We did not mean…this one harm.”

“What did you do to him?” Warhurst demanded.

“What did…he do to himself?” the alien replied. “We fear…he was not…ready for…enlightenment within the Sentient Sea.”

“Enlightenment?” Garroway said. “Isthat what they call it?”

Norris was still screaming, his mind blasted, utterly gone.

Eight days later Garroway lay at the edge of the jungle with Kat Vinita, relaxing after their last bout of lovemaking. He and Kat had become close these past weeks, very close, though he doubted the arrangement would become permanent. How could it, when they had no idea where they would be deployed next, or if they would be deployed together?

Besides, there was still Lynnley, somewhere out there among those stars. Hell. Was what he felt for Lynnley nostalgia for a distant friend? Or something more? It was impossible to tell. He’d changed so much.

“There’s Sol,” Kat said, pointing. “The Relief Expedition must be along that line of sight too.”

“That’s what they say,” Garroway replied. “Another five months and they’ll be here.”

She laughed and snuggled closer in his arms. “I wonder if when they get here they’ll approve of our…solution?”

He smiled and lightly stroked her breast. “I doubt it. From what Hanson and Carleton told the brass, PanTerra was set to keep the Ishtaran humans in what amounted to slavery.” A Navy corpsman had arrived in time to slap some fastheal nano on Dr. Hanson’s wound. She’d lived, and she was telling everything she knew about PanTerra’s scheme. Carleton had joined her in the revelation, probably to cover his ass.

And King as well, though he still didn’t see anything wrong with his stand. Why should he? he asked. PanTerra had been operating with the best intentions of the Ishtaran humans at heart. King had accepted house arrest with ill grace and temper. He would be vindicated, he claimed, at the court-martial. Unfortunately for him, a board of senior officers would not be available until they returned to Earth. In the meantime, Ramsey had assumed full operational command of 1 MIEU. The Marines themselves joked about the “mutiny.” Some had taken to wearing makeshift eyepatches or peppering their speech with piraticalarrrrs .

They gave the AI Cassius credit for carrying out the coup.

“I think they’ll have to accept it as afait accompli ,” Garroway told her after a moment. “I think the colonel is a damned genius, myself.”

“Let’s hope the brass back home agrees,” Kat replied.

Colonel Ramsey’s solutionwas elegant. The Marine Corps was not supposed to set government policy, but the government was 8.3 light-years away right now, and the nearest other representatives of that government would not be there for another five months. With the sudden Ahannu declaration of peace, something had to be donenow.

Ramsey had put together a working plan. As senior officer for 1 MIEU, he’d formally recognized the free Ishtaran humans as a separate state, an independent state on Ishtar, supported by the U.S. Marines. They would be the ones who talked to Earth’s representatives about any repatriation or emancipation of humans in the Llalande system, and they would approve any travel of Ishtaran humans back to Earth. Further, the Ishtaran state—Dumu-gir Kalam, as it was to be called—would have access to the Sag-ura under Ahannu control. Earth would supply the diplomats to begin peaceful negotiations between the two groups, with an eye to helping the Sag-ura gain some measure of self-determination. The Ahannu had agreed—reluctantly, but they’d agreed. The Marinenir-gál-mè-a carried a fair mass in the way of moral authority. Dr. Hanson had compared it to the Marines being thought of as co-equal gods with the Ahannu.

Gods of battle.

That was quite a promotion, Garroway thought.

Frankly, he doubted that the Sag-ura would ever choose self-determination. According to the xenosoc experts, they didn’t think of themselves as slaves but as people who merely served their gods, who had served them since time had begun. What, he wondered, would happen when the government’s desire to free the human slaves on Ishtar collided with the laws against interfering with people’s religion? The social firestorm that raised would likely burn for another century or two, at least. But the Sag-ura would have time to become adjusted to some new ideas, like the fact that they could choose a path for themselves. Maybe in a few more centuries…

“You know,” Garroway said, “once this story gets out, none of the other nations on Earth will have anything to do with PanTerra. They’ll be finished.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Though with that much money, I doubt it.”

“Aren’t you the little cynic?”

“Fuck you.”

“Again?”

She let her hand run down the hard-muscled curve of his belly. “Maybe. Depends on whether or not you’re up to it.”

He laughed, pulled her closer, and kissed her. Glowing, fragile gossamers danced in the night sky above them.

And later still, while Kat slept, Garroway queried the net for the location of Sirius and was disappointed to learn that that bright star, Alpha Canis Majoris, was halfway across the heavens, invisible now from Ishtar at this longitude.

He wondered if Lynnley was there now.

He wondered if she was thinking of him. Or if she, like he, had found another lover. He wondered if the sky where she was could be as spectacular as this. Well, it scarcely mattered. She was a Marine and went where she was sent. Just like him.