A second scream, a second light winked out. “Ortiz’s down! We lost Sergeant Ortiz!”

“Someone grab Ortiz’s boom-pack!” Garroway ordered. A brutally harsh command, but necessary. Ortiz’s telemetry showed he was dead, but the tactical nuke he’d been packing was still live and set to sequence Alpha.

It wouldn’t do to let the enemy get hold of it.

The thought elicited a derisive snort.Idiot! he thought.What would they want with it? Xul technology makes nuke-packs look like stone axes!

In the darkness ahead of him, Garroway saw movement, a flicker of black tentacles, a wink of reflected light, a shape emerging from shapelessness less than five meters away. Without thinking, he triggered his Hawking chaingun, sending a stream of 34mm slugs smashing into the half-glimpsed target. The recoil slammed him backward and tried to give him a left-to-right tumble, but his suit’s thrusters compensated automatically. He kept firing. Rounds sparked and flashed along the bulkheads with each ricochet; the shape flared white and came apart, half shattering into ragged fragments, the rest tumbling end-for-end back into the shadows.

Other targets appeared, seeming to separate from the strangely folded and crenellated walls, and he pivoted with the new motion, continuing to squeeze the firing contact inside his right gauntlet. His suit’s targeting system painted a crosshair reticule at the Hawking’s aim point, the image glowing bright in his visual field.

He could see very little of what he was fighting, even at what amounted to knife-fighting range. From intelligence gathered at Sirius Gate, he knew each Xul soldier was a teleoperated robot linked in with the ship’s controlling intelligence. Each was an elongated ovoid between a meter and two meters in length, obsidian-black, the smoothly sculpted body swollen and bulging in places, indented and concave in others, with no apparent matching of the details of its shape with others of its kind. Crystalline lenses like fist-sized rubies were set here and there in the body, again with no single design plan evident, and tentacles, as few as one and as many as twenty, sprouted from random points, helping the device to propel its way through the passageways in the zero-gravity of the Xul vessel’s interior. Its weaponry was varied, but usually consisted of a microparticle accelerator designed to fire very tiny butvery high-energy bolts of charged particles along an intense magnetic field. They also used laser technology…and in direct hand-to-hand combat, those tentacles possessed superhuman strength. The good news was that they were not heavily armored. Even handgun fire could punch through those paper-thin shells and wreak havoc with the quantum circuitry within. The stream of 34mm slugs from the chaingun slashed through them with explosive effect, sending chunks and fragments spinning wildly through the corridor.

Garroway’s Marines had been spread out along a three-meter-wide corridor when the Xul defenders began emerging from the bulkheads, literally appearing out of nowhere right in their midst. Pivoting in mid-passageway, Garroway saw Gwyneth Istook struggling in the grasp of a forest of black tentacles that seemed to grow from the nearest of the three enclosing walls.

Sending a stream of chaingun fire down that passageway would kill more of his Marines than Xul robots, despite the weapon’s safety-interrupt; he mentally thumbed his weapon selection to CQC and fired. Close-Quarters Combat called for a change in ammo as well as a change in tactics. The mental selector switched his Hawking loadout to SX, low-velocity safety-explosive rounds that detonated on impact and would neither ricochet off the walls nor pass through the target to kill someone in the line of fire beyond. It also switched his fire selector to single-shot. He raised his right arm, dragging the reticule in his visual field onto the black mass entangling Istook, and squeezed the firing switch. Nothing happened; Istook’s struggles had pulled her around until her suit entered Garroway’s line of fire, and the safety-interrupt in his combat computer had blocked the shot. Cursing under his breath, Garroway shifted his aim into the shadowy mass farther from the jerking form of Ishtook’s CAS and fired three quick-spaced rounds. Tentacles whiplashed, then came apart. Ishtook tumbled backward out of the thing’s grasp, bouncing hard off the opposite bulkhead. “Th-thanks, Gunny!”

“Not a problem,” he said, snagging the arm of her suit and stopping her rebound. “Stay close!”

“Gunny! The black-hats are on the run!”

It was true. The attackers were vanishing from the tactical display—destroyed, or retreating back into countless small, hidden side passages.

“Section! Who has Oritz’s boom-pack?”

“Right here, Gunny,” Corporal Hood called.

“Give it here.” They needed to plant these last two charges, then get the hell out of Dodge. “C’mon! In here!”

His suit lights had revealed a side passageway leading off at an odd angle from the main one. Ducking inside, they found themselves in a small, elongated room with glistening walls. “Place your weapon there,”

he told her, pointing. He watched her back as she set her K-94 against one wall and release the nanoseal in its base, anchoring it solidly in place. “Set sequence Bravo.”

“Bravo set, Gunny.”

“Okay. Two down, one to go….”

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

1549 hrs, GMT

The Lords Who Are were growing increasingly…concerned. Not fearful or worried, for those were emotional responses for which they simply were not equipped, but concerned, for hostile units were moving through the huntership’s bowels and the initial attempt to repel them had failed. True, the enemy had not penetrated far, and none were close to critical areas of the vessel, but internal scans had revealed several point sources of radiation that almost certainly represented primitive fission weapons of some sort.

Such a weapon might be primitive, but it could still kill. The Lords Who Are suddenly perceived a serious threat to their continued existence, and began moving to counteract it. Assault Detachment Alpha

On Board the Xul Intruder

1605 hrs, GMT

“Gunny! We got company! Several metric tons of it!”

“I see it.” His tactical display showed the onslaught, a red mass of enemy icons expanding like a cancer ahead of the Marine column.

Damn!He’d hoped to get a kilometer or so deeper into the Xul vessel to plant the last charge, but the fresh enemy attack had the route toward the ship’s bow completely blocked. Fresh red icons were beginning to appear behind the Marines as well, in fewer numbers, but positioned to block their retreat back to the AUT.

So be it. He unslung Ortiz’s K-94 pack, slapped it against a bulkhead, engaged the nanoseal, and set sequence Bravo. “Okay, Marines,” he ordered. “Fall back, by squads. Nice and slow, and by the book. Moulton!”

“Yeah, Gunny?”

“You’ve got point now. Pig free! Use it to best effect!”

“Roger that, Gunny!”

Staff Sergeant Moulton had been tail-end Charlie on the column, but as the Marines turned and began retracing their steps through the lightless tunnels, he would be in the lead. He was the section’s plasma gunner—carrying the unit’s PG-140, or “pig,” a twenty-five-megawatt weapon that could burn through three inches of plasteel at a range of one hundred meters. Because of the danger of frying fellow Marines in these tight quarters, he’d been under orders to direct his fire only toward the rear, keeping the enemy off their tails.

With Moulton in the lead, there’d be no fire restrictions as they retraced their path back to the AUT. Their suits remembered the way, guiding each Marine un-erringly back through the tangle of dark passageways. Ten minutes into the march, however, Moulton shouted a warning. “Bogies! Comin’ out of the bulkheads!”

“Burn ’em!”

Despite the shielding of his CAS, Garroway felt a tingling buzz pass through his body, the magnetic bleed of Moulton’s pig as it powered up, then loosed a tenth-second bolt of energy equivalent to the detonation of half a kilo of high explosives.

There was no air in the passageway to carry the shock wave, but Garroway felt the blast thrumming through the bulkheads beneath one hand and both feet. Someone cheered. “That’llshow the sons of bitches!”

Garroway was backing down the passageway, loosing short, controlled bursts from his chaingun at the machines closing in from behind. Splinters and shards of metal and circuitry danced and spun through the corridor, bouncing off of bulkheads and from his armor, glittering in his lights. And still the robotic enemy kept coming.

And the Marines kept fighting. “Retreat, hell!” Marine General Oliver P. Smith had said of a withdrawal in a minor war of an earlier century. “We’re just attacking in a different direction.” And the immortal Chesty Puller had once said, “We’re surrounded. That simplifies the problem.” This was a battle Smith and Puller both would have understood, despite the alien battleground, despite the high-tech weaponry. They fought their way through the smoking wreckage and charred fragments of their foe. Battlespace

1618 hrs, GMT

Since the late twentieth century, astronomers had known that many asteroids—some estimates said fifty percent—possessed satellites, a smaller asteroid circling the larger at distances of from a few tens to a few hundred kilometers. Early in the history of the Solar System, collisions between asteroids had been common, and many of the fragments, moving too fast to fall back to the parent body, but too slowly to escape, fell into orbit.

Asteroid 2127-VT was such a body. Twenty-three kilometers long and eighteen wide, it was orbited by a nameless chunk of rock barely 1.2 kilometers across at a distance of 30 kilometers. For almost five billion years, it had circled the sun at a leisurely pace in the bare-empty gulf between Jupiter and Mars. Human science did not yet understand the quantum-effect field technology employed by the Xul that allowed them to instantaneously transfer a given amount of energy to a target body. Most physicists would insist the trick was impossible, even given the stark evidence of the Xul attack. Nevertheless, when the Xul ship kicked 2127-VT out of orbit, imparting to it a velocity of 2,000

kilometers per second, the satellite was caught in the energy transfer field, and continued to circle its parent despite the abrupt change in course and speed.

Hours later, 2127-VT was tracked and imaged by both HELGA One and HELGA Three, as well as by fire-control and tracking centers on the Moon and in Earth orbit. Those scans missed the satellite, however. That volume of space was becoming increasingly obscured by dust and debris from earlier laser strikes.

At 1608 GMT, a direct hit by HELGA Three turned 2127-VT into an expanding cloud of rubble, much of which would miss its target, and of which most of the remainder would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. The tiny satellite, however, had not been touched. It continued to circle the cloud’s center of mass, even as it began plowing through the gravel, rock, and ice that once had been its parent. Myriad impacts altered its course slightly; its course altered more, and very gradually, as the debris cloud dispersed more and more.

Overall, however, it continued along the same path, heading directly toward Earth. And the debris cloud served perfectly to mask the satellite’s presence from the laser and radar scans being used to track the incoming stream of asteroids.

2127-VT’s moonlet would strike the Earth in another eleven hours and twenty-one minutes. 7

12FEBRUARY 2314

Quincy

Resident within the Xul Group Mind

1634 hrs, GMT

The trick was to keep a firm hold on his identity.

In any modern battle, the key weapon was information, and the ability to penetrate an enemy’s computer net often determined the encounter’s victor before the actual fighting began. Software penetrators of various types and capabilities, ranging from simple viruses to extraordinarily complex AI systems, were among the most basic and common of weapons in the modern military arsenal. Quincy—in more proper terms, KWN-C3 1189 (military grade)—was an artificial intelligence, an extremely intricate and flexible set of software instructions running to several billion lines of polyplex hypercode arrayed within a virtual four-dimensional quantum matrix, self-maintaining, self-diagnosing, self-modifying, self-replicating within certain rather stringent situational parameters, and, most importantly, self-aware. Spawned as a code seed almost fifty years earlier within the Bell-Hitachi Naval Research Labs at China Lake, California, Quincy had written most of his own code himself—again following carefully outlined parameters—and guided his own development with a speed, skill, and depth of understanding impossible for human programmers.

At the moment, most of Quincy was resident within the Marine HQ computer net in Phobos, though nearly exact duplicates of him, identical save for memories and experience, served with Marine command constellations throughout the Solar System and elsewhere. Perhaps forty percent of his code had been copied, however, and downloaded to the AI net within theCommodore Edward Preble hours before. This independent aspect of Quincy called itself Quincy2.

And now, a tiny fraction of that total, designated Quincy3, swam within the eldritch sea of an alien cybernetic network. Around him, like blending voices in a vast, choral symphony, echoed and re-echoed information packets equivalent to individual thoughts—the mental workings of the alien AI. Despite the claims made through centuries of fiction—books, movies, threevee, and noumenal sims—hacking into an alien computer was not a matter of finding a password or of simple numerological cryptography. When two distinct computer systems lack even such basic philosophical agreement as the use of binary logic, when mutually alien languages, reasoning processes, and background assumptions are really alien, there is simply no common ground for communication at any level. Fortunately, the problem of entering and compromising the Xul computer network was not as complex as it might have been. On two previous occasions, human-created AIs had penetrated Xul networks. In the twenty-first century, an artificial intelligence known as Chesty had managed to penetrate the fringes of The Singer, a Xul mentality, an utterly insane composite electronic mind trapped within a vessel locked for half a million years beneath the ice crust of the Europan world-sea. Subsequent studies of The Singer’s hardware had yielded important clues to the basics of Xul computer technology—or at least to the technology they’d used half a million years before.

And during the battle at the Sirius Gate, in 2170, a Marine command constellation AI named Cassius had penetrated the Xul intruder’s network, using techniques developed after studies of The Singer’s dead hulk a century earlier.

What the AIs had gleaned from those contacts was only a glimpse of the alien minds inhabiting those titanic starships, but a glimpse had been enough to allow considerable advances both in the understanding of Xul computer technology, and in the creation of a means to infiltrate it. Essentially, human military AIs had learned how to create a kind of penetrator body, encased within a shell of memes crafted to mask it from the alien intelligence; the analogy favored at China Lake was an organic virus using a protein shell to enter a target host cell.

Quincy3was such a penetrator, carried in close to the target within the computers on board the AUT, and electronically launched once the AUT’s electronic sensor suite detected the RF leakage from the damaged Xul huntership.

Quincy3, disguised as one of the myriad component minds adrift within the metamind of ancient alien consciousness, began searching for specific thoughts, listening for hints and whispers dealing with navigation, with origins, with views of catalogues of stars and views of the sky, and related esoterica, and tracking them….

Assault Detachment Alpha

On Board the Xul Intruder

1655 hrs, GMT

“Fall back!” Garroway called. Anchoring himself to the bulkhead outside the entry breach, he snapped off orders. “Everyone fall back to the autie! Moulton! You’re with me!”

They’d emerged at last from the tangled interior of the Xul hunter, entering the partially enclosed chamber where they’d made their entrance. The AUT, Garroway was relieved to see, was still in place, imbedded in the shattered hull. The Xul vessel was continuing to repair itself, but didn’t seem to know what to do about the trapped AUT. The Xul defenders were still following them, but cautiously. Moulton’s pig had vaporized hundreds of them during the march back.

Could machines—even intelligent ones—be taught fear?

His tactical display showed a surging, blood-red cloud moving up the corridor they’d just left. If they were learning fear, they were also learning to find courage in strength of numbers. A red light flashed in his awareness, and he checked his ammo. Fewer than two hundred rounds remaining.

“I’m almost dry!” he told Moulton. “Watcha got left?”

“Power’s at twelve percent, Gunny. And the barrel’s over-heating. My last one.”

Garroway shook his head inside his helmet. “No sense in holding back now. Hit ’em!”

Moulton swung the massive barrel of his plasma gun into the opening and triggered the weapon. Garroway felt the tingle of the heavy weapon’s fringe effect, as bolts of high-energy plasma seared into the darkness of the open corridor, the impacts at the far end flashing in strobing flares of brilliant, violet-white flares. The blasts were soundless, but he could feel the vibration of each explosion, transmitted through the alien vessel’s internal supports to his boots and gauntlets.

“Section Two!” he called. “Chrome! What’s the word?”

“Charges set, Gunny,” was her reply. “We’re almost back to the autie!”

“Copy that. Give my people some cover, but watch your targets. They’re coming in now.”

“You got it. We have ’em!”

“Gunny Garroway! This is Wilkie!”

“Yes, sir!”

“We have a problem.”

God, what now? “Tell me, sir.”

“Our telemetry shows that Victor just went off-line. The Xul may be disarming the charges!”

Shit, shit, shit!…

“Copy that.” He hesitated. “Just the one so far?”

“So far…no, check that. Zulu just went off-line.”

Of the five nukes placed, two had now been deactivated. At this rate, in another few minutes none of the charges Alpha had put in place would be operational. Of the three remaining boom-packs, two—Whiskey and X-ray, were charges his section had placed—Whiskey was right there beside him, still nano-glued to the bulkhead—while the third, Yankee, was one of Chrome’s, somewhere in the aft end of the Xul ship.

“Are you suggesting going to Charlie, Lieutenant?”

Sequence Charlie was the emergency triggering protocol. Wilkie, or Chrome, or Garroway could initiate a firing command that would detonate all weapons immediately.

Obviously, that was intended as a last-ditch option, since it would guarantee the death of every Marine within several kilometers at least.

The Corps frowned on suicide. They had a lot invested in the training and equipping of each Marine, and Sequence Charlie was wasteful.

On the other hand, this was fast becoming a use-it-or-lose-it situation.

“Negative,” Wilkie replied after a chillingly long hesitation. “HQ says they have a penetrator inside the Xul ship. They want some telemetry before we pull the plug.”

“Roger that.”

HQ? That must be the brass on board thePreble , which was only a few thousand kilometers distant, at last report. They must have piggybacked a penetrator AI into the radio-frequency bleed from the Xul ship in the hope of winning some useful intel.

Okay, so Alpha needed to buy some more time.

“That’s it, Gunny!” Moulton said. “My last barrel’s damned near slagged.”

“Boost for the autie, then.”

“Aye, aye!” Moulton flexed his knees and kicked off from the bulkhead, sailing out into the emptiness of the chamber. Garroway watched him go, saw the correcting bursts from his suit thrusters putting him on a vector that would take him to the AUT.

It was time to vam the hell out of Dodge.

He kicked off from the bulkhead, but kept his back to the autie, the heavy-barelled Hawking attached to his right forearm trained on the opening between his feet. He was just fifteen meters clear when black, metallic tentacles flickered out of the opening, questing, reaching…

He squeezed the firing switch on his Hawking, sending a sharp, quick burst into that black opening, and the blacker mass within. On full auto, he’d run the weapon flat dry in less than twenty seconds. The burst threatened to knock him into an uncontrolled tumble, but his suit thrusters compensated. He fired again…then again…each burst acting like a rocket blast to shove him just a bit faster. But he was aware now of something like clouds of thick, black dust issuing from other parts of the vast sweep of the interior bulkhead, clouds made up of tens of thousands of individual machines. The ones emerging at his feet were closest, so he kept firing at them, the rounds slashing through fragile metal shells, explosions ripping open bodies and severing whiplashing tentacles, sending fragments spinning through space…and then the noumenal warning light stopped flashing and stayed on, and his weapon clocked empty.

He wished now he had a couple of live tactical nukes on his backpack A-frame, then discarded the notion. The blasts would fry any Marines still in the open, and might well slag down the surviving nukes implanted inside the ship. But it was a charming thought, taking a hell of a lot of bad guys with them. He ordered his suit to go to full thrust.

Marines at the autie were firing now, sending a storm of rounds and plasma bolts slashing through the advancing clouds of black dust.

The covering fire wasn’t slowing them down at all….

Quincy

Resident within the Xul Group Mind

1702 hrs, GMT

Quincy3had found what he was searching for.

From his electronic perspective, the alien computer net’s function sang to him, a chorus of voices and tones ebbing and flowing around him, an infinite sea of sound within which he drifted like a speck of flotsam. The chorus at first seemed cacophonous, an endless babble of sound with no apparent meaning or melody. The more he listened, however, the more aware of undercurrents and harmony he became. He could not understand what the voices were singing, of course, and whether the intonations even represented a language at all was problematical. Despite almost three centuries of study by the best, most powerful, and fastest cybernetic analysts in existence, the key to anything like a Xul language remained elusive.

Images, however, were something else, a matter of finding and identifying matrices of numbers representing qualities of tone, hue, and contrast. Quincy3had discovered what felt like a storage area holding some trillions of gigabytes of data that appeared to factor out as two-and three-dimensional images, apparently a part of some sort of navigational network. Sampling one of the larger images, he recognized a thick-strewn dusting of white suspended within black that might represent a three-dimensional image of one section of a galactic spiral arm.

He began copying data as swiftly as he could. Since Quincy3possessed little in the way of storage space compared to his bigger and older brothers, he began transmitting the data as quickly as he could retrieve it.

We Who Are

Asteroid Belt

1703 hrs, GMT

The Lords Who Are detected the radio transmission almost immediately. While they could not read it, it was certain that it consisted of data gleaned from the huntership’s memory matrix—probably navigational and mapping data.

That, in turn, suggested that the enemy had somehow in-filtrated the huntership’s computer network. It was imperative that the intruder be found and stopped.

This was not an easy task—the electronic equivalent of searching an ocean for a particular fish. We Who Are initiated a search, of course, successively walling off portions of its own mind, trying to isolate the virtual area from which the broadcast was being sent. The process would take time, however. A more promising track, however, was to destroy the hostile vessel imbedded in one of the aft cargo holds. The intruder had almost certainly projected itself into the net from that vehicle, and depended upon it to remain connected with the universe outside.

Unfortunately, destroying the intruder would also take time. Until the huntership’s external sensors were repaired, the enemy craft could not be targeted by either weapons or the quantum energy transference field used to manipulate the vectors of asteroids. We Who Are could fire into the area blindly, of course, but that would almost certainly be self-destructively counter-productive. Some hundreds of thousands of defenders were in the area now, however, and they could be remotely programmed to seek out the enemy vessel and disassemble it.

That option carried the best chance for rapid success.

Assault Detachment Alpha

On Board the Xul Intruder

1705 hrs, GMT

“C’mon! C’mon! C’mon!”Garroway yelled.“Move it, Marines!”

The last of the combat-armored Marines grabbed hold of safety lines and hauled themselves up the gaping ramped entrance to the AUT. Garroway, firing his braking thrusters wildly, nearly careened off the transport’s hull, but Chrome and Bauer were waiting for him, reaching out and snagging his suit as he tumbled past and hauling him back within reach of a line.

The black clouds—swarms of Xul combat machines—were getting closer.

“We’re all on board!” Chrome yelled over the tactical net. “Kick us the hell outa here!”

The ramp was still down, the Marines not yet in their seats as the Navy pilot fired the AUT’s main plasma thrusters and brought them up to full power. Garroway was jolted to the deck as acceleration slammed him down and back. Black tentacles snapped and writhed above his head, but for a stunned moment he couldn’t process what he was seeing.

“The Xuls are on the ship!” Chrome yelled. “They’re goddamn boarding us!”

Hood and Ortiz opened up with their chain guns, firing past other Marines still crowded into the aft end of the transport’s cargo deck. Garroway started to rise, but another lurch knocked him down. Gravity twisted and shifted in odd directions; it felt as though the AUT was tumbling, falling end over end, and adding a centrifugal component to the acceleration.

“What the hell’s going on up there?” Garroway demanded over the command channel.

“It’s the Xul defenders!” Wilkie shot back. “They’re all over the autie, clinging to the hull!”

Garroway looked at his data feed from the AUT. According to the numbers, the transport had cleared the Xul ship by about three hundred meters.

“Lieutenant!” he yelled. “We need to go to Sequence Charlie!”

Now itwas use it or lose it, with no other options. The three remaining nukes on board the Xul vessel wouldn’t detonate on their own for another thirty minutes…and by then the enemy might well have found and disarmed them all.

And if the defenders on the AUT’s hull broke through….

“Lieutenant! Do you copy?”

There was no answer…and suddenly the data stream from the AUT cockpit was gone as well. The enemy machines might already have entered the cockpit.

He wanted to find Chrome, but the cargo deck was a chaotic tangle of Marine armor in tumbling darkness. He had to make the decision, and he had to do itnow ….

Closing his eyes, he formed the triggering code in his mind, verified the sequence, and launched it. At first, nothing happened, and he wondered if he’d been, after all, too late. And then a giant’s hand slammed the AUT, and a searing, blue-white glare seared through the still open aft cargo hatch.

Still in the utter silence of hard vacuum, the AUT rode the expanding plasma wavefront of a nuclear detonation.

Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

1707 hours GMT

General Clinton Garroway was in the stateroom set aside as a command center for him and his staff, watching a noumenal image of the Xul intruder, the view downloaded from a combat drone less than fifty kilometers out, when the nuclear weapons detonated. Instrumentation on the drone confirmed that at least two separate explosions had triggered simultaneously—and possibly three, though precise measurements could not be taken.

In the image window in his mind, however, the entire aft end of the gold, needle-slender Xul vessel suddenly vanished in a tiny sun, a sun that expanded almost too quickly for the eye to follow. He saw the forward half of the ship crumple, then shred away as the sun engulfed it. Bits of flotsam and debris spun ahead of the blast wave, which continued its rapid expansion…and then the image winked out as the blast caught the drone and annihilated it.

Garroway inwardly stared into the empty window for a long time after that. ThePreble had been receiving continual updates from Wilkie on board the AUT. Garroway knew that the Xul, somehow, had disarmed at least two nukes, and he’d heard at least a garbled report that the AUT was boosting clear of the Xul vessel, but that something was wrong. What? What had gone wrong? Whatever it was must have been damned serious, because evidently Wilkie or one of the section leaders had decided to execute Sequence Charlie, detonating the remaining weapons immediately…and before the AUT could accelerate clear of the Xul ship. His nephew was dead….

Garroway was having some trouble wrapping his mind around that one. He’d given the orders that had sent Travis into harm’s way, sent him on what had amounted to a suicide mission, but still he’d held out hope that the Marines would overcome as they always seemed able to do. That they would survive. The AUT had been no more than two hundred meters from the detonation point when the nukes had triggered. There seemed to be little chance that anyone had survived.

“Major Bettisly,” he called over the constellation com net.

“Yes, sir.” Bettisly sounded subdued. He must have been watching the feed as well.

“I want a search launched for the AUT. Immediately.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I also want drones sent in to check out the Xul ship. It doesn’t look like there’ll be much left, but we need to be sure.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any word on Quincy?”

“The software penetrator? Not yet, sir, but I’ll check.”

“Quincy Sub-three was not able to disengage from the Xul group mind before the explosion,” another voice, steady and measured, said in Garroway’s head. “I have been attempting to re-integrate with him.”

“You have no contact at all?” he asked the AI.

“That is correct, General. However, Quincy Sub-three was transmitting data as he uncovered it, and I have stored it withinPreble ’s main memory. I believe Quincy Sub-three successfully carried out his assigned mission.”

Could an AI feel pride? Garroway thought he could detect that emotion—just a hint—behind the calm and precisely articulated words.

And…if self-aware software could feel pride, did it feel grief, or pain, or anything over the loss of a part of itself?

He wanted to ask, but decided to wait until he had a private channel. “That’s good,” he told Quincy2. “I want backups made of everything, and multiple copies transmitted both to Phobos and to the Pentagon immediately. Flag them for intelligence analyses.”

“Yes, General. I have already done that.”

As always, Quincy was a quick three steps ahead.

“What…what are the chances that the AUT survived the blast?” he asked.

“Unknown, General. And the debris and plasma in that sector make radar searches for something as small asCambria -class transport problematical, as does the fact that we do not have a precise vector on Detachment Alpha’s craft.

“An estimated two-to four-kiloton nuclear detonation, however, creates a fireball of approximately one-to two-hundred meters’ diameter.In vacuo , of course, the fireball’s expansion is considerably greater, perhaps as much as half a kilometer, but it is conceivable that the plasma front had cooled significantly by the time it reached the AUT, and that the transport survived both the impact and the thermal radiation.

“A greater danger is represented by the radiation flux, which, two hundred meters from a four-kiloton blast would have generated between ten to the fifth and ten to the sixth REMs—instantly fatal to unshielded organic life forms. Armored Utility Transports have significant magnetic shielding, however, and should have helped minimize exposure.”

“So…you’re saying there’s a chance?”

“A chance. I do not have sufficient data to estimate a numerical value for that chance, however.”

“We’ll take anything we can get.”

“General,” the AI said in a mental voice that sounded puzzled, “the loss of Quincy Sub-three is of relatively minor importance. True, re-integrating with him might yield additional contextual data for Intelligence, but its loss is not significant within the broader context.”

“Actually, Quincy, I was thinking about the Marines on board the AUT.”

“Of course. Your nephew is on board.”

“There were thirty-two Marines in Detachment Alpha,” he snapped, angry. “And a Navy crew of four on board the transport.All of them deserve every chance we can give them!”

“I understand, General.”

Garroway wondered if that were true. AIs like Quincy were programmed to simulate human emotions and speech patterns, and to show an interest in topics of interest to the humans around them, but what theyreally felt—assuming they could experience anything a human would recognize as emotion—was always tough to pin down. Not for the first time, Garroway wondered how humanity would deal with alien species like the Xul when they didn’t even yet understand the thought processes of their own intelligent offspring.

Or how human thought worked, for that matter.

He focused again on the replay of the data feed from the drone, playing it through slowly, at extreme magnification. It was tough to tell, but itlooked like a tiny, oblong speck glittering in the light of a distant sun, had been captured moving away from the Xul vessel. At extreme magnification, itmight be an AUT. Again and again, he watched as the nuclear fireball expanded, blocking the tiny object from the drone’s view.

Quincy might be able to make more of the imagery. There was no way the unaided human eye could tell if that was the AUT, or if it might have survived. Still, it was something. If that was the AUT, analyses of the images might give a clue to its vector when it was hit by the plasma wavefront. And that could cut down tremendously on search time.

Well done, people, he thought, staring at the anonymous fleck of light.Very well done . Only now was Garroway beginning to appreciate what had just happened. The Xul intruder, so far as could be determined from several thousand kilometers away, had been destroyed. The attack it had launched on Humankind’s homeworld had been interrupted, and the XEL and HELGA defense complexes should be able to take care of the asteroids the enemy vessel had already accelerated toward Earth.

A tiny detachment of thirty-two Marines, assaulting an alien vessel two kilometers long from a transport that was a rowboat by comparison, had just helped save the Earth.

If those Marines and sailors had died in the saving, as seemed probable, theirs had been a truly heroic sacrifice, the stuff of legend. And if any of them were still alive…

He turned sharply from the thought. Drones and rescue vessels were already en route. All that could be done was being done.

Earth and her billions had been saved.

But he couldn’t help wondering if his nephew still lived.

High Guard HEL Facility 3

Solar Orbit

1805 hrs, GMT

Captain Gupta Narayanan studied the mental readout, paying special attention to Kali’s projection on the elimination of the remaining Earth-threatening asteroids. Eight more bodies remained to be targeted, and eight and a half hours remained before the first of those bodies—now reduced to a cloud of dust and rubble—would have struck the planet. Between HELGA Three and HELGA One, each of those remaining bodies could easily be engaged and destroyed long before they reached the vicinity of Earth. It had been a near thing. Had the intruder continued launching asteroids, no possible application of the firepower available to the High Guard would have been able to engage them all. Senator Danikov himself had already transmitted a brief message of congratulations; few on Earth, it seemed, had even been aware of the attack, but those who were—chiefly in the various government military branches—had broken into jubilant celebration.

The Xul intruder was destroyed. Earth was safe.

Narayana wasn’t so sure.

It was an absolute and inviolable dictum of physics: matter, like energy, couldnot be created or destroyed. Multimegaton bursts of laser and X-ray energy could vaporize large chunks of those tumbling boulders into harmlessness, but the majority of that very considerable mass was going to continue on course, reduced to dust and gravel, perhaps, but still bearing most of the original mass on multiple paths that would begin intercepting Earth in another eight and a half hours. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. Rocks the size of gravel would burn up in the atmosphere. But this wasn’t normally. Those rocks were moving at truly astonishing velocities. When they reached the Earth, they would punch through the planet’s slim envelope of air so quickly they wouldn’t have time to vaporize.

Earth—perhaps even the survival of Humankind—remained in the balance. The luminaries back at Space Command and the Pentagon didn’t seem to realize the danger.

Yet. Narayanan had no doubt that they would recognize their error very soon, now. He’d sent off a message after Danikov’s transmission. So far, there’d been no reply. All the High Guard could do, of course, was try to intercept each threat as swiftly as it could be detected and tracked, and destroy it. When these next eight flying mountains had been reduced to rubble, Narayanan would direct Kali to begin searching for smaller pieces of rock remaining in the expanding, fast-moving clouds and begin targeting them as well, from the largest down to the smallest. They wouldn’t be able to get them all. Of that he was certain.

No matter what they did, Earth was in for a hell of a bombardment, beginning just eight and a half hours from now….

8

13FEBRUARY 2314

Earth

0529 hrs, GMT

0029 hrs, EST

It began as a rain of fire.

For three hours, now, the nightside skies of Earth had provided spectacular entertainment. What approached Earth now, some twenty-three hours after the Xul intruder nudged the first one-kilometer rock out of its eons-old orbit, was a series of expanding, cone-shaped clouds of fragments. Dust and debris flashed into the planetary atmosphere at 2,000 kilometers per second, flaring in an instant into dazzling incandescence. At 0229 hours GMT, the night sky first exploded into dazzling brilliance, a meteor shower of unprecedented size and brilliance. At any given instant, the sky was streaked by hundreds of threads of light, all radiating from a single point in the sky, the overall light bright enough to read by. In Ukraine and western Russia, already past the dawn terminator, bright streaks of light and occasional vapor trails could be seen rising like streams from a celestial fountain from the western horizon even in full daylight.

The most dramatic sky appeared with the swarm’s origin at the zenith, in the constellation Gemini, directly above the American west coast where it was 2000 hours, and fully dark. There, meteors appeared second by second in uncounted thousands, flashing out from the origin and raining like white fire to the horizon.

After less than half an hour, the first debris field began to fade, but then the second cloud of fragments intercepted the Earth, and the fireworks began anew. Since each asteroid had been kicked out of its original orbit at a different point in the Asteroid Belt, this new light show seemed to originate from a slightly different part of the sky, this time appearing to emanate from the constellation Taurus. Fortunately, due to the clouds’ scattering, most entered the atmosphere at an oblique angle; their speed was so great that even fragments the size of peas would survive all the way to the ground, their passage so swift that they didn’t have time to vaporize completely. Pieces entering the shell of atmosphere at a flat angle tended to skip back into space, or to fragment and vaporize. Smaller pieces, dust motes and fragments the size of grains of sand, were slowed enough as they struck atmosphere that theydid burn up, and the result was a light show more spectacular than anything seen in the sky during the span ofHomo sapiens on the planet. Vast throngs of people gathered outdoors to witness the spectacle; the skies were clear across most of North America, the mid-February temperature in this age of advanced global warming a pleasant 15 degrees or more.

Larger pieces, however, punched through the atmosphere in an instant, heating white-hot, but losing very little of their mass in the transit. Gravel-sized chunks were reported falling in sparsely populated areas from Saskatchewan to Sonora, from Hawaii to Florida.

Few of the planet’s inhabitants were aware of the danger, of course, at least initially. Many knew that an alien spacecraft—rumored to be a Xul vessel like the one destroyed at Sirius a century and a half before—had entered the Solar System, and that High Guard forces were battling with it. Such was the information easily and immediately accessible on the global data net, and rumor and word-of-mouth spread variations of that basic theme throughout the growing crowds. But none of the governments involved—the North American Federation, the World Union, the European Union, or the United States of America—had as yet issued an official statement—or a warning. What was the point? There was no time to evacuate cities…and when the entire planet was the target, no one place was any safer than any other. Earth’s entire combined off-world cargo and passenger transport capacity might have sufficed to lift a few hundred, perhaps even a few thousand people off of the planet,if there’d been sufficient warning.

While most of the watchers simply enjoyed the show, a few pursued their own agendas. Since the twenty-first-century revelations that nonhuman aliens had been in large part responsible for much of the original evolution and development of the human species, numerous new religions, and a fair number of old, had grappled with the question of aliens in various creative ways. For many, the Ahannu and the N’mah, the only two ET species with which any serious communication had been achieved so far, were gods…or, at the least, they played a decidedly godlike role. For others, especially the older, more conservative bastions within Islam and Christianity, they were deceivers and therefore agents of evil…not gods, but demons.

Since the Hunters of the Dawn were still largely a mystery, but since itwas now certain that Hunter ships had devastated Earth in an asteroid bombardment some 8,000 yearsB.C.E. , most religions placed them squarely on the side of the demons in any celestial warfare, but there were a few who thought otherwise. As the light show progressed, a major riot started in San Francisco between communicants of the Grey Enlightenment and the Circle of the Celestial Illuminants. CCI dogma insisted that there could be no evil among the angelic beings of other worlds, and that rumors of aliens throwing planet-buster asteroids at the Earth must be lies, while GE belief featured the Xul as chief among Satan’s legions. Two hundred died in the resulting clash of doctrines. Similar riots were reported in Ciudad Méjico, Rouen, Oporto, and Naples. In the Vatican, in Saint Peter’s Square, similar doctrinal disputes resulted in a clash between followers of the Papess and of the counter-Pope, beginning with cobblestones and clubs, and ending with handguns and civilian laser weaponry. Fires gutted half of the Vatican offices before the Italian Army and the Swiss Guards could disperse the prowling mobs.

But worse was to come, and swiftly. Throughout the early evening hours in the western Americas, reports began coming in of unprecedented high-energy impacts, from Hawaii east to Ukraine. Hundreds—then thousands—began crashing out of the sky, striking the empty lands between cities or out at sea, for the most part, cities being remarkably tiny targets when compared to the planet as a whole. Thunder, isolated at first, but soon becoming continuous and deafening, sounded across North America as the celestial bombardment began in earnest. There were scattered reports of damage and injuries, but nothing serious. People continued to flock to outdoor vantage points, watching the sky fall. At 0215 hours GMT, a large portion of Bordeaux, France, was demolished by a rock the size of a loaf of bread as it came skimming in just above the horizon and smashed into the Rue Emil Fourcand at 2,000

kilometers per second, creating a shotgun-blast effect that demolished buildings as far east as Bergerac. Three minutes later, the top half of the kilometer-high Helios Tower in the Miami Offshore Complex disintegrated in thunder and flaming fragments, at just about the same instant that the town of Pont Rouge, in Free Quebec, vanished in the equivalent of the detonation of a thirty-megaton fusion warhead. It didn’t help that a probable majority of the fragments entering the atmosphere actually did explode before hitting the surface. The shock waves were powerful enough to flatten cities, strip mountains bare, and punch kilometer-wide depressions into the landscape below. One large boulder massing several tons slammed into atmosphere east of Hawaii and, in an instant, punched a straight line of vacuum through the sky before vanishing again into space above the Marshall Islands. The thunder clap of its passage sent tidal waves rolling across the Pacific, deafened thousands, swatted atmospheric fliers out of the air, and shattered windows as far away as Japan.

From orbit, Earth’s night hemisphere presented an awesome and terrifying spectacle. Observers on board the Nippon/Celestine Orbital Hotel Complex, then passing two hundred kilometers above the Gulf of Mexico, watched, stunned, as brilliant pinpoints of light flashed and strobed in random patterns among the streaks of shooting stars seen from above, each point representing an impact equal to the detonation of millions of tons of chemical high explosives. The scene was captured by the hotel’s Earth-observer cameras and uploaded to the Global Net, which preserved it when the orbital hotel itself was smashed out of existence ten minutes later.

Other orbital facilities were destroyed as well—communications stations, orbital factories and nanufactory centers, naval yards and orbital depots, solar power stations with their far-flung, gossamer-fragile photocell wings. The French freighterGaronne , the Cantonese asteroid minerFushun , and the North Indian frigateGodavari all were wiped from the sky before they could power up and move clear of the planet.

Of the actual impacts, most were over water, of course, but those were no less destructive than those fragments falling over land. A twenty-ton rock came down in the Gulf of Maine, and the tidal wave obliterated Nova Scotia, all of coastal Maine, and flooded the tide barriers around Boston, washing away much of the city, and submerging the rest. The offshore tourist and shopping complex of Pacifica simply vanished—probably carried away by the same tidal wave that scoured Baja and flooded San Diego.

For the past three centuries, all of the world’s established coastal cities had been battling the effects of global warming—including rising sea levels. Some, like Charleston, had followed the ancient example of Holland and built extensive sea walls, creating safe havens and new land behind them that were for the most part below sea level. Others, like the Manhatten Megaplex, continued buildingup as the sea waters flooded in, controlling the effects of storm surges and high tide through the use of concentric rings of tidal barriers, while protecting the central portions of each metropolis beneath enormous transplas domes. Most domed cities faired well through the bombardment, save for those, like Houston, which took a direct hit. Most cities protected only by tidal barriers or flood-control walls were overwhelmed by the repeated impacts of fifty-and eighty-meter-high waves.

In the first three hours of the bombardment, an estimated six hundred thousand people died. And even worse was soon to come.

Thanks to the vast, obscuring cloud of asteroidal debris, it wasn’t until the orphan moonlet of 2127-VT

passed the orbit of the Moon that this singularly cataclysmic threat to Earth was finally detected by the deep space tracking facility at Fra Mauro. At a distance of 400,000 kilometers, however, the hurtling mountain was only three minutes and twenty seconds away from impact when the warning was flashed back to Earth.

The three cis-Lunar High Guard facilities had been designed as a kind of last line of defense against Earth-threatening asteroids. As long ago as the late twentieth century, astronomers had discovered several potential planet-killers as they passed within a few hundred thousand kilometers of Earth—sometimes after they’d already made their closest approach and were on their way back into interplanetary space once more. Since it was possible that a rogue nation seeking to bombard Earth with an asteroid might do so by changing the orbit of one of these Earth grazers, leaving too little time to bring the HELGA facilities on-line, it was decided to create three inner-sanctum bastions—large X-ray lasers orbiting at the points of an equilateral triangle midway between Earth and Moon. Since each could only be fired once—firing involved the detonation of a small fusion warhead to pump the laser, vaporizing the satellite—they’d been held out of the original battle against the possibility that one or more large bodies made it past the HELGAs and into near-Earth space.

The three stations, and the artificial intelligences operating them, were named Verdande, Urda, and Skuld—the three Fates of Norse mythology who measured the span of a man’s life, and who also guarded the World-Tree of Life.

Almost certainly, the trio of satellites saved Earth from total destruction. The body, the orphaned satellite of 2127-VT that entered cis-Lunar space at 0526:35 GMT, massed 2.35 × 1012tons. At 2,000

kilometers per second, it carried a kinetic energy of 4.69 × 1021joules…the explosive equivalent of close to onebillion megatons.

Verdande, Urda, and Skuld all were on-line and ready when Alexander, the AI running the Pentagon Combat Center, flashed the warning to them. It took over two minutes for the individual tracking systems to locate the intruder, and rotate the satellites into position. As the asteroid flashed past the Moon’s orbit and on toward Earth, they would have to pan very quickly to hit their fast-moving target. The falling rock was one hundred fifty-two thousand kilometers out—seventy-six seconds from impact when all three stations fired.

Verdande missed. Of the three, that station was closest to the target, the lateral displacement as the planetoid passed the greatest and, at the last instant before detonation, meteoric fragments—dust-and sand-grain-sized remnants of 2127-VT—sandblasted the station, puncturing its solar cell array and minutely affected its aim. Both Urda and Skuld, however, burned as brightly as tiny suns, loosing two micro-second bolts of invisible X-ray radiation that converged on the rock from two directions nearly eighty degrees apart.

The planetoid body, like most of its class, possessed an extremely low density—1.5 grams per cubic centimeter, which made it only a little denser than Styrofoam. Much of it was composed of water ice, mixed with a kind of carbon soot.

Shock heating shattered the rock, but unevenly. Had it been traveling at more reasonable planetary velocities, the cloud of fragments might have expanded enough that few would have hit the planet. Unfortunately, seventy-six seconds after firing the cloud hit atmosphere, the fragments, many glowing white hot and all still moving at 2,000 kilometers per second. The largest chunk, two hundred meters wide and massing eight million tons, tunneled a straight line through atmosphere at an oblique angle high above the Atlantic Ocean, its shock wave thundering across the surface and shattering the above-water sea-farm complex at the Grand Banks.

Had it been deflected by another degree or two, it would have missed the surface entirely. Descending across the ocean in an instant, it plowed into the water on a trajectory that was very nearly flat. The impact vaporized a hole in the water three miles across and a mile deep, all the way to the sea floor, with a blast cloud that actually ballooned well above the atmosphere and into space. For a seeming eternity, the wound in the tortured sea gaped open, held at bay by the bubble of superheated steam and the fiercely radiating molten rock exposed on the naked sea bed; as the steam rose and cooled, the ocean walls collapsed and the ocean came crashing in, but slowly, the boiling water still held back by the steam.

Some of the remaining fragments missed the Earth entirely, passing above the horizon and heading back into space. Others struck in a vast footprint from Bermuda to Spain, like the blast from a titanic shotgun, adding to the general devastation. A wall of flame seared across much of Europe, setting cities and forests ablaze.

Tens of millions died from the immediate effects of the strike.

Worse,far worse, tidal waves rippled out from each impact, like ripples from a rock thrown into a pond. These ripples, however, carried a significant fraction of the kinetic energy released by the strikes, and, as they neared land and the sea floor grew shallow, waves bulked into towering walls hundreds of meters high. Because the largest fragment had been traveling west to east and struck at such a shallow angle, the majority of the displaced water traveled east, smashing into Portugal and Spain first, the French Atlantic coast minutes later. The mountains saved much of Iberia, though the coast from La Coruña to Cadiz was devastated, and the flood boiled up the Douro River as far inland as Valladolid. The French Atlantic coast, however, was completely submerged for two hundred kilometers inland, and the narrowing of the English Channel created a monstrous wave that scoured everything between London and Paris flat. At the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow gap between the mountains of Spain and of Morocco served as a similar bottleneck, focusing the incoming tidal surge into a deadly hammer’s blow that rolled across the entire Mediterranean from end to end, simultaneously drowning and smashing ancient and populous cities from Barcelona to Rome to Athens to the Levant.

Only within the past two centuries had archeology—helped along by the studies of records kept by the extraterrestrial N’mah—finally acknowledged that the myriad stories about a lost continent in the Atlantic Ocean had actually been based on fact. Drowned Atlantis had not been a continent, in fact, nor had it been, as debunkers supposed, the island of Thera in the Aegean, destroyed by volcanic eruption. Instead, there had indeed been a low-lying island the size of Iceland some hundreds of kilometers off the coast of southwestern Spain, opposite the Pillars of Hercules, just as Plato had recorded, and the site of a thriving Bronze Age culture first planted and nurtured by the N’mah in the aftermath of the last Xul incursion into the Solar System several thousand years before. That culture—and many others throughout the Mediterranean—had vanished in 1197B.C.E. when a fragment of comet struck the sea floor nearby, coincidentally less than a thousand kilometers from the site of this new major impact. The fragment that destroyed fabled Atlantis had been somewhat larger, but moving at only a tiny fraction of the newcomer’s speed. That time, earthquakes and tidal waves had collapsed much of the offshore island, leaving only the Madeira Archipelago and the Canary Islands above water, and sent a tidal wave blasting through the Mediterranean that had toppled megalithic structures in Malta, wiped out the civilizations of the Hittites and the Achaean Greeks, and left behind countless tales to add to the growing body of myths telling of a worldwide flood.

Thatflood had carried a tiny fraction of the power and destructive force of this one. To the west, the tidal waves were smaller and less energetic than those that overwhelmed Europe and the Mediterranean, and reduced in destructive force by the greater distance they’d traveled, but inconceivably fast and powerful mountains of water still rose eighty meters above the beaches as they thundered into North America at three hundred kilometers per hour.

The wave swept across all of Florida and most of the Gulf Coast without stopping, and rolled inland as far as the western reaches of the Piedmont from Georgia to Virginia. Cities that had withstood the celestial bombardment thus far were crushed, overwhelmed, and submerged. Miami vanished almost without a trace, its dome crushed and its offshore office and housing towers swept away like twigs. Cuba and the other Caribbean islands were inundated, only the highest mountains remaining above the waves as they roared past, from northeast to southwest. The surge swallowed much of the Amazon Basin, submerging farmlands as far south as the Matto Grosso. North, the Atlantic coast, already savaged by the impact in the Gulf of Maine, went under again, the waves this time reaching as far inland as the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Farther north, the waves broke against the Monts Notre-Dame, sent a tidal surge up the St. Lawrence as far as Lake Ontario, and spread north to flood the eerily circular formation of Lake Manicouagan—itself the crater marking an ancient asteroid strike that had struck Québec Libre 120 million years in the past.

Far to the east, the steam bubble at last collapsed, sending out a second set of ripples. Hours after the first tidal waves had exploded over dry land, the second waves, smaller but still destructive, struck. They added little to the overall levels of death and devastation, however. The waves from the first impact had already scoured bare almost an eighth of the Earth’s surface. One additional result of what soon would be known as Armageddonfall was not at first apparent in the chaos and devastation immediately following the Atlantic impact. During the hours leading up to the major impact, as more and more population centers had felt the sting of incoming high-velocity projectiles, major nodes of the Global Net—communications centers like Atlanta, Boston, Washington, and New York had begun dropping offline. Electronic traffic had been automatically rerouted to avoid blacked-out regions, but affected areas were rapidly spreading as the damage intensified. Then the tidal waves had rolled in off the ocean, scraping entire cities off the coasts and plunging a third of the planet into a complete power blackout. All of North and South America, all of Europe, most of Africa, and parts of Asia, especially around the Pacific Rim, all found themselves knocked off the global power grid, and the computer networks in those regions collapsed.

Millions among the watching throngs across Earth’s night side had noticed the effects first when they could no longer use their personal implant hardware to access the Net. Questions uplinked to local nodes went unanswered, and individuals found their mind-to-mind communication links with friends, families, businesses, and civil services abruptly cut off. Artificial intelligences—hundreds of millions of them, serving as personal secretaries, e-librarians, and electronic assistants of every kind and permanently resident within the Net—were suddenly gone or inaccessible. Alexander, the powerful AI operating as a command program within the Department of the Chiefs of Staff and responsible for the coordination of all American military forces, continued to exist within a fragment of the military’s net in the sealed sub-basements of the Pentagon, but the Pentagon itself, and the nearby city of Washington, all were now submerged beneath ten meters of mud and water, and it would be a long time before survivors—human and electronic—could be rescued.

The majority of civilians across the planet depended on their links with the Net—for communication with others, for information retrieval, for operating vehicles and machinery, for nearly every aspect of modern technological life. They received their first basic nano implants shortly after birth, and these grew with the individual according to his needs. It wasn’t widely advertised, but during training, U.S. Marines and other elite military personnel were deliberately deprived of their intracranial hardware links, in part to demonstrate that they could function without them. Many recruits, however, were unable to adjust and washed out before receiving their military-issue upgrades. Others backed out before their civilian gear could be neutralized, unwilling to try life disconnected from the Net. The experience was traumatic and disorienting in the extreme, the electronic equivalent of dropping a civilized man into the wilderness, naked, without tools or weapons, and utterly, utterly alone.

That electronic psychic trauma was precisely what billions of humans experienced when the Global Net collapsed. Abruptly cut off from friends, from family, from news about what was happening as the sky continued to rain fire, millions of people panicked. The veneer of civilization is always agonizingly thin, and never more so than when the government infrastructure begins breaking down. Without Net access, local power grids failed, fire and emergency services were paralyzed, and civil authorities could see only what was happening outside their own doors, with no access at all to the larger emergency picture. As the panic spread, cities burned from Paris to St. Louis and from Caracas to James Bay, looters roamed streets in hordes, and mobs battled one another in the ruins even before the scouring waves rolled in.

Other effects of the impact were even more serious, farther reaching, and more threatening to Humankind’s survival.

Several cubic miles of seawater had been vaporized by the impact, and more had boiled away over the next few hours as liquid water tried to reach the incandescent crater on the sea floor. Rising in a vast, churning column, the steam cloud had peaked low in the stratosphere and begun spreading out, an immense and fast-growing disk of cloud.

After the first few cataclysmic moments, the air pressure near the impact was significantly lower than the pressure farther out. The cloud began to rotate, hurricane-like, counterclockwise. Unlike a hurricane, the storm remained anchored in place by the rising column of hot gas; from that column, the storm continued to draw energy, growing larger and more powerful hour by hour. Wind velocities near the central eye approached the speed of sound.

By the time the sun set over the tortured region, the storm’s super cell covered a quarter of the planet, from Labrador to central Africa, and eighty percent of Earth’s surface, all but in the extreme north and the extreme south, was socked in under a solid and impenetrable cloud deck. At first, temperatures at the surface rose. The multiple impacts of that long and fiery night had dumped a very great deal of energy into the atmosphere as heat, and that heat was trapped by the cloud layer. For three centuries, global warming had slowly but steadily transformed the face of the planet, completely melting the North Polar ice cap, and melting all of the permanent sea ice around Antarctica and even much of the ice on solid ground. Sea levels had risen by several meters over the course of centuries, and even in midwinter at high latitudes, temperatures rarely fell more than a few degrees below freezing. Now, in the mid-February winter of the northern hemisphere, temperatures rose steadily and inexorably, to thirty-five degrees, as hot as a sweltering midsummer’s day.

But that was not to last. Those clouds retained a great deal of heat at first, but, as the days passed, and with the dramatic increase in the planet’s albedo, temperatures fell and the water began to condense into droplets.

A week after the impact, it began to rain—worldwide.

And two weeks after that, so much solar radiation was being reflected back into space that temperatures continued falling, and swiftly. In places as far south as Mexico City, Hawaii, Canton, and the inundated streets of Cairo, it began to snow.

And snow.

Andsnow .

For three centuries, the two greatest threats to human survival had been incessant worldwide warfare and the effects of global warming. Both now were stopped cold—literally. Out of a total world population of 15.7 billion people, an estimated four billion—over a quarter—had been killed immediately, or within a few hours of the impact. In the coming months, billions more would die of starvation, disease, and exposure to the brutal and unending global winter. Global warming had been completely and irrevocably reversed with the onset of a new ice age. As for war…the survivors had all they could do just staying alive as the snow grew deeper around them. War—at least anything of that name larger and more organized than armed gangs battling over food in the ruins—was a thing of the past.

At least for the time being.

Sixty-five million years before, a twenty-kilometer-wide asteroid had fallen into the sea that one day would be the coast of Yucatán. Much larger than the moonlet of 2127-VT, it hit the planet with a velocity of only eleven kilometers per second, and liberated perhaps one percent of the total kinetic energy released by the Doomsday Impact of 2314. The Cretaceous Impact had set the North American continent ablaze, and created a global winter that drove seventy percent of all life on Earth to extinction—ending the ancient reign of the dinosaurs.

One hundred times more powerful than the dinosaur killer, the Xul Strike of 2314 was the hammer blow of Armageddon.

And the very survival of the human species now hung in the balance. 9

14FEBRUARY 2314

Assault Detachment Alpha

Navy Sierra One-one

Location unknown

0308 hrs, GMT

Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway lay in a tangled jumble of combat armored suits on the AUT’s forward cargo compartment bulkhead, waiting to die.

The AUT was tumbling end over end, centrifugal force creating a simulation of gravity—Garroway estimated about half a G—at both the forward and the aft ends of the cargo compartment. He’d actually started out at the aft bulkhead, but hours ago, he’d made the tortuous climb up what had been the deck, using seat backs as ladder rungs, to the deck’s midpoint where “down” shifted from aft to forward. From there, he’d descended to the forward deck—in order to be with Chrome. Fourteen Marines of Detachment Alpha remained alive inside the autie, all of them injured. Garroway’s own wounds were limited to massive bruising and contusion—and what he suspected was a fatal dose of gamma radiation. His suit’s automated med unit had engaged the medical nano already in his blood stream, and was working to keep the pain at manageable levels and the nausea in abeyance. At this point, he wasn’t certain what would kill them first—the radiation burns or suffocation when their air supplies gave out.

That would be in another twenty to twenty-four hours, depending on how active they were in the meantime.

He leaned over, touching his helmet to Chrome’s, speaking to her through direct conduction. “How you doing, baby?”

“Fucking…hurts…” he heard her say, her voice weak and very far away through the armor. “Just want…t’sleep….”

“You stay with me, Chrome!” he shouted, his voice ringing off the walls of his own helmet. “Stay alert, Marine!”

Even as he said it, he wondered if it really mattered any more. Drifting off to sleep and never waking up sounded like a pretty decent way to go.

But as long as they were alive, they wereMarines …and Marines didn’t give up. He held her close with one arm, awkwardly with both of them encased in combat armor. The rest of Alpha Detachment lay around them—or on what now was the ceiling somewhere in the pitch darkness twelve meters overhead. Half of them were dead, according to their suit readouts. There was no power in the ship. Zero. They still had suit power, but communications had been lost when the local Net went down. Emergency backup suit radios were supposed to be shielded against EMP, but the powerful pulse from the blast appeared to have slagged the circuitry anyway. At least Garroway and the handful of Marines he’d been able to talk with suit-to-suit had no radio communications left. If any other Marines had working suit radios, he hadn’t heard from them yet. How long had it been? His implant timer told him that some thirty-four hours had passed since the detonation. Was that all? It seemed likeso much longer….

He checked Chrome’s medical readouts. She had her oxygen flow set low, and he nudged it a bit higher. Everyone was trying to conserve expendables—power and O2, especially—but it wouldn’t do to shortchange yourself into hypoxia. The readouts on her armor suggested she was suffering from internal bleeding. Not good, especially since he couldn’t crack her suit. The AUT’s cargo deck was still in hard vacuum, and the only medical aid available was what the rather limited medinano in her system could provide, coupled with her suit’s first-aid computer. It did appear to be slowing the bleeding, but she was still deep in shock, and getting worse. Blood pressure ninety over twenty…pulse one-sixty but weak. Damn!He was losing her.

Garroway had met Staff Sergeant Angelina O’Meara at Camp Lejeune four years earlier, when they’d both been DIs assigned to recruit training at the MCRD at Parris Island. His relationship with O’Meara—always“Chrome” andnever Angelina—had started off on the prickly side. The woman was brassy, loud, and as unabashedly in-your-face as the animated tattoos crawling over sixty percent of her body, and he still wasn’t quite sure how they’d finally ended up in bed during that liberty at Hilton Head. But they’d been close—and frequent if not exclusive bed partners—ever since. They were careful with the relationship. The Corps didnot condone physical liaisons between Marines, though there was a lot more latitude for men and women stationed offworld and a long way from home. Groundside duty, though, was different. They’d managed to keep their trysts at Parris Island secret, at least from the brass, which was the only way they’d been able to wangle an offworld billet together, with 1RST on Mars and Phobos. Once offworld, most commanding officers were willing to look the other way, so long as morale and discipline did not suffer.

As it turned out, Colonel Ramsey was a good CO, tough without being anal about regs, fair without being distant or unapproachable.

But wangling that offplanet billet didn’t seem like such a hot idea right now. If they’d still be stationed at the MCRD, training recruits, he and Chrome both would be alive, and with every expectation of staying that way.

Unless…

His thoughts wandered back to the Xul incursion. He wondered if any of the rocks the bad guys had tossed at Earth had made it through. Probably not. He felt a sharp thrill of pride, of accomplishment. Alpha had stopped the xenophobic bastards before too many asteroids had been redirected toward Earth, and the High Guard, whose job it was to protect against just such an attack, had some damned decent technology to back them up.

The thought that Earth had made it through the attack okay was all that had kept him sane for the past day and a half. The mere possibility that Alpha’s sacrifice had been in vain…

Travis Garroway refused to let his mind followthat particular track. He tried to peer into Chrome’s visor, but couldn’t see much. Light within the crippled transport was limited to the glimmer from medical readouts, and from self-powered glow strips providing dim emergency lighting along the AUT’s cargo deck. He couldn’t see past the smear of dim reflections on her faceplate.

“Chrome? You still with me?”

He heard an answer, mumbled and all but inaudible.

“Hang on, Chrome! Damn it…Angelina! Wake up! get with the program!”

“Damn…you…Trigger,” he heard through the helmet connection. “Said…never…fuckin’ call me…that….”

“Stay with me, damn you!”

From this angle, he could see a sliver of open space through the still-open ramp at the aft end of the deck. There wasn’t much to see—just stars slowly drifting past as the AUT continued its slow and relentless spin.

He wondered—not for the first time—where they were now.

Garroway remembered having downloaded a bit of history off the Global Net, an eon or two ago, about something called Project Orion back in the second half of the twentieth century. The idea—which had never gotten beyond the theorizing stage—had revolved around a search for peaceful uses for the nuclear arsenal that then was beginning to threaten the survival of civilization. A physicist named Freeman Dyson had suggested that a spacecraft might be built that employed fission bombs, detonated in a steady stream, one every few seconds, just astern of the ship. A massive pusher plate equipped with prodigious shock absorbers, would catch the plasma wave of each blast and let it propel the ship forward. Using hydrogen-pellet fusion, a thermonuclear version could take a ship to the stars. The then-British Interplanetary Society had even designed an unmanned, two-stage starship, called Daedalus, that might have carried an instrument package from Earth to Barnard’s Star in sixty years…again, on paper only. What had happened to the AUT had been a kind of working model of the old Orion concept. The detonation of several nuclear devices two hundred meters astern had created a plasma shock wave that had accelerated the autie into deep space at high speed. With nothing to slow them down, the surviving Marines were continuing to travel at that new velocity, with the burned-out hulk of the AUT tumbling slowly as it fell.

So where were they now? Somewhere outside the orbit of Mars, obviously…but a more precise determination simply could not be made. The local Net was down or inaccessible—due, no doubt, to the fact that the AUT’s electronics all were fried into useless hash, and Quincy3appeared to have died—if that was the right word—in the detonation. There was no way to determine the AUT’s current vector—neither speed nor course—nor was there any way of determining where they now were, or how far they’d come.

What were the chances of someone spotting them? Not very large, he guessed. In all of the adventure vids and entertainment sims dealing with this sort of situation, the hero always was able to cobble something together using spare parts and raw, human ingenuity…a flare using bottled oxygen, or a do-it-yourself radio set, or a laser signaling device using the ruby in the wealthy heroine’s necklace.

But rubies were in short supply just now, as were pressurized combustible gases and spare parts for radios with enough signal strength to manage interplanetary ranges. A careful inventory of supplies remaining on the AUT had turned up nothing that would reach another ship, or create a beacon bright enough to serve as a signal to searchers who might be out there. Garroway had no doubt that there were searchers in the area—Marines didnot abandon their own—but the AUT was very tiny and very dead, and it was falling through an extremely large volume of empty night. The one possible exception was the energy weaponry on board—laser rifles and a couple of man-portable particle guns. Charges were low, but energy could be diverted from the storage cells in some of the combat armor worn by dead Marines on the cargo deck.

The trouble with that bright little brainstorm lay in the fact that lasers and, to a lesser degree, pigs, had such tightly focused beams. A shooter would have to aimdirectly at the target ship for the beam to register, and when the targets couldn’t even be seen…

Hell, from out here, even Earth and Mars each were just bright stars. Anything as small as a ship was invisible. And, to make matters worse, that endless end-for-end spin made anything like careful aiming impossible. The entire detachment, what was left of it, could fire off their weapons randomly from now until their air gave out, and the chances that anyone would notice were so vanishingly small as to be essentially equal to zero.

Even at that, Garroway had considered sending Marines out to hang over the edge of the half-open ramp and fire at Mars and Earth as they circled past. Even a vanishingly small chance was still a chance, right?

In the end, though, as he looked at alternatives, it seemed a better course of action to conserve the remaining air as much as possible. All of that scrambling back and forth to fire of lasers in the hope of signaling someone would burn up enough oxygen to substantially shorten their remaining survival time. It seemed to be a better use of resources to give any searchers out there as much time as possible to find the tumbling autie, with someone still alive on board.

As the hours passed, though, that, too, began looking like a bad call on Garroway’s part. Every passing minute carried the AUT farther from their starting point, alongside the Xul intruder. Whatever their chances of rescue had been yesterday at this time, they were much dimmer now. He shook his head inside his helmet as he cradled Chrome’s CAS.Hopeless …. Commodore Edward Preble

Outbound from Mars

0420 hours GMT

“General Garroway! I really must insist that you give up on this useless search! We have more important things to consider!”

Garroway looked up at the speaker, a rangy, sharp-featured man with an acid tongue and a prissy manner. Brigadier General Walter Hudson was an Army officer assigned to the Phobos training center as the American Union Congressional liaison.

As a major general, Garroway outranked the unpleasant man, but Hudson’s role as an NAU

representative technically gave him authority over merely U.S. military affairs. Well…that was the theory. In strict chain-of-command terms, a liaison officer only served as a go-between, a kind of glorified messenger boy between the NAU Congressional Military Affairs Bureau and the staff to which he was assigned. The NAU could issue orders to Garroway using Hudson as an official conduit, but at the moment, the NAU did not appear to exist, not as a coherent and operational government body.

And Hudson was assuming authority which he simply did not possess. Not here, and not now. But Garroway had so far resisted the temptation to chuck Hudson out of his office. The situation on Earth was as yet unknown, though the general assumption was that things must be pretty bad. Still, Garroway’s commissioning oaths included oaths to support the North American Union as well as the government of the United States of America; despite popular belief, the two werenot the same, any more than the NAU was the sole voice and authority of the World Union.

Hudson might not have the authority to give Garroway orders, but Garroway was determined to observe proper government and military protocol. At the moment, protocol—and the shared illusion that something like government might still exist onany level—might be all that was holding human civilization together.

“General Hudson,” he said evenly, “I understand your sense of urgency. However, I still have Marines out there unaccounted for…men and women who put their lives on the line to destroy the intruder. I will not give them up for dead until hope for their survival is gone, or unless there is the gravest need otherwise.”

“What hope?” Hudson snapped. “General, those Marines died in the blast that destroyed the Xul ship. Tragic, yes…but I remind you that the situation on Earth is critical,critical. Almost certainly, billions have died. And there is every possibility that more Xul ships will enter the system at any moment in order to continue what the first began! I needn’t remind you that Humanity may not survive a second such attack!”

“And just what is it you would have me do, General? ThePreble certainly can’t take on another Xul intruder.”

“No. But you can return me and my staff to Phobos. We have lasercom communication with the base there, and know the facility is still up and running. We also have laser-com contact with facilities on Mars, Luna, and in deep space, including the HELGA stations, the Jovian system, and bases in the Asteroid Belt.

“In short, our infrastructure throughout the Solar System appears to be intact, save for Earth itself, and the various stations and facilities in low Earth orbit.”

“Just what is your point, General?”

“My point? My point is that we need to prepare for a second Xul incursion, and the quicker we do that, the better! Even if the Xul ship was completely alone in carrying out its attack, you can’t imagine that the rest of them will ignore the fact that one of their warships has just gone missing! They’re going to send other forces in to check up on us! And we need to be ready!

“Now, we’re already planning a conference at Stickney Base. We’re also lucky to have a N’mah ship in-system…theT’krah Elessed Ev’r .” The alien name rolled off Hudson’s tongue with practiced ease, glottal stops and all. “I’m told Stickney is in contact with them, and they will be arriving at Phobos within five days. I intend to be there to meet them!”

Garroway shot a quick mathematical query uplink to Quincy2, and received a reply almost at once. The Preble was currently decelerating, on a course that would match the course and speed of the Xul vessel at the moment of its destruction in another five hours. That put them roughly halfway between the current positions of Earth and Mars, but outside of Mars’ orbit, within the inner reaches of the Asteroid Belt. To return to Mars space, they would have to continue their deceleration for five more hours, then accelerate for two days back toward Mars, then decelerate for another two days. Not even the magic of N’mah semi-inertialess drive would change the cold numbers of fact. Four days. They could not return to Mars space in less than four days, at the very best.

He did a quick review of other assets. Possibly they could rendezvous with another ship already en route for Mars.

Quincy2assured him that there was nothing in transit now that would get Hudson back to Phobos in less than four days.

“General, if you’ll check the math and the available ship assets, you’ll see that you’re going to miss that reception.” He waited as the man’s eyes took on a distant look. Hudson did not have access to Quincy2, who was open only to members of 1MIEU’s command constellation, or Garroway’s immediate superiors with 3MARDIV.

“Nevertheless, General Garroway, I need to reach Phobos with the least possible delay. We could make it in four days if we decelerate at two gravities, then boost for Mars at two gravities instead of one. Captain Berger has refused my orders, and says he is operating underyour orders, as ranking officer on board this vessel.”

“Quite right. It is my intention to take thePreble into the general area where the Xul ship was destroyed, matching course and speed with the debris cloud. From there, I intend to have Captain Berger deploy additional remote probes and drones. My AI has analyzed recordings of the Xul’s destruction, and we believe those recordings caught just a glimpse of the AUT an instant before it was hit by the blast. We believe we have enough data to extrapolate the AUT’s vector after the blast…enough, anyway, to give us a fair chance of locating them.”

“General Garroway! Face reality! Your Marines are dead! They were killed in the destruction of the Xul vessel. If anydid survive, somehow, they were hit by so much radiation that, well, it must have been instantly fatal. They aredead , and nothing more can be done for them!”

Garroway drew a deep breath. “General Hudson. Those are my men and women out there, and I will determine when it is time to give up on them. The Navy hospital shipClara Barton is two days from here, and on approach. They have the facilities to treat severe radiation poisoning.

“While I understand your need to reach that conference on Phobos, I assure you that that conference will be continuing for some time…and thePreble has everything you need to attend it electronically. By the time things get started, you won’t even have much of a time lag to work around.

“But I will not give up on my Marines. Is that understood?”

Hudson glared down at him from across the desk, hands flexing at his sides. Then the man turned on his heel and stalked out.

Garroway leaned back in his chair, sagging a little inside. Making an enemy of an NAU liaison officer was not a career-enhancing move, as they said. If things were as bad as Garroway feared back on Earth, there was no NAU left…but the man could still make trouble.

In fact, Garroway’s take on the man was that Hudson was suffering from a severe case of ambition. As an LO standing in for NAU politicians unavoidably absent—perhaps permanently so—he was in a good position to create a power base for his own political aspirations.

Garroway scowled. If true, Hudson was playing political games with the lives of Garroway’s Marines. And that was something Garroway would not tolerate from anyone, not the Commandant, not the Chiefs of Staff, not the President of the United States.

Noone.

But the thought left him feeling isolated and alone. Communications were coming back on-line across the Solar System, but the situation in near-Earth space was still fuzzy and fragmentary, at best. The most telling image was being transmitted from a telescope camera at Fra Mauro, on Luna. He called up the image in a noumenal window for another long look.

Currently, it was early morning over Greenwich, which made it night across all of North America. The image from Luna showed Earth very nearly full, so he must be looking at the hemisphere occupied by the vast sweep of Asia and the western Pacific.

But there was no way to tell what he was looking at. The Earth was a blindingly white, white globe, the surface as completely masked by impenetrable clouds as was the surface of Venus. In places—especially along the sunrise terminator, which he calculated must be eastern Europe, the eastern Med, and Africa—lightning played within the cottony, light-muffling depths of those clouds, constant, silent flickerings and strobings larger and more powerful than anything Garroway had seen in all his years of observing Earth from space. He’d seen the storm over the Atlantic some hours earlier, noted the vast, spiral sweep alive with lightning flashes. If that was Europe he was looking at now, that lightning must be the eastern rim of the storm…and the storm must have grown considerably just in the past twelve hours. He tried to imagine what it was like right now on Earth’s surface, tried and failed. Darkness. Rain. Storm. Lightning. It was clear thatsomething very large had gotten past the High Guard defenses and punched into the Earth. To judge from the global cloud cover, that something had been a dinosaur killer in terms of kinetic energy at the very least.

Humankind’s survival must now depend on humans living offworld…but that was a terribly slender hope. Outside of small colonies dedicated to research or to military operations on Luna and on Mars, there wasn’t much else in the Solar System at large—a few dozen mining and processing centers in the Belt, some research stations among the Jovian moons and at Titan, fifty or so orbital facilities at the L-4

and L-5 points, and in solar orbit…nanufactories, for the most part, antimatter generating stations, and military bases like the HELGA stations.

That was the Solar System. There were a few bases and small colonies on worlds around other stars—most of them xenoarcheological research facilities like the one at Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A. There was a large colony now at Llalande 21185, on the Ahannu planet humans called Ishtar, numbering…what? Twenty thousand? If that.

He had no hard figures available, but the total human population off-Earth might total a few hundred thousand. That wasall .

But it wasn’t just the small off-Earth population. If his guess about that planet-girdling white cloud was at all accurate, it would be getting cold on Earth, from pole to pole, very cold. This might well be the start of a new global ice age. If so, the planet’s survivors were going to be damned hard-pressed just feeding themselves.

Up until now, the majority of the food for offworld facilities had been shipped up from Earth. There were greenhouses on Luna and Mars, yes, but they were barely productive enough to feed the staffs at those sites. Most bases and orbital stations were just too small to produce their own food. And now, somehow, those bases would not only have to feed themselves, but the Earth as well. A daunting prospect.

Quite possibly animpossible prospect.

And all of that assumed that another Xul ship didn’t pop out of nowhere and begin flinging more rocks around. Hudson was right about that. The Xul might well be back, if only to find out what had happened to their first ship. A determined attack by even one more ship would wipe the small human communities from the faces of Mars and Luna in no time at all, would complete the destruction of Earth, would mop up the remaining orbital stations and ships almost as an afterthought…and there wasnothing in the Solar System right now that could stand against them.

Humanity now faced two major problems, as Garroway saw it. The first was simple survival—pulling together whatever was left of Earth’s groundside population and ensuring that they could be fed and housed in the aftermath of the single greatest calamity ever to overtake Humankind. If the Xul hadn’t driven humanity into extinction, the ice age to come might well finish the job. The second was just as serious, and perhaps more so. The human race was now at war with an enemy immeasurably superior in technology to its own. The Xul had faster-than-light drive. That alone gave them an insurmountable advantage in combat. A combat fleet trying to close with such a vessel would never get close enough to launch a single missile, not when the Xul could outrun light itself, at need. The Marines of Detachment Alpha had lucked out, getting as close as they had. The blasts from HELGA Three and the XEL satellites at Mars had obviously crippled the intruder enough that the AUT could close in and put the Marines on board. That was the sort of combat tactic that you couldnot expect to work a second time.

In combat, victory went to the lucky more than to the skilled.

And it was very possible that Earth had just used up its cosmic allotment of luck.

“General Garroway?” a soft voice spoke in his mind.

“What is it, Quincy?”

“I believe we have found them.”

Thatbrought him sharply into the here and now. “What? The AUT?”

“Yes, sir. Radar and lidar scans of this entire volume of space identified a large number of fragments emanating from the blast that destroyed the Xul ship.”

“Yes, I know. That was part of the problem, wasn’t it?” The debris cloud had obscured much of the area, blocking both radar and laser tracking sweeps.

“Yes, sir. However, I made a careful analysis of the vector of each tracked fragment, eliminating those fragments massing less than one hundred tons.”

An AUT massed 200 tons, so Quincy had been looking for anything larger than half of an AUT. Garroway thought he saw where the AI was going with this. “Go on.”

“I paid particular attention to debris tracked in a cone extending out from the blast point along the general probable heading of the object we identified in the drone images. One fragment, massing an estimated two hundred tons, possessed a velocity component to its vector significantly greater than the rest.”

“Ah!” Of course. The AUT had already been accelerating out from the Xul ship when the explosion occurred. The blast front had pushed it along faster, essentially adding to its velocity the same velocity imparted to all of the other fragments.

Through that sort of analysis, the AUT would have stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.

“Well done, Quincy!”

“Thank you, sir. The application of basic physics seemed obvious.” But, Garroway swore, the AI still sounded, well…smug.

“What do we have that can reach them?”

“I have already taken the liberty of directing several reconnaissance drones into intercept vectors. The Clara Barton can rendezvous with them in two days. ThePreble could do so in nineteen hours.”

“Put me through to Captain Berger!”

“Yes, General. On-line.”

There was still a chance…small, but afighting chance.

And fighting was what Marines did best.

10

18FEBRUARY 2314

Mars Military Training Command

Stickney Base,

Phobos

1412 hrs, local

Colonel Robert Ellsworth Lee entered the conference chamber—doing so in a less than dignified manner, he thought, as he pulled himself along the guideline, half-adrift in the Martian moon’s microgravity. His staff trailed along behind, the command constellation for 3MarDiv’s 1RST, formally the 1st Regment of the 3rd Marine Division, and now officially the First Marine Recon Strike Team. The large, bowl-shaped auditorium was already filling up with high-ranking brass, to judge by the mass of gold and silver braid on so many full-dress uniforms, enough so as to leave him feeling distinctly on the peon side of things. He could see a few majors within the personal staffs of various flag officers, and a smattering of Navy captains and Army and Marine colonels, but by far the majority of officers wore the heavy gold braid of admirals and generals. There were, he guessed, a couple of hundred people there; he hadn’t realized there was that much military brass in Mars space.

There were quite a few civilians present as well, which made Lee uncomfortable. Until they identified themselves, you never knew who or what the suits might be—politicians, spooks, or civilian intelligence analysts.

Given the situation that had generated this unprecedented session, there likely were fair numbers of all three, and chances were that meant trouble, one way or another, for the professional military personnel in the room.

Lee found his seat in one of the back, higher tiers and strapped himself in. Chairs, of course, weren’t strictly necessary; you could stand all day in Phobos’s whisper of a gravity field and not feel the need to sit down. But seated ranks of attendees carried with them order and tradition, both; it simply wouldn’t do to have a forest of generals and admirals all standing in a mob, at slightly diverging angles, trying to see past one another to the stage.

The central stage was occupied by a podium, and by a large holoprojection disk. Smaller disks were set in a circle around the stage; not all of the attendees to the conference could be present physically, and arrangements had been made for them to attend electronically instead. But it was the large projection disk that particularly interested Lee. If the scuttlebutt floating about throughout the Phobos facility was true….

Lee didn’t let himself think about that. Instead, he directed his attention up, or what passed for up in this near weightless environment. Though the conference room was buried deep beneath the moonlet’s surface, the dome was set to show the view outside as though the structure literally rested on the surface, at the rim of Stickney Crater. The view was…spectacular.

Once, eons ago, a collision with another large body had very nearly shattered Phobos, leaving it looking like a gray potato with a deep, smooth chunk gouged out of one end. That gouge was Stickney, a crater ten kilometers wide on a moonlet that itself measured only twenty by twenty-seven kilometers. Called after the maiden name of Asaph Hall’s wife—Hall was the American astronomer who discovered Phobos in 1877—Stickney provided an awesome panorama of the Phobos surface, simply by virtue of its size compared to the moon itself. Outside the dome, the dusty surface of Phobos appeared to drop away in a deep and shadow-etched gulf; ten kilometers away, the far rim stretched across the horizon, bisecting the enormous rust-orange face of Mars. Scattered boulders half-submerged in dust cast long, fast-moving shadows. Some of those rocks, ejecta from the original impact, were fifty meters across. Though naturally a dark, dark gray in color, the surface of Phobos at this moment was bathed in a ruddy wash of Mars-light. The tiny satellite circled the planet at an altitude of just six thousand kilometers, so the planet’s face filled much of the sky; with the moon orbiting the planet three times in a single Martian day, surface features on Mars were visibly moving, drifting slowly from east to west. At the moment, the dark, charcoal sprawl of Syrtis Major was rising slowly above Stickney’s far rim, its borders marked by thickly overlapping craters, dark ravines, and bright highlands.

The choice of that particular surface view, Lee thought, had most likely been accidental…but he wondered if other people at the conference were looking at the seemingly bottomless gulf of Stickney, thinking about the ancient asteroidal impact that had gouged it…and connecting with the realization of what had happened to Earth.

Early reports were finally starting to filter in. The situation on Earth was as grim and as desperate as many had feared. At this time, only the governments of Japan, North China, and Australia had been able to jury-rig computer and communications links capable of reconnecting with the System Net, going through the nodes at Fra Mauro and at Crisium, on Luna.

Five days after the Armageddon Impact, as they were now calling it, it wasraining on the planet Earth. That represented a kind of grim joke. Some of the cheaper fictional download entertainment sims he’d seen made the old mistake of forgetting just how large, and how varied, a planet truly was. “It was raining on the planet Mongo” was, generally, as short-sighted a fictional mistake as saying “It was dawn on the planet Earth.”

But in this case, so far as early reports had indicated, it really was raining everywhere at once, save for at the poles, where it was snowing. Chinese aircraft had flown as far east as San Francisco and as far west as Ukraine, while Australian aircraft had probed eastern Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent. Everywhere, it was raining…and not in showers, either, but in streaming, thundering, heavens-opening torrents.

The single saving grace in the planetwide storm lay in the fact that vast fires set in central Europe, in South America, and in the North American Midwest appeared to have been drowned out. The bad news was that topsoil was being eroded away at a fearful rate.

Global temperatures were high, averaging 35 degrees Celsius everywhere but beyond the Arctic and Antarctic circles and reportedly was rising there as well. The rise in temperature was slowing now, as the rain continued, and no one expected that rise to continue for very much longer. Lee turned in his seat, studying part of the dome overhead opposite the vast sprawl of Mars. The Sun, currently, was below the Phobos horizon, but there, fairly high in the sky, a single star shone brightly enough to be seen despite the bright glare from the Martian desert below. That star now outshone Venus, a brilliant, diamond-sharp gleam of pure, white light.

That star was Earth, now as cloud-decked as Venus, and reflecting most of the solar radiation that hit it. It wouldn’t be much longer before the average temperature on Earth began falling. And no one could predict how far temperatures would fall.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” a voice sounded in his head. “This conference will now come to order.”

Lee turned his full attention back to the stage, and its central podium. An NAU Army general stood there, addressing the throng, resplendent in the full dress NAU silver and blue uniform. Lee requested a noumenal ID, and his implant retrieved an identification for the speaker—Major General Lucius Vanderkaamp, commander of the North American Union’s Fifth Army Group. The title, Lee reflected was something of a misnomer. The NAU possessed an army organization, but very little in the way of actual troops. Instead, under the New York Charter of 2240, the NAU had the right to recruit military units from its member nations—chiefly the United States. Right now, General Vanderkaamp was a general without an army.

“As the senior ranking military officer here,” Vanderkaamp went on, “I am assuming overall command of this meeting, ah, as chairperson. We are here to formally address the serious situation on Earth, determine possible courses of action, and to consider the threat now imposed by the Xul, the so-called Hunters of the Dawn.

“Before we begin, the chair will accept any opening statements or challenges.”

“Mr. Chairman!”

A bearded man in a blue civilian jumpsuit stood near the front. “This meeting is clearly illegal! Many representatives are not here, will not be here for days, yet. Many who are in attendance are so distant as to suffer from a full twenty-minute time-lag, the delay for a transmission and its reply to make the round trip, from Phobos to Luna and Earth orbit and back to Phobos.” He drew herself up straighter. “Further, there are no representatives present of the World Union.”

“And in what way does that make these proceedings illegal, sir?”

“Obviously, this body does not,cannot , speak for all of Humankind!”

François Brissard, Lee noted as he studied the man’s electronic ID, was an assistant consul from France stationed at Cydonia, one of several research colonies on Mars. He was also, he saw, an avid World Unionist, an advocate for a final elimination of international borders and the creation of a single world government…one based on World Union ideals, of course.

“Sit down, François!” another voice called from the crowd. “This isn’t the time for politicking.”

“Monsieur Brissard,” General Vanderkaamp said, patience in his voice, “these proceedings are intended as an initial survey of the…challenges now facing Humankind. I assure we’re not out to steal the World Union’s charter.”

Brissard sat down again, a bit reluctantly, Lee thought.

“Other statements?” Vanderkaamp asked the assembly.

“I have a statement.” The woman’s voice spoke Surzhyk, a creolized Ukrainian and Russian, but Lee heard it translated in his mind into English. Dr. Marta Petranova was a Russian xenoarcheologist, but she’d been granted diplomatic status by the Ukraine consulate at Clarke City, on Mars.

“Dr. Petranova.”

“The agenda you published for this conference is not complete.”

“In what way?”

“You list two items of interest—the survival of our brothers and sisters trapped on Earth, and the possibility of further attacks by the Xul. You have neglected the possibility of invasion.”

“I would think that was covered by the item concerning the Xul—”

“Not invasion by the Xul, Mr. Chairman. By theChinese .”

Vanderkaamp looked blank. Lee checked Petranova’s ID and bio, and saw that she, too, was a World Unionist.

When Vanderkaamp didn’t reply immediately, she pressed on. “Mr. Chairman! My consulate has received reports,many reports, of troops and aircraft belonging to the North China Hegemony landing in widely scattered areas of the Russian Federation, the Emirate of Tashkent, and Ukraine! Beijing is taking advantage of the chaos and devastation on our planet to advance their own agenda—one of planetary conquest!”

“Good God! First things first!” someone called from the crowd, and then it seemed that everyone was shouting, demanding attention.

Lee leaned back in his seat, then glanced at Major Risler, seated beside him. Carol Risler was his executive officer. “Well,” he whispered, “it’s starting.”

“You have to admit that parliamentary procedure lasted longer than we thought it would,” she replied. It was, Lee thought, a matter of scale. The destruction wrought on Earth by the Xul attack was so great, on such a vast and devastating scale, that many—perhaps most—of the men and women here simply couldn’t see the whole image. As a result, Brissard was pushing to make sure the World Union was properly represented, and Petranova wanted to make sure the Chinese didn’t extend their hegemony into Siberia and eastern Europe.

Maybe they simply couldn’t look at something as big as the extinction of Humankind.

“Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!” Another voice cut across the babble, both of voices in the chamber, and the confusing mental cacophony as various delegates tried to speak over implant circuitry.

“The chair recognizes General Garroway. Gentlemen! Ladies!Please! ”

The shouting died away, reluctantly, as a holographic figure appeared on one of the side projection daises. Lee recognized Garroway’s craggy features. He was wearing dark gray Marine utilities, which cut a sharp contrast with the full-dress uniforms so in evidence among the members of the conference physically present.

The slightly translucent figure of General Garroway waited patiently for the confusion to die away. His ID tag indicated that he was still on board the transportPreble , several million kilometers out from Mars.

“I thought the conference would appreciate seeing some of the intel 1RST managed to snatch from the Xul ship,” he said at last. “As I’m sure you’ve already been made aware, while the Marines were planting the charges that destroyed the Xul ship, the AI from my command constellation managed to infiltrate the Xul computer network.”

That raised a fresh murmur of comment and low-voiced conversation. Evidently, most here had not heard this. Lee had, however, and he nodded quietly. The general knew how to grab the attention of everyone here.

A light winked at the edge of Lee’s mental awareness—a noumenal warning that an image was available for download. He accepted the message, and a window opened in his mind. He gasped, his sharp intake of breath mingling with similar sounds throughout the auditorium. The view was…spectacular.

The viewpoint appeared to be just above the plane of the Galaxy, looking along one of the spiral arms back toward the Core. Stars gleamed in uncounted hundreds of millions, most with a blue to white hue in the arms, but shading to red and orange at the central bulge of the Galactic hub. The camera appeared to be moving deeper into the arm; individual suns separated themselves from the clotted mass of stars in the background and drifted past, to left or right, above or below.

When Lee tried to focus on any one star, a small ID tag appeared next to it. The writing was gibberish—short bursts of dots and lines that might be Xul writing, or which might be some sort of electronic notation. He was also, aware, though, of lines drawing themselves from sun to sun through the starcloud ahead, and other symbols that might be navigational beacons…or stargates…or…

“We still can’t directly translate the Xul language,” Garroway continued, “but as you can see from this, we did get some navigational data.

“My staff transmitted the data we were able to get back from the Xul ship to our N’mah allies on board theT’krah Elessed Ev’r , and I’ve already discussed this with them. They agree that they may be able to figure out where that ship came from.”

The conference chamber now was deathly silent. The large holoprojection disk lit up and, a moment later, a tall and sinuous figure appeared in the projection area.

Every person in the room, Lee realized, was leaning forward now, watching both with physical eyes and through the downloads linking into their cranial implants.

The “Repulsive Ones,” Lee thought as the alien’s image took form, hovering as though adrift in a column of water.And just incidentally the saviors of Mankind …

The historian Berossus had written about them around 280B.C.E. , in hisHistory of Babylon , recounting a myth possibly dating all the way back to ancient Sumeria. According to that story, a strange-looking being calling himself “Oannes” had appeared to people living at the head of the Persian Gulf before recorded history, teaching them math, agriculture, science, medicine, writing, and other essentials of civilization. Oannes, Berossus said, took no food, but returned each evening to his home under the sea, for he was amphibious. The being was described as having “a fish’s head atop another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s tail.”

In fact, the adult N’mah looked like a four-meter-long eel, mottled gray with an opalescent sheen, with a long and flattened tail. The head, elongated, strangely articulated, and encased in a black, chitinous armor, possessed four eyes—two the size of a man’s fists ringed in bone high up, well above two smaller eyes deeply recessed into the skull. Two vertically slit nostrils were set between the two pairs of eyes, and seemed to supplement pulsing gill slits in what passed for a chest. The jaw was massively armored and set with needle-sharp teeth. The being was fully aquatic, though it could breath air for short periods. To human eyes, a Repulsive One, indeed. But the N’mah were highly cultured and possessed a technology well in advance of humans. They used something like the electronic implant communications technology employed by humans—evident in the flat oval of silvery metal showing on the side of the being’s long skull—and they used an organic form on nanotechnology to reshape their surroundings to their needs. Their near-inertialess drive allowed their ships to accelerate at as much as one hundred gravities without pulping delicate cargoes, like passengers. Human physicists were still trying to get a grasp on how they managed that little trick.

This N’mah appeared to be floating in midair but, in fact, the being was in a tank of water elsewhere, his image projected by the holographic display. As Berossus had claimed, the beings were amphibious—but in the reverse of the pattern seen in Terrestrial amphibians, like frogs. In the N’mah, the juvenile stage crawled out of shallow birthing waters and onto land, though they were truly amphibious and at home in the water as well; after about fifty terrestrial years, the adults lost their hind legs and became purely marine-aquatic. It was the long juvenile phase of the life cycle that carried out the mining, the smelting, the fire-building, and the air-breathing industry for the race.

Berossus had called the creature of ancient Sumerian myth “Oannes.” Whether he meant that that was the being’s name, or the name of their species was not made certain in hisHistory, but he’d been clear on one point: Oannes, whatever he was, was not a god, but an “animal with reason,” an intelligent being which claimed to hail from the star Sirius.

That was a vitally important distinction that had set the Oannes myth apart from the usual ancient stories of gods and goddesses.

Another set of myths had arisen in Central Africa, with a primitive tribe called the Dogon. Not contacted by the outside world until the 1920s, their myths included stories of strange beings called “Nommo” who came from the star Sirius—again, not gods, but thinking creatures very unlike men. The story might easily have been dismissed as flights of a tribal people’s imagination or religious myth…except for the fact that the Dogon appeared to possess information, incorporated into their dances and their pottery designs long before their contact with the outside world, about Sirius’s invisible white dwarf companion, Sirius B, and the system’s even smaller member, Sirius C.

The evidence, while not conclusive, had been strongly suggestive, enough so that xenoarcheologists began taking them seriously. During the twenty-first century, discoveries throughout the Solar System demonstrated repeatedly that Earth had been visited not once, but many times, and over a period of many thousands of years, by nonhuman intelligences from the stars. The Oannans/Nommo, it seemed, might be one of them.

Other ancient cultures revered Sirius as well—among them the Egyptians, who called Sirius Sopdet, or Sothis, and “the Sun behind the Sun,” identifying it with the goddess Isis and the civilizing influence of the gods. The fact that the rising of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, coincided with the flooding of the Nile was most likely responsible for its veneration in ancient Egypt. Still…

In 2148, the Earth explorer vesselWings of Isis had reached Sirius, 8.6 light-years from Earth, discovering that “Sirius C” was, in fact, an artificial structure, one containing the mass of a large planet somehow collapsed into a titanic metal hoop twenty kilometers across. Enormous masses compressed into artificial black holes counter-rotated within the hoop at an appreciable fraction ofc , warping space and time and allowing instantaneous passage across impossible gulfs between the stars. Tragically,Wings of Isis had been destroyed by a Xul starship while in the Sirian system; a later Marine expedition had made contact with the N’mah, as the inhabitants of the Sirius C gate called themselves. And it turned out that the N’mah remembered the people of Earth….

“My name,” the being said, “or, rather, my title, is Duradh’a, and you may address me as such. Our peoples, N’mah and human, are closely intertwined,” a voice said over Lee’s cerebralink, dry and without accent, the product of a translation AI. “The threat of extinction has bonded us.”

True enough, Lee thought. When discovered, the N’mah had been living within the stargate structure, not as owners, but as high-tech vermin lurking within the Gate’s tunnels and inner chambers, living quietly beneath the Xuls’s notice. But eight thousand years earlier, they’d possessed technologies now forgotten, including the ability to travel faster than light between the stars. And eight thousand years earlier, their explorers had discovered Earth.

“This,” the N’mah was saying, “is not the first time your planet has been bombarded by the entities you call Xul and Hunters of the Dawn. This you have learned for yourselves.”

Earth, it seemed, had had a long history of visitors from the stars. Another alien race, the Ahannu, had colonized parts of Earth perhaps ten thousand years ago, enslaving large portions of the primitive human population, which came to worship them as the Anu, the gods. Archeoethnographers only now were beginning to unravel what that period of servitude had done in molding human thought, in planting the seeds that later became the gods of ancient myth…and of modern religion. But the Ahannu had attracted the attention of the Xul, and the Xul, it was now known, had diverted asteroids that time as well, including one that struck the Arabian Gulf, sending a tidal wave smashing into what later would be called the Fertile Crescent. The Ahannu colonies were literally wiped from the face of the planet.That impact, inundating with a tidal wave what centuries later would become Sumeria, proved to be the original genesis of Noah’s Flood, transmitted to the ancient Hebrews by way of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, and other ancient sources.

On that occasion, too, as was hinted at by the story of Noah, Humankind had been brought to the point of extinction.

According to N’mah records, their explorers had discovered human survivors of the flood, wretched beings on the point of reverting to complete savagery when the starships arrived, bringing the gifts of civilization, and, in the process, planting the seeds that would one day become the legends of Oannes and the Nommo, of God’s covenant with Man, of Prometheus’s gift of fire. Under N’mah guidance, civilization had emerged once more on the fertile plains between the Tigris and the Euphrates, cities had appeared, and humanity been reborn. The N’mah quite literally were the saviors of Humankind.

And now, every person in that conference auditorium desperately hoped, they would be Humankind’s saviors once again.

“We have long recognized,” Duradh’a continued, floating serenely in his tank, “the essentially cyclic nature of technic civilization within the parts of the Galaxy with which we are familiar. Your own discoveries—on your Luna, on the fourth planet of this system, on the world you call Chiron a little over four light-years from here, and elsewhere—have revealed the detritus of ancient star-faring civilizations smashed into extinction during repeated waves of devastation. You recognize, as well, that what you call the Xul or the Hunters of the Dawn are responsible for what your philosophers have called the Fermi Paradox.”

The Fermi Paradox strikes again,Lee thought. During the mid-twentieth century, physicist Enrico Fermi was supposed to have asked the question, “Where is everyone?” In a galaxy of three or four hundred billion stars—to say nothing of the hundreds of billions of other galaxies—the possibility that other life, other civilizations would sooner or later arise seemed all but certain. Even if the magic of faster-than-light drives never appeared to tamper with the equations, a suitably aggressive and technically oriented species that began spreading across interstellar distances would, sooner or later, reach and colonize every suitable planet in the Galaxy. Given a top velocity of even just ten percent of the speed of light, and a long lead time between waves of colonization, that one species could be expected to colonize the entire Galaxy in less than a million years—an optical-organ’s blink, compared to the age of the Galaxy itself. Given that the equations suggested hundreds, even thousands of star-faring species in the Galaxy at any given epoch, the sky ought to be fairly humming with interstellar signals and starships. Hence Fermi’s question: “Where is everyone?” For a long time, human astronomers and astrophysicists had simply assumed that life was a lot more infrequent an occurrence, technology sufficiently rare, and the life span of a technologically capable species sufficiently brief that therewas only one intelligence in the Galaxy—Homo sapiens.

Once humans had reached the Moon and Mars, though, they’d found plenty of evidence of previous waves of interstellar visitors—the first half a million years ago, the second in barely prehistoric times, with the arrival of the Ahannu and, later, the N’mah. Something, someone, seemed determined to obliterate anyone else who achieved space travel.

That someone was the Xul.

“Unfortunately, we still know extremely little about the Xul,” said Duandh’a. “They appear to exist as a blend of organic and inorganic components, but may be thought of as a machine group intelligence. They possess large and powerful starships which have faster-than-light capabilities, though they also employ the Ancients’ Stargates to enable them to achieve virtually instantaneous travel across extremely large distances. One base system has been positively identified in a star cluster outside the boundaries of this Galaxy; others are believed to exist within the Galactic Core. The Xul may be ubiquitous throughout this entire Galaxy of four hundred billion suns.

“The Xul have been in existence for at least half a million years. There is a strong possibility that the Xul, or their remote progenitors, evolved as much as one hundred million years ago and began spreading inexorably across the Galaxy. There is a distinct possibility—at this point unprovable, but a possibility—that a prehuman civilization on your planet, one arising among highly intelligent beings that in turn evolved from the animals you call dinosaurs, was obliterated by a Xul asteroid attack sixty-five million years ago. We see this identical pattern across the Galaxy appear again and again and again—life evolving, life attaining sentience and technology, technic civilization achieving interstellar space flight, followed by the abrupt appearance of the Xul and that civilization’s complete annihilation.

“One of your scientists,” the N’mah continued, “promulgated the biological concept you call ‘survival of the fittest.’ Briefly, an organism that develops a trait or characteristic that helps it survive will pass that characteristic on to its young. Over large periods of time, evolutionary pressures—survival of the fittest—will streamline those characteristics to sometimes astonishing degrees.

“We believe that the Xul originally evolved in anextremely competitive environment—perhaps a biosphere that was home to many large and dangerous predators. For those progenitors of modern Xul, survival became a matter of killinganything else that was a threat to the species. This trait may well have become completely and inflexibly instinctive with them, a way of seeing and dealing with the universe that leaves them incapable of seeing other civilized species as potential friends or allies.

“Once such a species developed advanced technic capabilities, we theorize, they might well maintain their place by deliberately seeking out newly emergent technic civilizations—by means of their radio signals, for instance, or the neutrino flux of fusion power plants—and eliminating them…at least to the point of ‘bombing them into the Stone Age,’ as one of your military personalities so bluntly put it.”

Lee nodded as the being spoke. This understanding, thisresolution of the Fermi Paradox had been floating around ever since the ruins on Mars, Chiron, and elsewhere had been discovered.

“Fortunately, the Xul are not always…efficientin their ministrations. You have initiated contact with the Ahannu, on the world you call Ishtar…a primitive remnant of what once was a star-faring empire. You have also established relations with we of the N’mah, whom you now know to be similar remnants of a once far-flung interstellar trade and exploratory cooperative.”

Rats in the walls, Lee thought. So far, humans had communicated only with the N’mah of the Sirius Stargate, a culture that had managed to remake portions of the gate’s interior into a microworld where they continued to live six thousand years later, unnoticed by the Xul even when the Xul continued to use that Gate for interstellar transits. Presumably, there were other N’mah colonies out there among the stars…but if so, they, too, were lying low, remainingvery quiet, hoping to stay off the Xul sensor displays. The N’mah had lost or given up interstellar travel thousands of years ago; starships tended to attract a lot of attention.

“With both the N’mah and the Ahannu,” Duradh’a went on, “therewere survivors. In our case, we deliberately gave up some aspects of our technology in order to, as you humans put it, ‘keep a low profile.’ In the case of Ahannu, one of their interstellar colonies was overlooked by the Xul, and maintained a primitive existence without recourse to space-flight at all.”

The Ahannu planet, Ishtar, had been a surprise—the Earthlike satellite of a super gas giant. Quite possibly, the Xul simply hadn’t bothered looking for Ahannu colonies outside of the normal liquid-water band surrounding the system’s cool, red dwarf star.

“We believe that a similar option is open to Humankind. We of theT’krah Elessed Ev’r wish to formally offer you this possibility of safety…to flee with us to a new sanctuary, possibly worlds located in a neighboring galaxy, there to rebuild your civilization and escape the Xul predators.”

Shocked silence greeted this offer. Lee was surprised. He’d expected offers of technological help, but not an offer of wholesale migration.

“Durahd’a,” one of the naval officers in the audience said, his manner tentative, “do I understand that you’re suggesting weabandon Earth?”

“Of course. You managed to destroy the Xul ship—an act of incredible bravery and courage, I will add—but you must recognize the inevitable, that sooner or later the Xul will come looking for that vessel. When they do, they will not limit themselves to bombarding Earth with asteroids. They have the ability to turn your sun into a weapon that will incinerate every living creature in this star system.”

“If that’s true,” Brigadier General Pamela Steubbins asked, “why didn’t they just do it first time around?”

“The Xul, to judge by what little we know of them, must be an extremely conservative species. Think about it. They have been in existence as a technologically adept species for at least a million years, and quite probably for as much as one hundred times longer than that. They tend to move slowly, tothink slowly, to draw conclusions slowly…but to make plans that seem quite long-ranged to more ephemeral species. We know theycan incinerate entire star systems, and that they have done so when faced by a sufficiently dangerous foe. A world scorched by a nova, however, orbiting a burned-out white dwarf sun, is of little use to them. The Xul, we believe, do tolerate, and even cultivate, the existence of other intelligences…taking care to keep them in a pretechnological state. We don’t know what they do with them, but we have seen evidence of this. Some of your years ago, the Xul dropped yet another asteroid on your planet to annihilate a promising Bronze Age culture there. They did not eradicate all life or all civilization, however. Possibly they planned on using you humans for something else.

“To answer your question, General Steubbins, the Xul use the least amount of force possible in any given situation commensurate with accomplishing their goals—sending one ship instead of a fleet, using an asteroid bombardment instead of novae. But since you have just rather dramatically demonstrated that youdo pose a long-term threat to them. I think you can be confident that they will not hold back a second time.”

“How the hell are we supposed to move the entire human population elsewhere?” a man in civilian clothing called out in what was almost a wail of despair. “There may bebillions of people left alive on Earth!”

“With regret, Senator Langley, that situation will not long ensue. The heat currently enveloping your homeworld will soon give way to ice and sub-freezing temperatures. Only those of your species already in space—plus the handful more you may be able to rescue—will survive.”

Again, silence hung heavy within the bowl of the conference auditorium. Only in the century or so since humans had reached Sirius had the N’mah begun building starships again, Lee knew, after a hiatus of at least five thousand years. One such was the enormousT’krah Elessed Ev’r, a ten-kilometer-long vessel that essentially was an asteroid with an inertialess drive attached, and rotating inner wheels housing thousands of N’mah, both aquatic adults and amphibian juveniles. For more than eighty years, now, more and more of the N’mah population in the Sirian Stargate had been moving onto the asteroid starships. Sirius was no longer safe for them, not after the humans had destroyed a Xul huntership at the Gate.

“In any case,” Duradh’a said, “there is a limit to what we can do. Essentially, we propose to give you what help we can in turning several asteroids into…I believe your term for them is ‘interstellar arks.’ This is what we of the N’mah are doing, as we continue to abandon the Sirian Stargate. In fact, we will not be able to evacuate all of our people, but we are doing what we can.

“This is the decision you must make as well, ifHomo sapiens is to have a chance of surviving.”

There was another long silence at this…and then the conference hall broke out in a babbling, chaotic pandemonium.

11

18FEBRUARY 2314

Mars Military Training Command

Stickney Base,

Phobos

1435 hrs, GMT

“We arenot going to abandon Earth!” Admiral Marcia Thomas said, shouting to be heard above the murmur of shocked and angry voices. “This is our home!”

General Vandekaamp pounded the top of the podium with the flat of his hand, gradually restoring order. Turning to face the image of the floating N’mah, he said, “This conference was called to discuss our options if the Xul return. I believe I speak for most here when I say it is premature to discuss running away.”

“That is your decision, of course,” the N’mah said. Lee tried to read some sort of emotion into the voice, into the being’s manner, and failed. The four whiteless eyes, the chitin-armored face, the shoulderless arms, none of these was remotely human, and if they bore anything at all like a human emotion, Lee could not read it. The dry voice, of course, was the mentally projected voice of the translator AI; Lee had never heard a N’mah voice, but an article he’d downloaded once had said its speech issued through the two vertical slits on its face—analogues of human nostrils—and that the tooth-filled mouth was used only for eating. He doubted very much that he would pick up on the strange being’s emotions through its tone of voice, either.

The human emotion loose in the room, however, was undeniable, and quite clear. The murmurs were spreading throughout the audience again, growing louder, more urgent. “How do we know the N’mah aren’t working with the Xul?” one insistent voice called out.

“Order!” Vanderkaamp yelled. “Wewill have order!”

“I believe that our, our honored guest doesn’t understand our situation,” General Steubbins said. “The N’mah have not known their homeworld for many thousands of years. Isn’t that right?”

“Truth,” Duradh’a replied. “Our world of origin, we believe, was destroyed by the Xul long ago. We understand your…emotional attachment to the world that gave your species birth. But believe me when I say that your survival as a species demands that you outgrow such attachments. I tell you the absolute truth. Earth, and every world in this stellar neighborhood, and every living being on or near them, is doomed. The Xul will not, theycannot experience competition or threat in any form without responding in the only way they are capable of responding—by returning to this system, and closely searching those nearby, in order to obliterate every trace of sentient life they can find.

“Your one hope is to find another world, in a star system so lost among the stars that the Xul can never find you.”

“He can’t be serious,” Major Risler said quietly, at Lee’s side. “How can we run from something that has FTL, when we don’t?”

“I don’t think he means outrunning them,” Lee replied, whispering. “The cosmos is a big place. If we found another world, maybe in another galaxy, it would take even the Xul millions of years to find us, combing the stars one by one. I doubt they’d be that persistent.”

“Anothergalaxy ? But that would take millions of years!”

“Not for us,” Lee said. “Not at near-c.”

He was pretty sure he saw what the N’mah delegate was saying. Even the Xul had their limitations. Survivors of their past predations had escaped their notice in part because therewere so many stars—four hundred billion in this one galaxy alone. The Xul couldn’t look everywhere, couldn’tbe everywhere. Like the N’mah, Humankind might be able to lose itself in the immensity of space. And with the N’mah inertialess drive, even flight to another galaxy might well be an option. Lee had once seen a technical discussion of the idea. If a ship could be boosted to a high enough percentage of the speed of light, relativistic time dilation would slow the passage of time for those on board to a crawl. One estimate suggested that the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.3 million light-years distant, would be only twenty-seven years away, according to shipboard clocks. No Earth-built ship was capable of that yet, but with N’mah technological help…

Yeah, it just might work.

But…

While twenty-seven years passed for the passengers of a ship crossing between the galaxies, 2.3 million years would pass for the Xul. True, they appeared to change only very slowly, over the course of ages, but even so, where would they and their technology be two million years hence?

Lee found the thought disquieting.

Much more disquieting, however, was the thought of what would happen to those left behind. Senator Langley had it right. How could that fraction of Humanity already in space simply abandon the survivors on Earth?

Within the past standard day, Fleet Command at Fra Mauro, on Luna, had succeeded in inserting a large number of remote probes into Earth’s tormented atmosphere, and the probes had begun sending back images. No numbers were available yet on how many might be still alive on the planet’s surface, but therewere survivors, teeming swarms of them in some places, sheltering as best they could from the torrential, never-ending rain, grubbing among the ruins of wrecked cities and fallen arcologies looking for food and emergency supplies, struggling to stay above the rising waters, to stay alive. Things appeared to be worst in western Europe, where repeated tidal waves had scoured away the very surface of the world right down to bedrock. Across eastern North America, there appeared to be little left in the way of infrastructure or organized government. Washington, D.C., Baltimore, the New York Metroplex, Boston, Charleston—cities as far inland as Atlanta had been reduced to utter ruin, and most of the coastal cities now stood under water, submerged by the tidal swell from the continuing hyperstorm that embraced most of the North Atlantic. Of some cities—Miami, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, there was not a trace remaining. Indeed, little remained at all of the entire former state of Florida or of the Gulf Coast as far north as Baton Rouge, and a new arm of the sea now reached far to the north to truncate the Mississippi River just below Vicksburg; the storm’s tidal surge had—temporarily, at least—raised the gulf ’s water level by over thirty meters.

Things were not so bad in the Southern Hemisphere, or in Asia, or even inland along the North American West Coast, where cities still stood, aircraft again roamed the skies, and armies and heavily armed militia appeared to be enforcing order for the public good.

How many now remained alive on the planet? It was impossible as yet to say. Estimates ran from as low as five billion—mostly in eastern Asia and the Southern Hemisphere—to an optimistic ten to twelve billion. Intermittent contact had been established with survivors on the U.S. West Coast, suggesting that things were grim there, but far from hopeless. The shorelines and great metroplexes along the coast had been battered by tidal waves, but most people inland had escaped unharmed. So far. That would change when the temperatures began dropping.

“Eight thousand of your years ago,” Duradh’a said, continuing, “the survivors on Earth were of no importance to the Xul. Evidently, they checked in on your planet for some thousands of years after, monitoring your recovery, but after the incident thirty-five hundred years ago, they seem to have lost track of you.

“I assure you, that will not happen again. Your species has proven itself adaptable, resourceful, and…stubborn to a degree that can only convince the Xul that you must be exterminated. Among the vast starclouds at the far end of the Galaxy, or, better, hidden away within the uncharted suns of a neighboring Galaxy, you might win survival.”

“But at what cost, Duradh’a?” Senator Langley said, his voice loud in the chamber, and echoed by the link with Lee’s implants. “Fleeing not into space, but into the remote future…beginning a new life elsewhere, giving up all thought of further interstellar exploration, giving up fusion power, evenradio for fear that we’d tip the Xul off to our hiding place, always fearful of discovery…no, sir. I know whatmy vote would be.”

“The N’mah might be right, Ted,” another man in a civilian jumpsuit said. “How do we fight a technology that far in advance of our own? It would be like battling hovertanks with rocks!”

“We don’t have a chance,” an Aerospace Force colonel added.

“Actually,” General Garroway said, “we might have a chance. Take a look at this.”

Another download signaled readiness, and Lee opened the window. What he saw was an animated sim, computer-generated and quite realistic in tone and texture. A Marine in full battle armor was kneeling at the edge of a forest, taking aim at some target unseen with a man-portable plasma gun. Behind him, a Neanderthal, naked and hairy, slipped out of the woods with a primitive ax—a stone head strapped to the end of a heavy branch with rawhide strips. The Neanderthal tiptoed close with exaggerated stealth. The Marine’s sensors must have been switched off, since he evidently didn’t see the cave man, who swung the stone ax hard and level, crumpling the man’s helmet.

Someone in the room laughed, a startling sound abruptly cut off, but most greeted the animation in cold silence. “Just what is your point, General?” Petranova asked.

“Just that technology isnot the last word in combat. If the history of modern warfare hasn’t taught us that much, it’s taught us nothing.”

He’s got that right,Lee thought.Korea …Vietnam…the Terrorist World War of the early twenty-first century…the Second and Third Mexican Wars…Siberia…the Giza Incursion…Brazil…it was always the big, high-tech Americans up against fanatical peasants fighting us with obsolete weaponry. Of course, Korea, Vietnam, and Brazil were the only ones we lost, and those werepoliticaldefeats, not military. But each time, we found technology had limits. You could never do it all from orbit or with robots. We always needed to get infantrymen in, boots on the ground, to kick ass and take names. Even the wars clearly won by high technology were never the walkovers their advocates claimed they would be. An untrained civilian or a half-trained militiaman armed with any weapon and a fanatical certainty that his cause was right could be killed, but not convinced. And even obsolete weapons were still deadly, when properly deployed and used.

“Are you suggesting a guerrilla war, General?” Vandenkaamp asked.

“And how the hell do we conduct a guerrilla war when the Xul can just walk in despite everything we do and turn our sun nova?” a Navy captain asked. “Damn it, how do we fight them when we can’t even catch them?”

“What I have in mind,” Garroway said after the time-lag hesitation, “is a bit too conventional to be true guerrilla warfare. But what I do suggest is that we convince the Xul that wiping us out is going to be too damned much trouble.

“Have a look at this….”

U.S.S.Clara Barton

en route to Earth space,

1510 hrs, GMT

Travis Garroway opened his eyes, honestly not sure what to expect. He was no longer wearing combat armor—that was a plus—and the pain that had wracked his body was blissfully, blessedly absent. Even so, he felt washed out and limp, and the ache of remembered pain still throbbed in distant pulsings along his spine and at his temples.

The overhead glowed with an even, soft light. It was not the overhead of the burned-out shell of the AUT, with its bundled tangles of wiring conduits, nano ducts, and life-support modules. And that was a definite plus as well.

“What the blazing hell hit me?”

A shadow came between his face and the glowing overhead. He blinked, focusing, and the shadow resolved into Chrome’s face. “Twenty hours of nanoreconstructive hibernation hit you,” she said. “Glad you decided to join the party!”

“Chrome! Gods! Are you?…”

She grinned. “I’m fine. So are you. You weren’t as cooked as some of the rest of us, so they hooked you into medihibe last. The Doc says they got to us in time, though. You can even still have kids.”

Tattooed images crawled disconcertingly across her face—a bat flapping its wings, a grinning skull with flames for eyes and stubby demon’s horns, an old solar sailor towed by a billowing mirrored disk that actually reflected portions of Garroway’s head and shoulders, shifting and distorting as it crawled across the topography of cheekbones, nose, and forehead.

“Turn those damned things off, will ya? You’re making me dizzy.”

“How’s this?” The cartoons froze motionless, then blended themselves into a camouflage pattern of black, brown, and jungle green.

“Better. I think.” He struggled to sit up, and realized he was lying on a hospital bed. Gravity felt pretty close to one G.

“We’re on Earth?”

“Negative.” She shook her head, and behind the camo patterns he detected a furtive emotion. Anxiety?

Pain?

“Then where?”

“Hospital ShipClara Barton . A drone off thePreble spotted the autie, and the Barton was able to dispatch a high-acceleration transport to catch us.”

“I…don’t remember.”

“Me neither. We were on the final dregs of life support. Unconscious or first-stage dead, according to Doc.”

Garroway suppressed a shudder. Nanomedical technology was good enough to bring people back from the early stages of death, but it was still a touch-and-go thing to keep memory and personality intact, especially if any significant necrosis had set in. He spent a fearful moment probing his own thoughts. Was he any different than he’d been before? Would he even notice if he were? His last memories were of lying in the endlessly tumbling autie, unable to move, listening to his own pounding heartbeat as the O2content in his last LS pack thinned away to nothing….

He couldn’t sense any difference, and his internal implant diagnostics indicated that he was healthy enough…a bit low on glucose, potassium, and sodium, a bit low on his red cell count and very low on lymphocytes…but considering what his system had just been through, not too bad at all. The worst, the most subtle damage had been to the twisted strands of DNA in his chromosomes, and swarms of specially programmed nano, self-replicating, self-guiding, and self-destructing when their job was done, had rewoven damaged segments of his chromosomal structure using patches taken from repetitive non-coding intron DNA sequences.

He still felt like the same person, though. And maybe whether or not hehad changed was a question not to be probed too deeply.

“Excellent,” another voice said. “Good to see you back with the living, Gunny. How are we feeling?”

“Weare feeling likewe were worked over by an Ahannu battle horde withtagu sticks. Who are you?”

“HM1 Foster,” the owner of the voice said, leaning over next to Chrome. He was a painfully young man in a Navy corpsman’s blue scrubs. He checked the diagnostic readout on the bulkhead above Garroway’s head. “Just checking your vitals.”

“I’m doing okay, Doc. When can I get up?”

“When you’re strong enough to do it. Give it a try.”

Garroway sat up, but too quickly. He lay down again, head whirling.

“Give yourself a few minutes to adjust, Gunny. We had to replace most of your blood with fluorohypox, and your bone marrow hasn’t had time to catch up yet. Just be careful moving…and drink water. Lots of water.”

The corpsman moved on to the next bed where, Garroway now saw, PFC Ella Lindeman was lying, apparently still unconscious.

“So…what was the butcher’s bill, Chrome?” he asked.

She looked away. “Fourteen of us made it, Trig. Eight bought it in the fight, and another ten on board the autie. And the Navy crew, too, of course.”

“The lieutenant?”

She shook her head. “The Navy boys who pulled us out said the autie’s flight deck was a real mess. Nobody made it.”

“The charges blew.”

“The charges blew.”

He felt a small surge of excitement. “Did we get the bastards? Before they could slag Earth?” When she didn’t answer right away, excitement turned to fear. “Chrome. What’s wrong?”

“We don’t have the whole story yet, Trig. Just bits and pieces, what theBarton ’s crew’s been able to pass along. But…it sounds like at least one rock made it through and hit Earth.Hard .”

“Gods…”

“There’s a conference going on back at Mars. Lots of wild scuttlebutt, of course. According to Doc Foster, theBarton ’s taking us back to L-4. We’ll know more then.”

“So…what? We’re looking at a dinosaur-killer scenario?”

“Something like that. Those rocks were going real fast, they said. Enough kinetic energy to pack a punch equal to a few million H-bombs, all going off at once. They say that enough of the Atlantic got vaporized that…well, if half the rumors are true, Earth has been hurt. Bad.”

Garroway digested this. He had no close family on Earth; they wouldn’t have accepted him for deep-space deployment if he had. His parents were dead, and he’d never married. There was his uncle and some other family in Baltimore, some cousins, his aunt, some childhood friends…. Scratch that.Had some other family. An impact like Chrome was describing in the Atlantic Ocean would have meant tidal waves.Big tidal waves. And Baltimore was on the Patapsco River right off of Chesapeake Bay.

He’d spent some happy vacations at his uncle’s place north of Baltimore when he was a kid. He wondered if anything was left of the old city.

Or of Washington, D.C.

Or of Quantico, or Parris Island, both Marine bases he’d been stationed at earlier in his career, places where he had a lot of friends, a lot of roots.

They would be gone, too.

The world that Travis Garroway had known and grown up in was, he suddenly realized, drastically, horribly changed, the place of his memories wiped away in an instant of flame and flood. He felt the weakness reasserting itself, felt hands and gut trembling.

“I know, Trigger,” Chrome told him, putting an arm around his shoulders. “It hit me bad, too.”

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“What Marines always do,” she told him. “Semper fi. Always faithful. We still have the Corps.”

“If the country, if the planet we were protecting isn’t there, though…”

“Earth’s still there, Trigger. And so are we. We’ll go on.”

He nodded, but felt a burning in his eyes. “Yeah. We’ll go on.”

What hurt was knowing that everything they’d done…and all those dead…and it hadn’t been enough. Earth had been counting on them, and they’d failed.

Mars Military Training Command

Stickney Base,

Phobos

1530 hrs, GMT

The voting had proceeded electronically, the results tabulated at once. “We’re agreed,” Vanderkaamp said quietly. “One hundred eighty-five to sixty-two, with twelve abstentions. We will stay in the Solar System, and do all we can both to aid the survivors on Earth, and to defend the system against further incursions by the Xul. A similar vote, of one hundred fifty-seven to ninety-five, with seven abstentions, is in favor of pursuing General Garroway’s suggestion of tracking the Xul ship’s course, locating the star system from which it came, and mounting a preemptive strike. We will need to further study his suggested means of attack, which he has designated Operation Seafire, but the majority agrees that this tactic gives us our best hope of striking back against the Xul, and in a manner that will serve to keep them both off-balance, and at arm’s length, at least for a time.”

“It’ll buy us some more time,” Garroway’s image said from the holoprojection disk. “Just like the Clusterspace Insertion.”

The Clusterspace Insertion had been a Marine operation carried out on the fifth of April 2170—some 144 years ago. After the destruction of the Xul huntership as it emerged from the Sirius Stargate, probes of the Gate had pushed through to explore the space on the other side, the star system from which the Xul vessel had come. Marines emerging at the other side had found another Stargate, this one built into a tunnel excavated into the heart of a small asteroid, and located in a red dwarf star system on the outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy, perhaps fifty thousand light-years or more from Sol. There, in what had been dubbed Cluster Space, the asteroid Stargate had orbited with some hundreds of other gates. A world had been visible…and the Galaxy as seen from outside, a vast spiral of stars…and a globular star cluster, like a bee-swarm of red suns, filling a quarter of the sky. Garroway had seen recordings made by the Marines on the raid—including one Corporal John Garroway, his great-great-granduncle.

With the possible exception of ancient humans carried to the stars by various aliens, those Marines had traveled farther from home than any other voyagers from the planet Earth. Stargates, it turned out, could be tuned through myriad different possible destinations by adjusting the rotational velocities and magnetic moment of the gravitationally collapsed masses within them. However, by sending a Marine raiding team through the Gate to plant nuclear charges at the other end, in Cluster Space, they’d made certain that the Xul couldn’t track the outbound path of their lost ship, and follow it up with a larger and more dangerous fleet.

At least, that was the assumption at the time, and it appeared to have worked for nearly a century and a half.

Now, though, another Xul ship had made it all the way to Earth. There remained a major question yet to be resolved as to whether the ship that had attacked Earth had come through the Sirius Gate; or arrived another way, through a different gate at some different star; or had reached Earth simply by traveling faster than light through open space. The navigational data recovered and transmitted by Quincy3ought to help resolve that question.

Operation Seafire might—justmight —enable Earth to become lost again, so far as the Xul were concerned, lost among those hundreds of billions of suns strewn in a titanic spiral across a hundred thousand light-years.

It was all Humankind had remaining in the way of hope.

But Vanderkaamp was still speaking, turning now to the patient, floating image of the N’mah. “I hope the N’mah understand that in choosing not to leave our homeworld, we are not rejectingyou . We still desperately need your assistance.”

There was a long pause. In the silence, Lee could sense every one of the delegates in the auditorium straining to pick up some hint of the alien’s feelings and thoughts.

“We understand your…attachment to the world of your origins,” Duradh’a said at last. “We understand the idea, at least, if not the emotion.

“However, we must take care of our needs first. Sacrificing ourselves for another species, however cherished, when that species is ultimately doomed in any case, would be neither productive nor rational. We intend to return to Sirius, there to oversee the evacuation of as many of our own as we can in the flotilla of asteroid starships we have been building over these past several decades.”

“If we stand together,” a Marine general in the audience called out sharply, “we canbeat these damned things! Stay! Fight with us!”

Again, there was a long pause, and Lee wondered if the being was conferring with others of its kind on theT’krah Elessed Ev’r. “The N’mah are not a warrior species,” Duradh’a said at last. “What we will do, however, is leave a small group of our people with you—volunteers who will continue to work with your engineers in developing key technologies…especially the inertialess drive, and large-scale nanufacturing and large-scale environmental restructuring. These are skills you will find particularly useful, both in the defense of your world, and in its repair.

“These volunteers at the same time will be constructing a starship of their own in your Asteroid Belt, so that they can join the rest of us at a later date. They will share with you the secrets of that construction; you may decide to remain and defend your world against the Xul, but your descendents, the next generation, may elect to pursue a different strategy. They should have the opportunity to find safety among the starclouds, even if you choose to stay here and die.”

“That is…very kind of you,” Vandenkaamp said. “I don’t know how we can thank you.”

“Your thank-yous are not necessary, of course,” Duradh’a said, “since they represent a linguistic social gesture with meaning to your species, but not to ours. We believe that every species deserves a chance to survive and find its own destiny. That is why we aided you eight thousand of your years ago. It is why we aid you now.

“But you should recognize one fact. If it is in the N’mah nature to help other species survive, to nurture them, it is in the Xul nature to pluck them up and destroy them. They are very good at this, and utterly and implacably relentless. The plan you’ve discussed here may indeed keep them away for another generation…or two…but theywill be back.

“And when they return, it will be to ignite your sun into a nova, and sear the face of every planet in this system clean of life. They will then search the worlds of every star within a hundred light-years, track down your colonies and your outposts and even individual ships traveling between the stars, and they will destroy them as well.

“Whether you admit it here in this hall or not, your Earth is already dead. And unless and until you elect to flee as far as you can, and submerge yourselves as deeply as you can in the sea of space surrounding you, you as a species are already dead as well.”

The holograph projector winked out, leaving 259 human delegates to the conference alone in a stunned and brooding silence.

12

18MARCH 2314

Interstellar Marine TransportChosin

Incoming, beyond the orbit of Jupiter

1814 hrs, GMT

It took Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach a long time to wake up and, once he did, he wasn’t sure coming back to life was worth the effort.

He emerged from cybe-hibe into a close, moist darkness, cold, aching, and confused. The first thing he was aware of was of a strangling sensation, as though he were drowning. Gagging, coughing, he struggled to breath, until the jelly filling his nose and throat and lungs dissolved away, absorbed by his mucous membranes, and he began drawing deep, shuddering breaths of cool air. Complete darkness was overcome—barely and slowly—by a brightening of the walls encircling him. He was on his back, in a tube just large enough to enclose his prone body, lying on a narrow slab with a soft and yielding texture, like foam, and with the last of a wet, gelatinous substance still coating his bare skin. Still struggling to breath, fighting now against panic and claustrophobia, it took a long moment to remember where he was…and to accept that he wasnot inKi-kala-kala , the frigid netherworld of his people. At first, he could grasp only fragments of memory, and had to focus hard to remember anything more concrete than tides of shifting emotion.

They’d told him he wouldn’t dream, but they’d been wrong, and some of those dreams haunting him through the stargulf had been less than pleasant.

His thoughts retained the flavor of some of those dreams, if not the substance. He felt images of the dark red and orange jungles, of the tree-shelterede-duru that had been home slipping away. Where was he?

He was a Marine—that much he remembered. His fists clenched at his sides as he closed his eyes and held that memory. He was aMarine .

Revivification to Stage Five, a voice said in his head.Breathing passages and lungs clear. Circulation and respiration now fully autonomous. Proceeding to Stage Six.

Nal wasn’t sure what “Stage Six” might entail, but he managed to choke down his apprehension and simply wait. He was a Marine—aMarine —and Marines didn’t let their terror get the better of them. Ofthat much he was certain.

An image flashed into his mind, a scene of startling clarity and realism. For just a moment he was standing at the front gate of Gilgamesh Base, the U.S. Marine facility on Enduru…the world the Un-ki called Ishtar. His friends Vedda and Kel both were there beside him, along with otherdumu-gir , and the Marine gunnery sergeant who’s taken their oaths was yelling at them to stand in a line, to stand up straight…

The image changed in a bewildering flash. It was nighttime, with stars overhead, the sullen glow of Igi-digir—the Face of God—hanging immense on the western horizon, backlighting the awesome sawback of the Ahtun Range. A gossamer, a green-glowing airworm, rippled past a few spans away, as insubstantial as a breath. A village singer keened mourning at the death of Gir Ulet i-Kaff in an encounter with the Ahannu god-warriors in the jungle below Kur-Dev.

Gir had been a friend of Nal’s, and his lover. Her death had been a large part of why he’d made the long trek down the hill to Gilgamesh Base, and told the Un-ki Marines that he wanted to benir-gál-mè-a as well.

Memory checks complete. Proceeding to Stage Seven….

Memory check. There was something…

Yes. They’d put something in his head…no,grown something in his head, and they’d told him that he would be able to hear the thing’s voice. He still didn’t understand. TheUn-ki magic was so very powerful, so strange.

But the…what had they called it? The implant, that was it. The implant was supposed to help him learn. Learn how to be aNirgal .

That thought steadied him.Not “Un-ki,” he thought, a bit fiercely.Earthmen. People. People just like me

….

Like other young men in hise-duru —no,village , ortown , note-duru . He’d begun learning English at an early age, but the strange language had been difficult, not at all like the flowing music of Eme-gi, The People’s Tongue, and he’d never been fluent. His vocabulary and his grammar both had improved a lot since they’d given him the implant, but he wasn’t yet adept in thinking in the harsh and dissonant jumbles of alien syllables the Earthmen had brought with them from the stars. Recruit I-763-56, the voice said. No, a different voice. A woman’s voice.How are you feeling?

“Uh…I’m feeling…like I’ve been hit over the head by akur-gal-gub …”

Quite understandable. Let’s pop you out of there. Hang on. And you might want to close your eyes. It’s bright.

He heard a sharp hiss, and then the hatch above his head cycled open, the shelf he was lying on extruded from the narrow, cylindrical chamber in which he’d been trapped, and he blinked against a near intolerable glare of light from somewhere overhead.

A woman’s face blocked the glaring light.

“What’s your name, Recruit?”

“Uh…Nal.”

“Fullname.”

“Sir! Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach,sir !” The formulaic recitation, drilled into him back at Gilgamesh, snapped him back to full awareness.

“Service number?”

“Sir! I-763-56,sir !”

“Don’t overdue the ‘sir’ bit, Recruit. I’m not an officer and I’m not a DI. Relax. Do you know where you are?”

He searched his badly jangled memory for a moment. “One…one of theUn-ki mul-hu-gal ?”

The woman laughed. “I’m not sure Captain Nakamura would refer to her baby as a ‘great star bird,’ but it works for me. You’re on board the IMTChosin . You’ve been sleeping for a long time, avery long time, but we’re almost home. Time to get up.”

Not home,he thought.Home was Enduru, light years distant. Excitement pounded in his chest, his temples. The Chosinwas nearing fabled Kia, the original homeworld of Man. He started to sit up, but she laid a hand on his bare shoulder. “Slowly. Sit up when you feel strong enough, but take it easy, okay? You’ve been bottled up in cybe-hibe for two years objective. When you feel ready, follow the green light.”

She stood by as he rolled over and, slowly, sat up. He was nude, but Ishtaran humans possessed few body taboos, and any shyness he might once have possessed had been lost in ten cycles of Marine recruit training.

“You okay?” the woman asked.

He blinked twice…then remembered the Earth-human gesture, and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Get up when you’re ready.” She touched a box molded to her forearm, studied a readout, then left, moving to the next closed hatchway on this deck. Still blinking a bit in the bright light as his eyes adjusted, he looked out into an enormous chamber, a cylinder ringed by small, circular hatchways like the one from which he’d just emerged, each served by a walkway with a safety railing and deck gratings like steel mesh.

Perhaps half of the hatches, he saw, were now open, and other men and women were sitting up on the extruded pallets, or taking their first tentative steps, hands firmly on the railing. All were nude, save for a few, like the woman who’d just questioned him, wearing Marine utilities. These individuals all seemed to be moving from hatch to hatch, opening them up and reassuring the newly awakened travelers. When he leaned forward a bit, catching himself on the pallet when dizziness nearly toppled him, he saw that this was simply one of many identical levels, some above this one, some below. And, while his mind and his memory told him that he was inside a gigantic star bird from Lost Earth made of metal and other, less well-understood materials, flying at inconceivable speed through the emptiness of Anu—of heaven—there was absolutely no sensation of motion.

Asleep for two years.

They’d told him during his training that when they put him into cybe-hibe, billions of inconceivably tiny machines would enter his body, taking over his bodily functions, his muscles, his heart, his breathing, his brain, and let him safely sleep for hundreds upon hundreds of cycles. Two years? He still wasn’t entirely sure what a “year” might be, but felt fairly sure it was a long time—several sixes of cycles, at least. The voice in his head, he now remembered, was something called anAI, an artificial intelligence named

“Smedley” that lived within the ship, and in the implants of his fellow recruits. Experimentally, he opened his mind, as he’d been taught, using a nonverbal symbol as a kind of key.You have a question? sounded in his thoughts—the voice of Smedley, speaking English.

“Uh…definitions. How many Enduri cycles are in a ‘year?’”

One Enduri day-night cycle,the voice said,the time it takes for Ishtar to orbit Marduk, its gas-giant primary, once, is equivalent to six point four two Earth days. One Earth year equals 365.25 Earth days, or 56.893 Enduri cycles.

Voices speaking in his thoughts. Magic. Ithad to be magic, even though the village elders insisted that there was no such thing. No magic, no spells, no gods.

His initial classes as a Marine recruit had taught him much the same. There was no magic, his teachers had said, though any highly advanced technology mightseem like magic to people who weren’t used to it. The visitors from Lost Kia were men and women, the same as theDumu-gir , not gods. The Ahannu had claimed to be gods, but the Marines from Earth had defeated them in battle, had created theDumu-gir Kalam —the Land of the Free People. For over eight thousand cycles, now, men of Lost Kia had lived with the Free People on Enduru, defending them against the hated Ahannu, teaching them of their ancient home in Heaven. Dumu-gir Kalam was what they called an offworld territorial dependency of a Kian land called the United States, and was, therefore, part of the greater American Federation. He still wasn’t sure what some of those words meant, but he did know that, among other things, the Free Peoples had the right to apply for U.S. citizenship. A few lucky ones were accepted every hundred cycles or so to become citizens of the United States. Once a citizen, thevery lucky ones could volunteer to train to attend Ishtaran Recruit Training at Gilgamesh Base, just outside of New Sumer. There they would learn how to become U.S. Marines.

Nal had been one of those very lucky ones.

The thought steadied him, and brought a surge of strength. Technically, he wasn’t a Marine yet, but a recruit—a lowly and unworthy creature, as his DIs had assured him time and time again. A sudden memory flooded his mind—of Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz leaning forward, his nose almost touching Nal’s, his face red as he thundered, “You arenot a Marine! You are arecruit …and recruits are so low thatwhale shit looks like shooting stars to you!”

Nal had no idea what a whale was, but Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz had done an admirable job of communicating the general idea. Oh, yes.

For ten cycles, Nal and sixty-eight other Ishtaran recruits had trained at the Gilgamesh facility, strengthening body, spirit, and his mind, receiving the all-important nanoim-plants that would let them download all they still needed to learn, and acquiring basic skills that would let them, some day, wear the precious talisman of Globe and Anchor.

Not all had made it. His Recruit Training Class, Number 763, had started with one hundred two recruits. The training regimen that followed had been carefully crafted—some would say sadistically so—to weed out those who didn’t have what it took to be a Marine. They were encouraged to drop out at every opportunity, and each successive cycle was, if anything, tougher than the one preceding. Shakily, Nal stepped off the pallet and stood. Perhaps it was nothing more than the effects of those billions of tiny machines, but he was feeling stronger moment by moment. He was feeling warmer, too. The last of that unpleasant jelly seemed to be evaporating from his skin, now, and the air in the huge chamber was very warm, oxygen-rich, and fresh-tasting. He was aware of a distinct emptiness in the pit of his stomach…which, at the thought, rumbled ominously. He washungry . Looking down at the deck grating, he saw a glowing green arrow moving at a walking pace, left to right, followed at an interval by another…and another. More magic that was not magic, he assumed, and he wondered how the trick was done. Reaching out a hand, he took the railing in his left hand and began following the arrows. They would lead him, he knew, to a communal washing chamber, a newly issued uniform, and to food.

Derel ti-Haj Vah-gur walked up behind him, leaning heavily on the rail. “I hurt,” she said. “How about you?”

Like Nal, like most of the native human population on the world Earth-humans called Ishtar, descendents of humans brought from ancient Mesopotamia as slaves by the Ahannu “gods” eight to ten thousand years before, Derel was small, with deep olive skin, black hair, and luminous brown eyes. Ten cycles of tough physical training and medinano injections had hardened her, like him, until the muscles of her belly, arms, and legs were clearly defined beneath her skin.

“Me, too,” he said, stepping aside and letting her pass. He fell into step behind her, watching the hypnotic shift of her buttocks as she walked ahead of him. Normally, he would have appreciated the sight of Derel’s nakedness—they’d shared several happy sexual trysts back on Enduru—but the aches and discomfort of cybe-hibe, and his current hunger, did a lot to redirect any lust he might otherwise have felt. There were also rumors that some of those invisibly small machines swarming through his bloodstream were programmed to block any physical response to such thoughts.

It was just as well. The DIs and instructors had made it abundantly clear that fraternization among the recruits, as they called it, wouldnot be tolerated, at least while they were still in training. “After you graduate,if you graduate,” he remembered Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz screaming at them as they stood rigidly at attention in their squad bay, “you can fuck each other’s brains out, what you have of ’em! But until that day you will haveno feelings save two! Youwill desire with every miserable fiber of your miserable beings to pleaseme ! And youwill love, with every miserable fiber of your miserable beings,my beloved Corps!…”

Wojkowiz had an odd manner of speaking, stressing every few words in a way that seemed calculated to impress their meaning on his Ishtaran recruits. That was just as well. All of the recruits knew some English besides their native Eme-gi—the Free Peoples used it as a trade and diplomatic language with the offworlder colonists—but few were really comfortable with it. That was changing, fast, with the downloads that had been coming at them faster and faster during their first training phase. And on Kia, the Earth of ancient legend, they would be speaking nothingbut English. Earth,he told himself grimly.Not Kia, but Earth ….

According to the contract the Ishtaran recruits had signed back at Gilgamesh, they would train on their home world for ten cycles—roughly nine Earth weeks—then be transported to Earth, to a magical-sounding place called Parris Island, where they would complete their training, this time with recruits from Earth, in another fifteen cycles. The rigorous sessions on Ishtar before they even boosted for orbit were designed to make sure there were as few dropouts from the class as possible, once they’d made the long—and expensive—eight light-year journey from Lalande 21185 to Sol. And after that? Graduation and assignment, of course. Each Ishtaran had volunteered for six years—341

cycles—of service in the Corps, during which time they might be assigned to Earth, to various Marine Corps facilities throughout Earth’s Solar System, to bases on the worlds of yet other stars scattered across the Vault of Anu, or even find themselves right back where they’d started, on Enduru/Ishtar. Nal had to remind himself that his 341-cycle enlistment was 341subjective cycles, that almost 600 full cycles had just passed in what had felt to him like an eye-blink. It still didn’t seem real—knowing that he’d slept that long and not even realized it. Stranger still was something else he’d learned—that the Chosin had been traveling so fast that time itself had shortened somehow, so that while 600 cycles had passed back home, fewer than 200 had passed on board the ship, andthat was how long he’d actually slept.

Neither the two hundred nor the six hundred counted against his enlistment. His subjective timekeeper told him he’d been placed into cybe-hibe just hours ago, despite the disturbing tides of his dreams, and no time whatsoever had elapsed.

He shook his head. There was no way, no way he was ever going to understand the games the men of Kia played with time itself. Better to just do what he was told, learn what he could, and accept the rest on faith. Trying to understand Kian magic, he’d heard, could drive you insane. An hour later—the unit of time was half again longer than onekin , which was 1/360th of a cycle—he was showered, dressed in olive-green recruit utilities, and seated inChosin ’s third-deck mess hall. The meal was scanty and bland—a kind of mush with little real flavor—but he’d been assured it contained all the nutrients he needed to keep going. He wondered if this were standard fare for Earth people. Possibly, even probably, not.Chosin , he’d been told once, carried enormous quantities of water, which were used as radiation shielding at near-cvelocities, but needed to be highly efficient when it came to hauling bulky expendables such as food.

Derel sat down next to him with her tray. “Have you heard anything?” she asked.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something has the Kians pretty upset.”

He looked around the mess hall. It was crowded already, and more Marines were arriving moment by moment. There a thousand Marines on board theChosin , he’d been told, and only sixty-nine of them were native Enduri. All the rest, Marines of the 3rd Marine Division, 15th Regiment, Third Battalion, had been from Earth, Marines stationed on Enduru—no,Ishtar —for 120 cycles.Chosin had arrived at Ishtar twelve cycles ago with replacements from Earth, and now these men and women were going home. The Enduran-born Marines, he saw, had not been encouraged to mingle with those from Earth. Or maybe it was just their recruit status.You are notMarines .You are recruits! In any case, the Enduran personnel had been given a couple of mess tables to themselves, off to one corner of the compartment.

“I haven’t heard anything. Why? What have you heard?”

She shrugged. “Nothing, really. Some of them…I don’t know. Upset. Like the sergeant who lasered us for our uniforms.”

He hadn’t noticed anything different about the man who’d scanned their bodies, recording their precise measurements, and who’d then handed them freshly nanufactured uniforms. But Derel was unusually perceptive, especially when it came to the emotions of others.

“They’re almost home, Der,” he told her. “Maybe they’re just anxious. You know, worried about their families back on Earth. They’ve been away…what? Twenty-two of their years? That’s a long time to be gone, even if they were in cybe-hibe for most of that time.”

“Maybe. But I heard they’d been selected for duty on Enduru because they didn’t have close families back on Earth. FamSit One or Two, it’s called. They volunteered knowing that the Earth they knew would be thirteen hundred cycles older when they got back, but with no close family to return to, it shouldn’t matter that much. No, something else is wrong. Something bad.”

“Well, I’m sure we’ll be told if there’s something we need to know. In the meantime…” He stopped. One bulkhead of the mess hall had just lit up, and now the head and shoulders of a Marine officer appeared, looking out over the crowded mess hall. Nal recognized her—Colonel Karla McTaggart, the commanding officer of the 15th Regiment, stationed at New Sumer for the past 120 cycles.

“Good evening, Marines,” she said. “Or maybe I should say good morning, since we’ve all just been awakened from a very long sleep.

“But according to the shipboard clocks, it’s 1930 hours, GMT, on the eighteenth of March 2314. After a ten-year flight, objective—two years, subjective—Chosinhas entered the Solar System and continued to decelerate toward Earth. We are currently just inside the orbit of Jupiter. Earth—home—is less than two hundred million kilometers ahead.

“But I have some…news. Very bad,stunning news. Five hours ago, the High Guard cruiserEndymion hailed theChosin by lasercom. After verifying our ID, they transmitted a long message from the CO of the Marine base on Mars.

“The text of the message will be available shortly for download, for those of you who wish to view it. The short version, however, is that two weeks ago, a Xul spacecraft entered the Solar System at FTL

velocities and diverted a number of asteroids toward Earth at extremely high speed. The Xul ship was successfully destroyed by a U.S. Marine strike force. However, although most of the projectiles it launched were successfully intercepted and diverted or destroyed, at least one of those struck in the Atlantic Ocean, generating tidal waves and firestorms that have devastated our planet.”

For a moment, there was stunned silence. Then hundreds of people tried speaking at once—murmuring to their neighbors, or shouting aloud.

“Please! Marines, silence…please!” Colonel McTaggart’s image said. She waited as the crowd noise died down once more. “I’m afraid I have little hard information beyond that. Casualties have been high—at least five billion dead, possibly many more than that. Damage is severe, on a scale literally inconceivable—dozens of major cities simply wiped out, and extensive damage to most others.

“We’re told that remote probes sent in from Luna have been carrying out surveys of much of Earth’s surface. The hardest-hit regions were Europe, western Africa, and the Americas. Asia and Australasia have both taken some damage, but are still functioning as dynamic sociopolitical entities.

“In other areas, however, the situation is appallingly grim. There are not millions, butbillions of refugees, food stores have been wiped out, clean water is rare, medical nano supplies and hospitals destroyed, nanufactories and power plants smashed. There are already reports of cannibalism, of starvation and of epidemics on an unprecedented scale, of a complete breakdown of civilization. Volcanic eruptions in places are spewing poisonous gasses into the atmosphere. A cloud completely blankets the Earth, reflecting heat and light back into space. It’s…getting colder. Scientists believe this may well be the beginning of a new ice age.

“There is a serious question as to whether Humankind can survive on our home world.”

McTaggart paused, letting the words sink in. Nal tried to imagine what he would feel like if he learned suddenly that Enduru had been destroyed, that most of the people he knew were dead, that the villages and enclaves of the Free Peoples were wiped away.

He failed. Such complete devastation was…literally unimaginable.

“A large number of military forces were offplanet when the disaster occurred, of course,” McTaggart went on. “Some of these—the High Guard, aerospace patrols, system defense facilities—all remain in place, on alert for a second alien incursion. Most of the rest, however, including all space-deployed elements of the U.S. Marines, are in the process of redeploying to Earth, where they will be employed in disaster relief and security efforts.Chosin was supposed to rendezvous with the space yard at L-5, but has now been ordered to LEO. Once in low Earth orbit, shuttles will be employed to take us down to the surface.

“There are only eleven hundred of us, but we will do what we can….”

There was more, but Nal heard little of it. The silence in the mess hall had deepened, become blacker, almost palpable.

Slowly, conversation resumed, low murmurs punctuated by people gasping for breath…or sobbing. The colonel had said there was doubt that Humanity would survive, but at the moment, Nal’s concern didn’t go beyond the survival of the other Marines on board the transport. Some had an unhealthy look in their eyes, like cornered animals…or they simply sat, staring at nothing. After several more moments, several were suddenly, violently sick, vomiting onto the deck or rising suddenly and bolting from the compartment. Others, men and women alike, were hysterically crying.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, he could see one Marine, a corporal seated at the next table over, using a combat blade to make tiny, precise slices in the skin of his forearm. Blood trickled from his arm and pooled on deck and table…and no one around him appeared to notice.

Humanity might be on the verge of extinction, but the Marines onChosin ’s hab decks might well be on the brink of madness.

13

25MARCH 2314

Camp Hope

Ring City, Virginia, US/FRA

0720 hrs, EST

Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway hadn’t been able to sleep. The dreams kept coming—especially the one where he was lost inside the endless, tangled maze of the Xul warship, the robotic horrors were swarming closer, and hehad to get through somehow or everything was lost…. Both Chrome and Earth were wrapped up in that dream somehow, with the feeling that if he failed—and there was no way he could succeed—both would die.

That dream, or variants of it, had haunted him now for weeks.

Despite the sleepless night, he’d stayed in his rack on the second deck of the temporary NCO barracks at the Fairfax Center until reveille, then gotten up, dressed, and gone below to the first-deck mess hall for breakfast.

As Marines filed into the mess hall, other Marines handed them a bowl and breakfast—one to a customer, a rectilinear lump half the size of a brick—dark brown, with the look and consistency of hard-dried mud—vacuum-sealed in plastic.

Garroway sighed. He was getting damned sick of NMFEs, and wondered if they would ever have decent food,real food, again.

Finding a space at one of the long tables in the mess hall, he placed his brick in the bowl and lightly ran his thumb down the middle. His touch and his body temperature caused the plastic to peel away, exposing the brick to the air.

The NMFE rations being passed out now were nothing more than blocks of processed sludge, vacuum-sealed with a thin film coating of submicroscopic nanobots. Opening the pack and exposing the film to the oxygen in the air triggered the transformation within about three minutes, turning dried sludge into an equal mass of what was euphemistically called “porridge.” Moisture pulled from the air rehydrated the meal; an extra programming trick let each nanobot liberate a tiny quanta of heat as it self-destructed into its constituent atoms once more, heating the entire meal.

It was hot and it was nourishing, but it still looked like mud.

After picking through the uninspired gruel, Garroway checked out a set of Class 1 combat armor—a lightweight vest with a sealed Mk. 56 helmet, as prescribed by the Plan of the Day—and a weapon, left the building, and crossed the parade ground outside, headed toward the Monument grounds. It was still raining, as it had been for the past thirty-eight days, though in the past week the torrential downpour had turned into a thin and chilly drizzle. The temperature this morning was five degrees—and falling. It wouldn’t be much longer before the snows came.

He checked his weapon’s charge as he walked, then slung the LC-2300 laser carbine slung over his shoulder. The shaggies had come again last night, trying to storm the gun emplacements along Southgate Road, right outside of Henderson Hall, and there might still be snipers in the area. A flight of Skydragons was expected in from the West Coast this afternoon. He hoped that proved true. A few Skydragons would go a long way toward tightening up the perimeter. On the grinder outside of the barracks, he came to a halt. It was 0800 hours, and the flag detail was raising the flag as a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” played in the rain. Garroway came to attention and rendered a hand salute.

The brief ceremony was an important gesture, vitally so, given that there was yet some question as to whether or not therewas a United States of America anymore, or a Federated Republic. In this tiny corner of a shattered world, the Marines of 1MarReg were all that stood between the memories of civilization, and a very dark and savage reality.

Across Meade Walkway—once a road for wheeled traffic, and now a tree-lined footpath—he entered sacred ground.

By a miracle of topology, the Monument had remained above water.

Late in the twenty-first century, a 180-meter transplas dome had been raised over this hallowed circle of parkland to protect the Monument from the rapidly worsening effects of acid rain. That dome was gone now, blasted away by hurricane-strength winds booming in off the Atlantic with the Armageddon Strike five weeks before, but the famous bronze statue—over 23 meters tall overall, including the flagstaff—still, somehow, stood. Five figures stood in a tightly packed cluster as they raised the flag, perfectly duplicating the 2-D photograph captured by photographer Joe Rosenthal. Portrayed in bronze were the likenesses of five Marines and a Navy hospital corpsman, each ten meters tall: Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon H. Block, Private First Class Franklin R. Sousley, Private First Class Rene A. Gagnon, Private First Class Ira Hayes, and Navy Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class John H. Bradley. Rosenthal had snapped that photo—which later won him the Pulitzer Prize—on the summit of Mount Suribachi, the highest point on a tiny, embattled, volcanic atoll named Iwo Jima, on February 23, 1945. Of the six men depicted, three—Strank, Block, and Sousley—had been killed later in the same battle. The American flag—flown from the monument’s angled flagstaff twenty-four-hours a day by a presidential decree going back to 1961—had been blown away by the storm, but the Marines had raised another when they arrived on the scene three weeks earlier—seventy-two stars aligned in concentric circles on the blue field, the thirteen red and white stripes symbolizing the original thirteen states. It hung limp in the drizzle, as if dispirited.

Garroway came to attention a second time, and again rendered a hand salute. Reverently, Garroway approached the monument. The base was of rugged Swedish granite, with the names and dates in burnished gold of every action in which the U.S. Marines had taken part, along with the inscription,IN HONOR AND IN MEMORY OF THE MEN OF THE UNITED STATES