Chapter Six

CAN-TIME—THE PERIOD THAT GROUND FORCES CAN SPEND IN TRANSIT BEfore their combat performance will start to deteriorate—was a factor that military commanders had known about for centuries, building it in to all their tactical planning. According to Z-B’s manual, their strategic security forces could endure a fifty-day trip in a starship without any noticeable decay in efficiency.

At forty days into the flight, which put them still three light-years from Thallspring, Lawrence was already wondering if any of Platoon 435NK9 would even get into the drop glider when the time came to go planetside. Whatever office-lurker expert had come up with the fifty-day rule had clearly never been in low-Earth orbit, let alone a starship.

Day forty-one, at 09:30 shiptime, the platoon were in the gym. With the rest of the day given over to nonphysical training and mission revision, it was the wrong time to be doing anything strenuous. The high they’d come out with would take hours to fade, leaving them hyped and edgy. But every platoon was scheduled for ninety minutes a day in one of the life support wheel’s gym compartments, keeping their muscle and bone structure up to scratch. There was no getting out of it.

Even knowing it would screw with the rest of his day, Lawrence concentrated hard on his exercise regimen, pushing rhythmically against the stiff resistance of the handlebars. He was prone on one of the starship’s standard apparatus benches, which used only springs or pistons to provide resistance. He tightened the resistance settings a couple of notches and carried on. Sweat began to build up on his forehead. His heart was pumping fast. That was the response he wanted, keeping every organ at its peak. He’d emphasized that enough times to the rest of them, and then led by example. Their Skin suits placed a lot of strain on a body, especially one that had been rotting away in an eighth of a gee for five weeks—something the can-time charts tended to overlook.

Glancing round the gym he could see Amersy and Hal Grabowski putting in a decent amount of effort; sweat was staining their scarlet T-shirts. Odel and Karl were getting away with the minimum, as always. Jones Johnson was barely moving his leg restraint, treating the session as some kind of personal rest period.

Typical, Lawrence thought: Jones was their platoon’s mechanic, and damn good with just about any sort of machinery, including projectile weapons. Naturally, he assumed that ability compensated for his lack in others. Despite being a member for three campaigns, he never seemed to grasp that the platoon survived by teamwork, which started at the most basic level: physical adequacy.

Lawrence got up and casually threw a towel round his neck. He loped over to Jones and grasped the frame around the man’s bench apparatus to give himself some leverage. His free hand slammed down on the leg restraint bars, forcing them to hinge round, and bending Jones’s legs almost double.

“Fuck!” Jones yelled.

“You’ve just been ambushed. A mine has blown a wall down, pinning your legs under a shitload of stone, and three rebels with machetes are coming toward you. If you want to live, you’ve got to lift yourself free.”

“Jesus fuck.”

“Come on, you idle bastard, lift.”

Jones’s face was compressed into a rubber mask as he strained to bring his legs back level. Blood vessels stood out on his neck, pulsing fast.

When it was clear he’d never get the bars back, Lawrence let go. “You’re fucking useless, Jones. I don’t mind that it will get you killed; we might get a halfway decent replacement. But if you’re immobilized it leaves the rest of us covering our asses. Keep up with us, or drop out now. I’m not carrying a liability.”

“This is a fucking gym, Sarge. If we’re out on patrol I’ll be in Skin. This fitness crap we’re supposed to stick to is total bullshit.”

“The only thing you can ever truly rely on is yourself.” Lawrence caught Hal grinning at the scene. He turned to the kid. “And you can stop smirking. In six days we’re going to be on the planet. Every welcoming smile you get means they hate you; the bigger the smile the more they want you dead. We’ve only got each other down there. Nobody else is going to look out for you. So I want you in the best shape it’s possible to be. Not just your body, I want your attitude to be right, too, because Fate help me, I’ve got to depend on you.”

He walked back to his own apparatus bench. Hal resumed his pumping, seemingly proud of how high he’d got the resistance turned up and how easily he handled it. Amersy, who hadn’t stopped his forward presses, gave Lawrence a look of mild rebuke as he passed. The corporal wasn’t out of line, Lawrence admitted; he had overreacted to Jones slacking off. But this time he wanted a lot more from the platoon than on any other mission. If he was ever going to achieve his personal objective when they reached Thallspring he needed to have complete loyalty, and to do that he had to take care of them. Good care. They might not appreciate it up here, but on the ground these missions quickly became very warped. Society’s assholes they might be, but they were streetsmart enough to know who they could trust when the shit hit the fan. And Z-B, in the form of Captain Douglas Bryant, didn’t get a look-in.

Lawrence began working his apparatus again. He could see Jones pedaling wildly and let out a quiet snort of satisfaction. He was lucky the squaddie hadn’t tried to smack him one. The frustration of can-time was twisting them up. At least back in Cairns they could sneak out of the base at night and screw the tension away with a girl on the Strip.

After gym the platoon was due two hours’ equipment readiness training. Lawrence left Amersy to supervise them by himself. He’d got another meeting with the captain; this close to the end of the voyage, they were averaging out at nearly one per day.

Their briefing room was a rectangular compartment with bare aluminum walls, apart from one large, high-resolution sheet screen. The three other platoon sergeants, Wagner, Ciaran and Oakley, were already sitting at the composite table. Lawrence gave them a quick nod and took his own seat. Captain Douglas Bryant walked in a moment later, accompanied by Lieutenant Motluk. The sergeants rose to their feet, all of them with one hand gripping the edge of the table to keep their feet on the ground, while the other was used to salute.

“At ease, people,” Douglas Bryant said cordially. He was twenty-eight, a product of Z-B’s officer academy in Tunisia. A smart man, with a solid family stake in the company to propel him along the promotion path. When Lawrence accessed his record he found the only active duty the captain had seen was counterinsurgency missions in East Africa. Punishment raids on camps deep in the jungle, where the native tribes still fought the imperialist company mines stripping the minerals from their land. It was a qualification of sorts for asset realization, but Lawrence would have preferred someone with genuine experience.

If he was honest, his contempt for Douglas Bryant originated from knowing the young man was more or less what he would have probably turned out to be himself: genuinely concerned about the condition and morale of the men serving under his command, full of information and knowing shit about what really mattered.

“Ciaran, have you got your platoon’s supply inventory sorted out?” the captain asked.

“Sir,” the sergeant of Platoon 836BK5 answered. “It was a glitch. The supplies were in the correct lander pod.”

The captain smiled around at his sergeants. “It’s always software, isn’t it? Have we had anything other than virtual problems since we left Centralis?”

They smiled back, tolerantly polite.

“Okay. Final suit tailoring, how are we doing? Newton, your platoon hasn’t started yet, why is that?”

“I keep them going in for function tests, sir. I want to leave final tailoring until as late as possible. Even with the gym sessions, five weeks in this gravity is messing with their size.”

“I can appreciate the reasoning behind that, but unfortunately it’s not quite the procedure we’re following. Your platoon is to report for final tailoring oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”

“Sir.”

“I can’t risk them not being ready when we emerge from compression. We must not be caught unprepared.”

Right, Lawrence thought, like Thallspring has moved and we’re going to finish this flight early. Final tailoring took a couple of hours per suit, at max. “I understand, sir.”

And so it went. Bryant was obsessed with details; everything any experienced commander would leave to his sergeants to sort out he wanted a say in. He had to have the operation running perfectly along the standard track, a dead giveaway that he was concerned more with the impression he generated within the company than with the practicalities of the situation they’d be facing. He even wanted Oakley to cancel a request he’d made for more remote sensors when they went groundside. His platoon had been assigned to sweep through an urban area that was all narrow roads in a maze of cheap housing—and that was from a ten-year-old map; it could have decayed a lot since then. In other words, a perfect ambush territory for the local badboys. And they’d have a lot of bravado before Z-B established themselves and obtained their good behavior collateral. Lawrence would have wanted the same security those remote sensors could provide. But despite Z-B’s vaunted policy of loop involvement, the beachhead plan already contained the number of sensors considered relevant. Bryant did not want anything to alter at this stage.

Oakley said yes, and got his bracelet pearl to rescind the request. They moved on to the landing operation’s timing and how Bryant didn’t want them to suffer undue delay on their way out of the drop gliders.

A gentle warm rain had been falling on Memu Bay for most of the day, the second unseasonable downpour in a fortnight. It meant Denise had to keep the children out of the garden and at the tables and benches sheltered by the roof. In the morning she’d handed out the big media pads and got them to paint the shapes they saw in the clouds, which resulted in a splendid collage of strange creatures in glowing blues, reds and greens. By the afternoon, when it was obvious the clouds weren’t going to blow away any time soon, she settled them in a broad semicircle and sat on one of the tables in the center.

“I think it’s time I told you about the planet of the Mordiff,” she said. “Even though Mozark never actually visited it himself.”

There were several sharp intakes of breath. The children gave each other excited looks. The dark history of the Mordiff planet had only ever been hinted at before whenever she talked of the Ring Empire.

Jedzella stuck her hand up. “Please, miss, it’s not too horrid, is it?”

“Horrid?” Denise pursed her lips and gave the question some theatrical consideration. “No, not horrid, although they fought terrible wars, which are always evil. I suppose from where we are today, looking back, it’s really quite sad. I always say you can learn the most from mistakes, and the Mordiff made some really big mistakes. If you remember what they did, then, I hope, you’ll be able to avoid those same mistakes when you grow up. Do you want me to go on?”

“Yes!” they yelled. Several of them gave Jedzella cross glances.

“All right then. Let’s see: Mozark never went there, although he did fly close to the Ulodan Nebula where the planet and its star were hiding. There wasn’t a lot of point to him going. Even in those times the Mordiff were long gone, and nothing they’d left behind could have helped him in his quest for a grand purpose in life. Although, in a way, a very warped and twisted way, the Mordiff had an overriding purpose. They wanted to live. In that they were no different to all the rest of us: humans today and the sentient species of the Ring Empire all want to live. But by fate, or accident, or chance, or even luck, the Mordiff evolved on a planet in the middle of the darkest, densest nebula in the galaxy at that time. They had daylight, just as we do. The nebula wasn’t thick enough to blank out their sun. But their night was absolute. The night sky on that planet was perfectly black. They couldn’t see the stars. As far as they knew, they were completely alone; their planet and its sun were the entire universe.”

“Didn’t they send ships out to find other stars?” Edmund asked.

“No. Because they had no reason to explore. They didn’t know anything else existed, and observation backed up the whole idea, so they didn’t even know they could go looking. That was their downfall, and it’s the lesson we must learn from them. You see, like most sentient species, they thought in the same fashion we do, even though their bodies were very different. They were big, almost as big as dinosaurs, and they had very clever limbs that could change shape. It meant they could slide their bodies along the ground, the way a snake does, or they could swim like fish by turning the limbs into fins, and some Ring Empire historians and archaeologists even thought they could fly, or at least glide. But that didn’t stop them from having an ordinary civilization. They had a Stone Age, and an Iron Age, just like us; then they went on and had a Steam Age, and an Industrial Age, and an Atomic Age, and a Data Age. And that was where their troubles started. By then, they had developed their whole world, and they had good medicine that gave them a long healthy life. Their population was expanding all the time and consuming more and more resources. Whole continents became giant cities. They built islands miles across that were just floating buildings. All of their polar continents were settled. There was no room left, and all the surface was being exploited. It meant they had wars, horrible, terrible wars that killed tens of millions of them every time. But they were always pointless, as all wars are. After entire nations were destroyed, the victors would just move into the ruins, and within a generation the land would be full again. All the while their technology, especially their weapons technology, grew more powerful and more deadly. The wars they fought became worse, and more dangerous to the rest of the planet.

“Then one day, the biggest nation, which was ruled by the greatest Mordiff overlord, discovered how to create a wormhole.”

The children let out a fearful Ooooh.

“Did they invade the Ring Empire, miss?”

“No, they didn’t invade the Ring Empire. Have you forgotten? They didn’t know it was there. They made their wormhole go in a very different direction. You see, wormholes are formed from a distortion of space-time. We use ours to create a tunnel through space so we can fly to the stars. The Mordiff traveled in time. Because the Ulodan Nebula denied them a vision of space, time was all they knew. The overlord ordered a single giant wormhole terminus to be built, standing at the center of his nation. It was the greatest device the Mordiff had ever constructed, for not only did the terminus generate the wormhole, its own structure was self-sustaining. As long as it had power, it would never decay or fail. And it got its power from the way it distorted space-time. In other words, it was eternal, almost like perpetual motion.”

“My daddy says that’s impossible,” Melanie said with haughty self-confidence. “He says only fools believe in it.”

“It is impossible,” Denise said. “But that’s the best way to describe how the Mordiff’s terminus worked.”

Edmund sneered at the girl, then turned to Denise. “Why did the over-lord build it, miss?”

“Ah. Well, that’s where the terror and the tragedy of the Mordiff begins. When it was finished, the overlord ordered an exodus of his whole nation. An armada of flying craft carried them all into the terminus, millions and millions of Mordiff. And when they were all safe inside, the overlord’s personal guards set off the most terrible weapons the nation possessed. All of them, all at once. They were so bad, and so powerful, that they killed every living thing on the whole planet, and turned all the cities to rubble, even those of the overlord’s nation.”

The children stared at her, awed and troubled.

“Every Mordiff nation had the same awful doomsday weapons; some spread deadly diseases while some simply exploded hard enough to open up cracks into the magma below the continents,” Denise said. “The over-lord knew it would just be a matter of time until somebody used them. By then, each of the nations was so desperate for new land and resources that not using the doomsday bombs would mean they’d collapse from within.

“So now the overlord’s nation was inside the wormhole, traveling further and further into the future, away from the time of the planet’s death. Some of them, a scouting party, emerged a hundred thousand years later, flying out of the terminus—which had survived the explosions and radiation, of course. To the scouting party it was only minutes since they’d entered the wormhole, but as soon as they came out they found a sterile planet, with the ruins of the megacities crumbling into dust. By then, the radiation had decayed, and the plagues had died away. These Mordiff scouts dumped bacteria and algae over the surface and flew back into the terminus. Then they came out another thousand years later, when the bacteria had spread everywhere, bringing the soil back to life. This time they scattered seeds before they went back into the terminus. The third time they emerged, they left breeding pairs of animals and fish. A thousand years after that, the world had returned to the state it was in before their Industrial Age, with huge grassy plains and forests and jungles. That’s when the whole of the overlord’s nation came out of the wormhole. They’d only been flying inside the wormhole for a couple of hours, while outside a hundred and twenty thousand years had rushed past.

“They looked around at this beautiful, clean new world, and they rejoiced and thanked the overlord for delivering them to this wonderful place. Many of them forgot the crime that had been done to give them this chance at a fresh life and settled down to rebuild their original society. So once more they mined the land for metals and minerals, and their cities began to grow again, always expanding over the wilderness. After a few generations, some of the Mordiff forgot the debt they owed to the overlord family, which still ruled the original nation, and began to break away and form new nations of their own. Two and a half thousand years later, the planet was once again covered with cities. Once again, wars were being fought. So, the overlord of that time did what his ancestor had done. He gathered his nation into flying craft and sent them through the terminus. Behind them, the doomsday weapons exploded yet again.

“This wretched cycle turned another three times. Whenever the world grew too crowded to support the billions of Mordiff who filled the cities, the overlord’s nation would escape through time and kill everyone left behind. But after the last time they fled into the terminus, the scouts came out a hundred thousand years later to find something unexpected had happened. Their sun had changed. When they looked at it, they could see dark sunspots swelling and bursting all across its surface. It was reaching the end of its main cycle and growing colder. Of course, as they’d never seen the other stars in the galaxy, they didn’t know what was happening. They never knew that stars change and die; they’d assumed that their little universe was static and eternal. The physicists among them began to speculate and produce theories at once, and they probably worked out what was happening, because they were smart, don’t forget. But knowing what’s happening and being able to do anything are very different things.

“So the scout group took measurements and recordings of how cold the air was becoming, and how frigid the land had turned, and went back into the wormhole to report to the overlord. At first, he didn’t want to believe what they told him, but, eventually, he came out and witnessed the star’s winter for himself. By now, the ground and ruins were covered in a thick layer of frost, which glittered in the dimming sunlight, and the seas were frozen solid. For a long time the overlord raged against what he thought of as supreme injustice before he regained his senses. Scouts were dispatched far into the future: two hundred thousand years, five hundred thousand, a million, two million, even ten million. They all came back with worsening reports of how the sun grew colder and colder, swelling into a huge red monster that covered a fifth of the sky. At no time did it ever show signs of returning to its original state.”

“Can stars do that?” Melanie asked quietly. “Get better, I mean?”

“No, dear, they can’t. Not by themselves. There are stories that some kingdoms in the Ring Empire tinkered with the interior of stars when the Empire was at the height of its powers, but they’re only stories. And for all their knowledge and technology, the Mordiff were never as strong and wise as the Ring Empire. So the overlord had no choice, he had to order his people out of the wormhole as soon as the effect of the doomsday weapons had faded away, and while the sun still had some warmth. In that respect, he was a good leader, doing the best he could. He ordered that the new cities were to be built under protective domes. Their technology, he said, was enough to turn back the tide of night. Which, in truth, it was. They could still live on their planet, protected from the cold under skies of crystal. Fusion power would provide them with all the light and heat they could ever want. But these enclaves were harder to build, and took even more resources to maintain. It was a difficult life, and by now, the Mordiff had evolved for war and conquest. They knew nothing else. After so many generations devoted to endless conflict the outcome was inevitable. Once their population began to expand again, the ordeals and depravation hit them harder than ever before. The domed cities fought each other. It was insane, because they were so much more fragile than the open cities of old. And this time there was nowhere to flee if anyone let off the doomsday weapons. The only thing in their future now was cold and darkness.

“According to the Ring Empire archaeologists, the last of the Mordiff died out less than fifteen hundred years after they emerged from the terminus for the final time. The Ring Empire explored the Ulodan Nebula twenty-five million years later and found a few fractured remains amid the ice that shrouded the whole world, all that was left of a species that had covered their planet with cities and marvels.”

The children sighed and shivered. Many of them glanced out at the sky for reassurance that their own sun was still there, as bright and warm as ever. The clouds were clearing above Memu Bay now, shredded by the offshore wind into gravid streamers. Broad white-gold sunbeams prized their way through the ragged gaps to chase over the land. Denise smiled with them in reassurance at the water that glistened so refreshingly on the plants in the garden and the trees outside.

“That was scary,” Jedzella announced. “Why did they all have to die?”

“Because of their circumstances. The nebula meant they could only ever look inward. We’re luckier than that. We know the stars exist. It should help us develop a more enlightened attitude toward the way we live and behave.” Denise tried hard to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

One of the girls waved urgently. “What’s enlightened?”

“It means being nice and sensible, instead of being stupid and violent.” She paused and smiled round. “Now, who wants to go out on the swings?” It was still too wet, and she’d get a telling off from Mrs. Potchansky for letting them get their clothes damp. But they were at their happiest when they were gallivanting around outside: she couldn’t bear to take a moment of that away from them.

They pelted out from under the roof, cheering and racing each other to the swings. Denise followed at a slower pace. Running the Mordiff tale through her mind always conjured up a melancholic mood. The story of their tragedy had too many resonances with humanity. There but for the grace of God … Not that she believed in gods, human or alien.

Her Prime alerted her to a priority spacecom alert diving through the datapool. Two fusion plasma plumes had been detected eight million kilometers out from Thallspring. Spacecom was scanning for more. Data traffic rates between their offices and tracking satellites doubled inside fifteen seconds, then doubled again, increasing almost exponentially.

Denise’s hand flew to her mouth as she looked round at the children. Their carefree shrieks, giggles and smiles pounded into her consciousness, and she was suddenly fearful for them. She tilted her head back, searching the section of sky that spacecom’s coordinates indicated. In relation to herself, it was a nine-degree window just above the western horizon. There were too many clouds in the way to permit any sighting of the tiny blue-white sparks she knew were there. But their presence acted like an eclipse on her heart, making her world colder and darker.

It had begun.

Captain Marquis Krojen sat back in what he liked to think of as the command chair on the Koribu’s bridge. In practice, it was just another black office chair equipped with freefall restraint straps and bolted to the decking behind a computer station. There were eleven other identical stations in the square compartment, arranged in two rows of six, facing each other. Nine of them were currently occupied in readiness for exodus.

When he was a junior officer on his first couple of starflights, he’d managed to get a place in one of the observation blisters in the forward drive section for exodus, his captain of the time agreeing he wasn’t essential for the operation. He’d waited spellbound with his fellow young officers as the moment approached, putting up with cramped limbs and stuffy air just for the chance to witness the transition. In the end it was as uneventful as most events aboard a starship. The wormhole wall, a blankness that wasn’t quite black, slowly faded away, allowing the stars to shine through, almost like a lusterless twilight creeping up on a misty evening.

That had been thirty years ago. He hadn’t bothered with visual acquisition since, preferring the more precise story of the display screen graphics and his DNI grid. Five of his own junior officers were currently crammed into the observation blister, a reward for reasonable performance of duties during the flight. They’d learn.

“Stand by for exodus,” Colin Jeffries, his executive officer, announced. “Ten seconds.”

There were so many displays counting down that the verbal warning was completely unnecessary. Tradition, though, like so many things on board, orchestrated the crew’s behavior, helping to define the chain of command.

His DNI showed him the ship’s AS powering down the energy inverter. The plasma temperature in the tokamaks began to cool as the magnetic pinch was reduced. Power levels fell toward break-even, producing just enough electricity to keep the ancillary support systems up and running.

All around the Koribu, the drab monotony of the wormhole faded away to be replaced by normal space. Holographic panes on top of the bridge computer stations turned black, showing the steady gleam of stars relayed from external cameras. The AS activated various sensors, aligning them on Thallspring. Several of the bridge officers cheered as the bright blue-and-white orb materialized on their panes.

Let’s face it, Marquis thought, we have little else to do. Bridge officers were simply a last fail-safe mechanism, nothing more. The AS ran the ship, while humans made small decisions based on the minute fraction of tabulated information it provided them through holographic panes and DNIs. Summaries of summaries: there was so much data generated by the millions of onboard systems that it would take a human lifetime just to review a single frozen moment.

“Eight million kilometers, as near as you can squint,” Marquis said, after analyzing his DNI information. “Radar active. We’re searching for the rest of the ships.”

Simon Roderick leaned on the back of the captain’s chair, inspecting his displays. “Very good. I expect that as we tracked their compression distortion while we were in the wormhole, they won’t be far behind.”

Marquis didn’t reply. Everything Roderick said, the way he said it, was an assertion of his assumed superiority. A captain should be master of his own ship; as indeed the other captains of the Third Fleet were. But with Koribu acting as the flagship on this campaign, Marquis had endured Roderick’s presence for the whole flight. He’d been subject to a stream of advice and requests the entire time. Every night, Roderick had dined with the senior officers, making it a miserable meal. The man’s conversation was rarefied, discussing culture and economics and history and company policy. Never a joke or a lighthearted comment, which put everyone on edge. And he’d occupied five cabins. Five! Although Marquis no longer begrudged him that. The Board member spent most of the ship’s day cosseted away there in meetings with his ground force commanders and the creepy intelligence operatives Quan and Raines.

“What’s the reaction drive status, Captain?” Roderick asked.

“Engineering crew are priming us for ignition.” Marquis kept his voice level and polite. Roderick could access as much data as he could, probably even more, given the access codes he had. The question was just a reminder of the strategy he’d insisted on.

Normally, a fleet would hold its drift positions at exodus, waiting for every starship to arrive before maneuvering into formation and heading in to the target planet. This time, Mr. Roderick had decided that there would be no formation; each starship would start its Thallspring approach flight at once. With the starships strung out, the planet’s hypothetical exo-orbit defenses would be more exposed when they deployed. The lead starship would take the brunt of the attack but provide the remainder with first-class targeting information.

Marquis had pointed out during this discussion at their nightly meal that a formation of starships multiplied the available firepower to generate an excellent shield, and provided a much greater all-round coverage than a singleton.

“Remember Santa Chico, Captain,” Roderick had replied. “We should examine history and move on from our failings in an appropriate fashion. Tempora muntantur. Tactics evolve in association with technology.”

Marquis hadn’t been on the Santa Chico campaign, thank God, but that planet was always a one-shot. Thallspring wouldn’t have anything like their level of technology. If by some miracle they had built exo-orbital systems, they’d be the old-fashioned kind.

“Course to six-hundred-kilometer orbit plotted, sir,” Colin Jeffries said.

Marquis reviewed the fusion drive schematics that his DNI was scrolling. Overall failsoft was 96 percent, which was good. They’d spent three months before the mission in dock at Centralis having a C-list refit. Only if failsoft dropped below 70 percent would he cancel ignition.

“Cleared for ignition, Mr. Jeffries. Alert the life support wheels to secure for gravity shift.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anyone know what’s happening on the planet?” Roderick inquired lightly.

Adul Quan looked up from the bridge station he’d appropriated. He’d routed a lot of sensor readings to his holographic panes, where analysis routines were reinterpreting the raw data. “Standard microwave and radio emissions. I’m also seeing hotspots corresponding to known settlement sites. They’re still there, and effective.”

“Ah, some good news. Very well, they’ll attempt to contact us soon enough. There’s to be no response. I’ll talk to the president once we’re in orbit.”

“Understood.”

Amber lights began to flash, warning them of the fusion drive ignition.

“Sir, the Norvelle has come out of exodus,” Colin Jeffries reported.

“Excellent,” Roderick said. “I’m going to my cabin. I doubt you need me breathing down your neck right at this moment, eh, Captain? You have my every confidence to deliver us into orbit unharmed.”

Marquis didn’t look round. “I’ll inform you of any status change.”

One thing Denise, Ray and Josep had never properly taken into account was how little lead time they’d have. Their Prime software might have trawled the spacecom alert from the datapool with a minimum delay, but that didn’t mean there weren’t others who were just as fast. Leaks were also a factor. The verified sighting was automatically distributed to over a hundred government personnel; most of them had family, all of them had friends and media contacts.

Fifteen minutes after spacecom’s internal verification of starship exodus, the general media knew of the alert and started bombarding the president’s office for official confirmation and a public statement. It was just after midnight in Durrell, the capital, but the president’s praetorian aides responded swiftly. Their first cautious release that anomalous spacecom data was being reviewed hardly satisfied the howling mob, but it did give them enough justification to start breaking the story across the datapool and on the news shows. It was a story that fed on its own hysteria, expanding with each retelling. Recordings of the last invasion were snatched from their libraries and broadcast in extreme detail, reminding everyone of the oppression and brutality they’d suffered, as if they needed such cues. Thirty minutes later, just about all of Thallspring knew the starships had come again.

In their single act of public responsibility that day, the media announcers did keep repeating there was no need to panic—the starships were eight million kilometers away. Given how many people were desperate to hear the entire message, it amazed psychologists just how many managed to blank that part out.

Human nature being what it is, people’s overriding instinct in times of danger is simply to head for home. It’s a baseline refuge, seeking comfort and security from contact with your own family. In every city people walked out of work to hail the nearest taxi or jump on their tram; bikes and cars poured onto the roads. There hadn’t been traffic snarl-ups and gridlock like it for over a decade; in fact, not since the last time the starships arrived.

Denise’s usual twenty-minute trip back to the bungalow on the Nium River estuary took nearly an hour and a half. She hadn’t realized so many people even lived in Memu Bay, let alone had cars or bicycles or scooters. So much time had been wasted just sitting in trams expecting them to move any minute. Nobody ever drove down the tram lines in the center of the road—until today, when they blocked it solid. Eventually, she hopped out of the stationary vehicle and started walking.

Fortunately the local datapool retained its integrity through the chaos, though even its connection time had slowed appreciably as half the town used it to contact the other half and ask them where they were. She sent a stack of preformatted messages through her own ring pearl, using Prime to route the heavily encrypted packages to various resistance cell members so they would be untraceable. Acknowledgments returned sporadically, scrolling across her vision as she dodged traffic and slithered around lumbering pedestrians.

Outside the town’s heart, the traffic wasn’t so clogged, which allowed the vehicles to drive a hell of a lot faster. They’d all had their AS programs taken offline, with the human driver ignoring the speed limits. Denise jogged along the suburb pavements, sprinting across intersections. Not even being young and female saved her from vigorous hand signals as cars swerved.

When she did trot up the gravel path to their front door she was sweating enough to make her blouse and skirt cling annoyingly. Ray and Josep still weren’t home: they’d been out on a boat when spacecom’s alert was given. Their last message said they were less than ten minutes behind her now. She wondered how they’d managed that with the melee constricting the center of town.

The bags they’d need were permanently packed. Denise disengaged the bungalow’s active alarm and tugged them from the hall cupboard where they were stowed—a couple of sports shoulder bags, the kind anybody would take for a week’s holiday. Inside were clothes—some needing wash-ing—toiletries, coral souvenirs, several bracelet pearls with the supplements any student would own. All the items would pass a spot inspection. It would take a detailed lab analysis to detect any sort of subterfuge. Her ring pearl interrogated the hidden systems, running final function and power checks. Once their validity was confirmed, she dumped them beside the door, then ran back to her own room, stripping off her blouse. Her blood still seemed to be hot and fizzing, even though her heart had slowed right down. Now the starships had arrived, she felt invigorated. A simple faded-copper T-shirt and black shorts gave her a great deal more freedom of movement. She twisted the plain gold band on her index finger that contained the pearl, reassured by the contact. A strange preparation ritual for a warrior about to go into combat, but then this was not an arena the gladiators, knights and ninjas of old would recognize.

Denise was lacing up her sneakers on the doorstep when the boys arrived. They’d acquired an open-top jeep from the diving school, which Josep was driving. He braked it to a sharp halt at the end of the drive. Ray jumped out and slung the cases in the rear. Denise took the backseat. She was still slipping on her safety harness when Josep accelerated away, sending gravel pelting into the jasmine.

“Which way are you going?” she asked.

“We figured the outer loop road,” Ray called over his shoulder. “It’s longer, but the traffic regulation AS says it’s still relatively clear.”

Denise visualized a layout of the town. Their bungalow was just about on the opposite side from the airport. Perhaps they should have planned that better, as well. But once they got onto the loop road, it would take them directly there.

“How long?” she asked Josep. She had to shout; the wind was whipping her short hair about as he sped them along the concrete road with its broad, neatly mown verges.

“Forty-five minutes,” he said.

“You’re kidding.”

His smile was grim. “I can do it!”

“Okay.” Denise started to instruct her Prime, and indigo timetables slid across her vision. Scheduled planes were still flying out of the airport. According to the bookings program, just about every tourist in Memu Bay was trying to bring his or her departure flight forward to today. Prime accessed the Pan-Skyways reservation system and searched through the passenger list on a flight to Durrell that was due to leave in an hour and ten minutes. Only a quarter of them had checked in so far. Several had contacted the airline to say they’d been caught up in the traffic snarl and were running late. Sensible people, she thought. She erased two of them and substituted Ray and Josep, under their ghost identities.

“We’re in,” she said gleefully.

The loop road was a big improvement. At first. Traffic on their side of town was light. It began to build, increasing in proportion to the distance to the airport. Even Josep had to slow down as both lanes began to fill.

“Where’ve they all come from?” she asked, looking round in dismay. Family cars, sedans with darkened windshields, jeeps like theirs, vans and trucks; every one had a driver gripping the wheel with an intent don’t-mess-with-me expression on his face.

“I don’t know,” Josep muttered. “But I know where they’re going.” He swung the wheel sharply, sending the jeep around a big pickup and onto the hard shoulder. Free of the jammed-up main lanes he accelerated again. Tires bounced frantically through the potholes, the suspension juddering loudly.

Ray grinned happily. “There goes your license.”

“It’s a stolen jeep, and I’m not licensed to drive it anyway. Now smile for the traffic cameras.”

Denise rolled her eyes and pulled a floppy old fishing hat on her head as other drivers shouted at them. To the side of them, traffic was grinding to a complete halt. She could see the kind of luggage people were carrying. Cars just had suitcases thrown into the backseats, but several vans and pickups were piled high with furniture, some even had pets, mainly dogs barking in confusion. A small pony peered nervously out of one rig. She couldn’t understand where they thought they were going. It wasn’t as if this continent had a big rural community that could absorb them. There was only the Great Loop Highway with its scattered settlements around the Mitchell Plateau mountains. And she knew what their inhabitants would think of refugees from the city.

“Damn,” Josep grunted. Other people had started to swerve onto the hard shoulder. Vehicles stuck on the inside lane were tooting their horns furiously at the lawbreakers trundling past. It didn’t take more than another five hundred meters before the hard shoulder was reduced to a parking lot. They were still a good twelve kilometers from the airport.

“Go around them,” Ray said.

Sighing, Josep engaged the high-traction mode for the hub motors and urged the jeep off the hard shoulder and onto the verge. They bounced along the grass, tilted at quite an angle. Tires left long spin tracks in soil still wet from the morning’s downpour. Cars on the hard shoulder tooted angrily as they bumped and fishtailed past the completely stationary lines.

That ride ended three kilometers short of the airport, when the verge turned into a cutting. The banks were too steep for the jeep to use even on high traction.

Josep braked and they slowly slithered down the slope until the tire rims were resting on the curbstones lining the hard shoulder. Nothing was moving on the dual roadway. People had climbed out of their vehicles, talking to each other in exasperated voices. Denise could hardly believe it, but the trams on the high-speed link between the roadways were also stationary. Maniac drivers had actually tried to use the rails as a road, ramming through the crash-barrier that guarded the outer lane. There was a long zigzag line of cars and vans bumper to bumper along the tramway, looking as if several dozen of them had all collided in slow motion. Those drivers were screaming at each other. She could see several fistfights had broken out.

“Out,” Josep said. “Come on, we’re close enough now.”

A big DB898 passenger plane thundered overhead, its undercarriage bogies folding into its fuselage. Hihydrogen turbofans whined loudly as it rose in a steep climb. Everyone standing about on the road stopped what they were doing to watch it pass. The majority then started walking, as if the aircraft had been some kind of religious summons.

Denise, Josep and Ray started a fast, easy jog, drawing jealous stares from families and older people tramping along the concrete with moody desperation. Thanks to the d-written enhancements throughout their bodies, the weight of the bags and the intense midafternoon sun had no effect on them, so they were able to maintain a steady pace for the entire three kilometers. Denise had a mild sweat when they reached the arrivals hall, but that was all.

The crowds around the various airline gateways were thicker than fans going into a stadium turnstile on a league finals day, and a lot more restless. They pushed and shoved their way toward the front, either ignoring or giving out aggressive nose-to-nose stares to anyone who objected. Up on the walls, giant sheet screens were showing man-in-the-street interviews, with just about everyone the reporters found asking the same thing: when are our exo-orbit defenses going to blast these invader bastards into radioactive gas? Surely some clandestine top-secret government project had built them ready for this moment? Why are we defenseless?

They arrived at the Pan-Skyways gate three with five minutes left until boarding ended. There, in the middle of five hundred noisy, straining, angry people, Denise gave both of them a kiss and a hug. If they were surprised by the uncharacteristic display of affection they didn’t show it. She’d often been exasperated by them during the last year; now she realized how much she cared for them, almost as much as for their mission. “Look after yourselves,” she mumbled. It wasn’t a wish; it was a command.

They returned the hug, promising her they would. When they showed their ghost identity cards to the gate it opened smoothly to let them through.

Denise wormed her way out through the crush of people and went up to the observation deck on the roof. She was the only person there. A humid offshore breeze plucked at her T-shirt as she stood pressed up against the railing. Twenty minutes later, the big Pan-Skyways jet taxied out onto the runway and raced into the hot sky. Denise watched it vanish into the hazy horizon, then lifted her gaze to the sky’s zenith. Seven tiny, bright stars were visible through the azure veil.

Her arms were spread wide, hands gripping the smooth, worn metal of the railing. When she took a deep breath, she could feel the oxygen flowing through her arteries, fortifying her enhanced cells. Her physical strength brought a cool self-confidence with it, a state of mind she relished.

Welcome back, she told the sparkling interlopers. Things are going to be a little different this time around.

Simon Roderick sat at the desk in his appropriated cabin, surrounded by data. Some of it came from holographic panes, the rest was provided by DNI. All of it flowed and flashed at his whim. Organization, the key to success in any field, even one with as many intangibles as this. He knew how Captain Krojen considered himself at the mercy of the Koribu’s AS, how isolated that made him from the physical running of the starship, a situation Simon never placed himself in, no matter what his supervisory assignment. The captain’s trouble was his insistence on routing commands through his officers, keeping them involved. If he kept humans out of the equation he would find himself a lot closer to achieving true authority over his machinery.

The stream of information enveloping Simon shifted as the last of the Third Fleet starships reached its six-hundred-kilometer orbit. Its new pattern was close to the optimum he had envisaged. Needless to say, Thall-spring had deployed no exo-orbit weapons against the starships during their approach. They had, though, endured a constant bombardment of communication traffic during the flight into orbit. Several tapevirals had been hidden in the packages, some of them quite sophisticated—for an isolated world. The Koribu’s AS had recognized and isolated them immediately. None of them had come even close to the Barbarian Sentience subversives that the antiglobalizers had used back on Earth.

Simon shifted his attention to the images building up from the small squadron of observation satellites that the Third Fleet had released into low-Thallspring orbit. It was a world that had moved ahead in a steady pedestrian fashion since Z-B’s last asset realization. Infrared mapping showed the settlements had expanded roughly as predicted, although Durrell was certainly larger than expected. Worst case, it gave them a hundred thousand more people, which the ground forces could certainly handle. Fortunately, that corresponded to an increase in industrial output. After all, those extra people had to be housed, clothed, fed and provided with jobs.

Several blank zones on the planetary simulation caused him a flicker of dissatisfaction. His personal AS noted the direction of his ire and informed him that three observation satellites and one geostationary communications relay had failed. The successfully deployed systems were being reprogrammed to fill the gaps.

He sent the planetary data into peripheral mode and established a link to Captain Krojen. The officer’s sullen face appeared on a hologram pane. “I’d like you to begin the gamma soak, please,” Simon said.

“I wasn’t aware our reviews were complete,” Krojen said. “There could be people down there.”

“The primary scans haven’t found any artificial structures in the location we selected. That’s good enough for me. Begin the soak.” He canceled the link before there was an argument, and expanded the Koribu’s schematics out of the grid.

Just behind the starship’s compression drive section, their gamma projector began to unfurl. The mechanism had been included on all of Z-B’s colonist carrier starships as fundamental to establishing a settlement. Basically a vast gamma ray generator and focusing array, it was a cylinder fifteen meters in diameter, and twenty long, riding on the end of a telescopic robot arm. Once it was clear of the drive section, the cylinder’s outer segments peeled open like a mechanical flower. On the inside, the petals were studded with hundreds of black-and-silver hexagonal irradiator nozzles. A second set of segments hinged open around the first, followed by a third. At full extension, it formed a circular disk sixty meters across.

Thallspring’s second-largest ocean was rolling past underneath the Koribu, with the coastline sliding into view over the horizon. Durrell was directly ahead of the starship, a gray smear amid the emerald crescent of land that was the settlement’s enclave of terrestrial vegetation. Outside that, Thallspring’s native aquamarine plants embraced the rest of the land.

Koribu’s gamma projection array swung around on the end of its arm until it was pointing toward the settlement. Small azimuth actuators tweaked its alignment and began tracking. Tokamaks inside the starship’s compression drive section started to power up, feeding their colossal energy output straight into the projector array. The amount of energy demanded by a starship to fly faster than light sliced down through the atmosphere in a beam that was no more than a hundred meters wide when it struck the surface.

The impact was centered on a patch of ground at the western perimeter of the settlement, just overlapping the border of the earth plants. No living cell of any type could survive such a concentration of radiation. Thallspring’s plants, animals, insects and bacteria died instantly beneath the beam, a huge zone of vegetation that immediately turned bruise-brown and began to wither. Branches and leaves bowed down and curled up beneath the relentless invisible onslaught; fissures split open along tree trunks, hissing out steam from ruptured osmotic capillaries. Animals thudded to the ground, skins shriveled to black parchment and innards cooked, spitting out little wisps of smoke as they ossified in seconds. Even below ground, nothing was spared. The gamma rays penetrated deep into the soil, eradicating bacteria and burrowing insects.

Then the beam began to move, scanning back and forth across the ground in slow kilometer-wide swaths.

Simon shifted the soak data into peripheral. He used the Third Fleet geo-stationary relays to open a connection into Thallspring’s datapool and requested a link to the president.

The man whose image appeared on his holographic pane was in his late fifties, heavy features roughened by lack of sleep. But there was enough anger burning in his eyes to compensate for any insomnia lethargy.

“Stop your bombardment,” President Edgar Strauss growled. “For fuck’s sake we’re not any kind of military threat.”

Simon’s eyebrow twitched at the obscenity. If only Earth’s politicians were as forthright. “Good day, Mr. President. I thought it best if I introduced myself first. I’m Simon Roderick, representing the Zantiu-Braun Board.”

“Switch your goddamn death ray off.”

“I’m not aware of any bombardment, Mr. President.”

“Your starship is firing on us.”

Simon tented his fingers, giving the pane and its reply camera a thoughtful look. “No, Mr. President; Zantiu-Braun is continuing to upgrade its investment. We are preparing a fresh section of land for the Durrell settlement to expand into. Surely that’s beneficial to you.”

“Take your investment and stuff it where the sun doesn’t shine, you little tit.”

“Is there an election coming up, Mr. President? Is that why you’re talking tough?”

“What would the likes of you know about democracy?”

“Please, Mr. President, it’s best not to annoy me. I do have to monitor our beam guidance program very closely. Neither of us would want it to move out of alignment at this crucial moment, now, would we?”

The president glanced at someone out of camera range, listening for a moment as his expression soured further. “All right, Roderick, what do you bastards want this time?”

“We’re here to collect our dividend, Mr. President. As I’m sure you know.”

“Why the hell can’t you just say it? Too frightened of what we’ll do? You’re pirates who’ll slaughter all of us if we don’t comply.”

“Nobody is going to slaughter people, Mr. President. As well as being a crime against humanity with a mandatory death penalty in the World Justice Court, it would be stupidly counterproductive. Zantiu-Braun has a great deal of money tied up in Thallspring. We don’t want to jeopardize that.”

Edgar Strauss became even more angry. “We’re an independent world, not some part of your corporate empire. Our funding was raised by the Navarro house.”

“Who sold their interest in Thallspring to us.”

“Some goddamn tax-avoidance bullshit on a planet twenty-three light-years away. That doesn’t entitle you to come here and terrorize us.”

“We’re not terrorizing you. We’re simply here to collect what rightfully belongs to us. Your middle-class daydream existence was bought with our money. You cannot run away from your fiscal responsibilities. We need a return on that money.”

“And if we choose not to?”

“You do not have that choice, Mr. President. As the lawfully elected head of state, it is your obligation to provide us with assets that we can liquidate back on Earth. If you personally fail to meet that requirement, you will be removed and replaced by a successor who isn’t so foolish.”

“What if all of us refuse? Think you can intimidate all eighteen million of us into handing over our possessions to you thugs?”

“That isn’t going to happen, and you know it.”

“No, because you’ll fucking kill us if we try.”

“Mr. President, as the officially designated retriever of your planetary dividend, I am serving you formal notice that it is due. You will now tell me if you will comply with its collection.”

“Well, now, Mr. Board Representative, as president of the independent planet of Thallspring I am telling you that we do not recognize the jurisdiction of Earth or any of its courts out here. However, I will surrender to a military invasion fleet that threatens our well-being, and allow your soldiers to loot our cities.”

“Good enough.” Simon smiled brightly. “I will post lists of the assets we require. My subordinates will transfer down to the planet’s surface to supervise their shipment. We’ll also help reinforce your police force in case of any civil disturbance. I’m sure both of us want this to go as smoothly as possible. The quicker it’s done, the quicker we leave.” He canceled his link to Edgar Strauss and issued the general landing order.

“We have a go authorization,” Captain Bryant informed Lawrence. “Get your platoon suited up. We’ll embark the drop gliders in two hours’ time.”

“Yes, sir. Have we got the updated ground cartography yet?”

“Tactical support is processing the surveillance satellite data at this moment. Don’t worry, Sergeant, you’ll have it before you fly down. Now carry on.”

“Sir.” He turned to face the platoon. They were all hanging on the edges of their bunks, facing him expectantly. “Okay, we’re on.”

Hal let out a loud whoop of satisfaction and jacked out of his bunk. The rest followed, keen for any end to the voyage, even one that pitched them into a hostile environment.

Lawrence was first into their suit armory. One of the reasons Koribu’s life support wheels were so cramped was the amount of space the Skin suits took up in transit. Each one was stored in a bulky glass-fronted sustainer cabinet, which fed it a regulated supply of nutrients and oxygen. He walked down to the cabinet with his own suit inside and opened the small drawer on the bottom. It was empty apart from a plastic capsule containing a pair of full-spectrum optronic membranes. He slipped them onto his eyes and began to undress.

There was plenty of joshing and derisory comments as the platoon put in their own membranes and stripped off their one-piece tunics. Lawrence didn’t join in; the banter had an edge to it as the reality of Thallspring crept toward them—their way of riding over the jitters.

He stripped naked except for a slim necklace with a cheap hologram crystal pendant. His thumb stroked the scuffed surface, and a seventeen-year-old Roselyn smiled brightly at him. Technically, even the necklace was against regulations, but Lawrence hadn’t taken it off in twenty years. He pumped the small dispenser button next to the sustainer cabinet’s drawer. The metal nozzle squirted out globs of pale blue dermalez gel, which he began to smear over his body. It took a good five minutes to cover himself completely, slicking down his short-cropped hair, rubbing it into his armpits and crotch. He and Amersy did each other’s backs and shoulders. Only then was he ready to put his suit on.

His cabinet door opened with a quiet wheeze of cool air. He put his palm on the scan panel inside for a bone and blood review. The suit AS compared them to the patterns contained within its e-alpha section and agreed he was Lawrence Newton, the designated wearer. He waited for the disengage sequence to run, cycling the sustainer fluids out of the suit before disconnecting the umbilicals. Indigo script from the suit’s AS scrolled down his optronic membranes, showing him its status. Bracing himself on the floor, he lifted the flaccid suit out. In the Koribu’s low gravity it didn’t weigh much, but it had roughly the same inertia as his own body.

From the outside, it looked no different from any of the other Skin suits his platoon was struggling to remove from their cabinets. The flexible carapace was a dark gray color, without any visible seams or ridges. Its fingers had hardened, slightly pointed tips; while the feet were boots with toughened soles. To touch, it had a texture similar to human skin, although the outer layer was the one part that wasn’t biological. A smart polycarbon with an external sheet of chameleon molecules, and woven with thermal fibers capable of redirecting its infrared signature. Even if a hostile did manage to locate it, the carapace was tough enough to protect him from all handheld projectile weapons, and a fair percentage of small artillery pieces.

Lawrence gave it the order to egress him, and it split open smoothly across the chest from crotch to neck. Inside the carapace was a stratum of synthetic muscle up to five centimeters thick. He pushed his foot into the right leg, feeling the gel ooze against his skin as the limb slithered deeper into the suit. Like squeezing into whale blubber, he always thought. The left leg followed; then the arms were inserted into their sleeves. He tilted his head back and reached round for the helmet, which was hanging loosely. Moving his arms through even a small arc was hard, as if he were trying to shove a gym bar that was on maximum resistance. Slowly, though, the helmet section came up, and he pushed his head up inside. The grille was open and inactive, allowing him to suck down some air. As always, he felt a quick chill of claustrophobia: it was difficult to move, he could see nothing and hear nothing through the helmet.

Indigo script blinked up as the AS reported it was ready for full integration. Lawrence gave it permission. The carapace sealed up. A ripple moved along the suit as the synthetic muscle adjusted itself to grip him correctly. The optronic membranes flashed elaborate visual test patterns at him, then began feeding him the picture from sensors mounted around the helmet. He swiveled his eyeballs from side to side, a motion picked up by the suit, which altered the sensor angle accordingly. Audio plugs wriggled into his ears, and he heard the grumbles and complaints of the platoon as they clambered into their own suits.

“Phase two,” he told the suit AS.

With his legs held tight by the synthetic muscle, small nozzles extended into the valves on the top of his thighs, which had been surgically spliced into his femoral arteries and veins. A second set of nozzles coupled with the subclavian valves on his wrists; the last set were on his neck, plugging his carotid artery and jugular vein into the suit’s own circulatory system. With the connections physically secure, the suit AS interfaced with the integral e-alpha guards governing the valves, enabling them. They opened, and his blood began to circulate round the suit muscle, blending with the artificial blood that the suit had been hibernating on in its support cabinet.

A checklist scrolled down, confirming the suit muscles’ integrity. Internal blood bladders held a large reserve of the oxygenated, nutrient-rich fluid capable of being fed into the circulation system when any bursts of strength were required. Other than that his own organs would have to support the suit muscle entirely by themselves.

“Phase three.”

The suit AS began to bring a multitude of peripheral electronic systems online: he’d enhanced the original program with his Prime, which he felt gave him a better response and interface. Nobody else knew about the addition. He still wasn’t sure about Prime’s legal status, and the Z-B armory technicians disapproved of such customizations.

Phase three started by providing him with several sensor options, all of which he could link to targeting grids. Communication links ran through their interfaces and encryption codes. Air filters slipped across the helmet grille, giving him immunity from chemical and bioviral attack. Integrated weapons systems ran through test sequences. He selected neutral carapace coloring, shifting it from the original dark gray to a bluer shading that the human eye had difficulty distinguishing. That was coupled with full thermal radiance, allowing him to jettison the heat generated by his body and the Skin suit muscle through the thermal fiber weave. His penis sheath confirmed it was secure and capable of allowing him to take a leak any time he needed.

Lawrence stood up and examined the range of articulation his new Skin gave him, moving his limbs in every direction, bending his body, flexing fingers. Sensors on the inside of the synthetic muscle picked up the initial movement, and in conjunction with the AS shifted the suit in a corresponding motion. As he worked methodically through the various positions and actions the yammer of claustrophobia vanished as it always did. Worming up from his subconscious to replace it was a mildly narcotic sense of invulnerability. Even on Santa Chico his Skin had never let him down. Anything that made him less reliant on Captain Bryant was a good thing indeed.

Lawrence looked around the compartment. Most of the platoon were already in their Skin and running preparation checks. He saw Hal, who only had his helmet left to fit. The kid was sitting on the bench, frozen with worry. Lawrence went over and stood directly in front of him. He flashed the kid a quick thumbs-up, unseen by the rest of the platoon. “You need a hand?” his amplified voice bounced round the aluminum walls.

“No, Sarge,” Hal said gratefully. “I can cope, thanks.” His suited hands scrabbled round slowly and awkwardly behind his head, finding the helmet. Then he was pushing himself into the dark covering.

The platoon trooped out of the suit armory and lumbered down the corridor to the munitions store. Each Skin’s AS linked directly with the quartermaster AS to issue the weapons authorization. When he received his allocation, Lawrence’s Skin split along the top of his arms, revealing various mechanical components that were melded with muscle bands to form hybrid guns and microsilos. He slotted his magazines into their receiver casings and watched as the thin muscle bands undulated, moving missiles and darts into their sacs and chambers. The punch pistol he’d been given was clipped to his belt, ironically the largest weapon and the least lethal.

For some unfathomable bureaucratic reason, the Cairns base AS had decided that the munitions store should also distribute Skin bloodpaks. Lawrence collected his four and secreted them in the abdominal pouches. They’d give him another few hours’ endurance should they hit physically demanding conditions. Nice to have. Although, frankly, if the Memu Bay ground forces hadn’t established their headquarters and barracks at the end of the first day, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

Now that the squad was active, they took a lift up to the life support wheel’s axis, then transferred down the wide axial corridor to the cargo section. The radial corridor that led out to their drop glider was even narrower, making life difficult for the bulky Skin suits. Not that the interior of their little landing craft—a short cylinder filled with two rows of crude plastic chairs—was much of an improvement. They strapped themselves in amid curses about lack of space and bumped elbows. Lawrence took the single chair at the front. It put his head level with a narrow windshield. A small console with two holographic panes was provided in case anything glitched the AS pilot and he needed manual control. For a vehicle intended to deorbit and deliver them to a specific ground coordinate with only a fifty-meter margin of error, the whole arrangement seemed totally inadequate.

Amersy closed the hatch and strapped himself in. Short trembles running through the fuselage indicated the other drop gliders were leaving their silos. Eight minutes to go.

“Hey, Sarge,” Jones called out in their general channel. “I think Karl’s testing out his vomit tube. Aren’t you, Karl?”

“Fuck the hell off.”

“Knock it off back there,” Lawrence said.

His optronic membranes alerted him to a call from Captain Bryant, which he admitted.

“Tactical have completed the cartography of Memu Bay,” Bryant said. “It’s accessible now. Get your platoon to install it.”

“Yes, sir. Any major changes?”

“None at all. Don’t worry, Sergeant, we’re on top of this one. I’ll see you down there. Meteorology says it’s a beautiful day; we might even have a barbecue on the beach this evening.”

“Look forward to it, sir.” He canceled the link. Asshole. The suit’s AS gave him the platoon’s general channel. “Okay, we’ve got the current map. Get it installed and integrated with your inertial navigation. I don’t want anyone getting lost.”

“Has it got any decent bars marked on it?” Nic asked.

“Hey, Sarge, can we have access to the Durrell guys?” Lewis asked. “Like to know how it’s going.”

“Sure. Odel, set it up.”

“Absolutely, Sergeant.”

Five minutes until their flight.

Lawrence began installing the new cartography into his Skin’s neurotronic pearls. Out of curiosity, he accessed the traffic Odel was pulling out of the Durrell force’s datapool. His membranes displayed a small five-by-five grid, with thumbnail videos from different drop gliders. He expanded one, seeing a shaky picture from the nose camera. A splinter of dark land rocked from side to side in an ultramarine void. Terse voices barked short comments and orders.

“No groundfire,” Amersy observed. “That’s good.”

“Have you ever seen any?” Hal asked.

“Not yet. But there’s always a first time.”

Three minutes.

Lawrence dismissed the video grid and requested the new map of Memu Bay. It looked very similar to the settlement he remembered from the last time he was here: big features like the stadium and harbor were still there. Smaller, somehow. He superimposed the old map and let out a shallow breath of aggravation as he took in the new sprawl of outlying districts. Memu Bay had grown beyond Z-B’s projections. A larger population would be harder to keep in line. Oh, great. No battle plan ever survived engagement with the enemy, but it would be nice to have one that was vaguely relevant when they hit the beach.

He opened a link to Captain Bryant. “Sir, the settlement’s a lot bigger than we thought.”

“Not really, Sergeant. A few percent at most. And physically there’s been no change to the center since last time. Our deployment strategy remains effective.”

“Are we getting any additional platoons?”

“From where? It’s Durrell that’s really grown over the last decade. If anything we should be supporting our forces there.”

“Are we?” he asked in alarm. He’d never dreamed that the platoon might be switched. That would screw up everything.

“No, Sergeant,” Bryant said wearily. “Please monitor your status display. And stop worrying. A bigger population just means more behavior collateral. We’re carrying enough units down with us for that.”

“Sir.”

One minute.

The intermittent vibrations he could feel through the fuselage suddenly grew more pronounced. When he did check his status display, he saw the captain’s drop glider had left the silo beneath them. Icons flashed an alert. Then Platoon 435NK9’s drop glider was shaking as it slid down the silo’s rails.

“Hang on to your hats, ladies,” Edmond sang out. “We’re going bungee jumping with angels, and someone just cut the cord.”

Light burst in through the windshield. Lawrence saw the edge of the silo falling away from them, a dark hexagon framed in lusterless silver-white metal that shrank into the middle of a honeycomb of identical silos. Their retreat brought the rest of the starship into view. Once again, he could only smile at its functional beauty. Drop gliders and pods were being spat out of the silos at a furious rate. They retreated from the Koribu in an expanding cloud, dropping ass-first toward the planet below. Pods were just squat, rounded cones, with a collar of small rocket motors secured around their peaks. Drop gliders were also cones, but flattened into a standard lifting body shape and fitted with swept-back fins. They’d been coated in a thick pale gray foam of thermal ablative to get them through atmospheric entry. A rocket motor pack had been attached to their rear. Those he could see falling beside them were puffing out streamers of grubby yellow gas from the reaction control nozzles, turning as they fell.

The AS began to fire their own reaction control thrusters, orientating them so the rocket pack was aligned along their orbital track. Thallspring slipped into view through the windshield, a dusky ocean smeared with hoary clouds, its outer atmosphere a phantom silver corona caressing the water. Memu Bay was hiding over the horizon, a third of the planet away.

Orange sparks bloomed around the drop glider as the squadron began to retro-burn, hundreds of solid rocket motor plumes flaring wide in the vacuum, blowing out a cascade of glimmering particles as though some iri-descent fluid was part of their chemical formula.

Flight profile displays began a countdown for their own drop glider. The solid rocket at the center of the pack ignited, giving them a four-gee kick. It was little more than a mild discomfort for the platoon, encased in their protective Skin. Thirty seconds later it ended as abruptly as it began. Small thrusters fired again, turning them through 180 degrees. Now the nose was pointing along the line of flight. With their speed below orbital velocity, they began the long curve down into the atmosphere.

The rocket pack stayed attached for another fifteen minutes, maintaining their attitude with steady nudges from the reaction control thrusters. Up ahead of them, a multitude of sparks began to burn once more as the pods and gliders hit the uppermost fringes of gas. They were longer this time, a darker cherry red, and they continued to elongate as the ablative foam vaporized under the vigorous impact of gaseous friction. Soon space around them was drenched with inferno contrails, arching down toward the planet like the chariots of vengeful gods.

Lawrence felt the fuselage start to tremble as they sank deeper into the chemosphere. His communication links to the starship and relay satellites diminished, then dropped out altogether as ionization built up around the fuselage. The AS began to move the fin flaps, testing the vehicle’s maneuverability. Once the air surfaces were providing a predetermined level of control, it fired the explosive bolts securing the rocket pack. The jolt flung Lawrence and the others forward into their straps, a motion cushioned by their Skin. There was nothing for him to see now; crimson flames from the slowly disintegrating ablative were playing across the windshield, lighting up the cabin.

They were flying blind at Mach 18 inside the crown of a three-kilometer-long fireball; gravity began to take hold, pulling them eagerly toward the ground. All he could do was wait and sweat and pray as the AS flicked the lean air surfaces with a dolphin’s precision, maintaining stability within the hypersonic glidepath. This was the moment he hated and feared above all else. It forced him to invest trust in the cheapest craft Z-B could build to accomplish the job, with nothing he could do other than ride it out.

He reviewed the platoon, calling up a grid of video and telemetry windows. As expected, Amersy’s heart rate was over a hundred while he quietly murmured his way through a gospel chant. Hal was asking a host of questions, which Edmond and Dennis took in turns to answer, argue about, or just tell him to shut up. Karl and Nic were talking quietly together. Jones had brought up maintenance profiles for the jeeps that the lander pods were bringing down for them. Whereas Odel … Lawrence enlarged the man’s grid, scanning his suit function telemetry. Odel’s head was rocking from side to side, while his hands palm-drummed rhythmically on his knees. He’d accessed a personal file block in his Skin’s memory. As they were streaking through a planetary atmosphere with the savage brilliance of a dying comet, Odel was happily bopping away to a Slippy Martin track.

At Mach 8 the external flames began to die away. Clean blue daylight embraced the drop glider. Lawrence could see the residue of ablative covering their blunt nose, black bubbling tar that sprinkled droplets from the peak of seething ripples. The craft’s antenna found the relay satellite’s beacon and established a link.

Mission tactical data scrolled across his membranes. The other drop gliders bringing down the Memu Bay force had made it through aerobrake. One of them, Oakley’s platoon, was going to undershoot, coming down fifty kilometers from shore. Their AS was already modifying the descent profile so they’d land at one of the larger archipelago islands. A helicopter could recover them later.

Captain Bryant had already begun shifting deployment patterns to cover the loss. Platoon 435NK9 was given an extra two streets to sweep.

“Always a pleasure,” Amersy grunted as the fresh data installed into their mission orders.

“We’ll assess on the ground,” Lawrence told him. They both knew the extra streets would be left alone—privilege of having field autonomy, it gave him some leeway. Lawrence’s priority was getting the platoon through the town without incident.

According to the tactical data, the landing pods were descending nominally. They’d taken a different profile from the gliders, using a longer, higher aerobrake path, then dropping steeply. They were scheduled to hard-land on the ground behind Memu Bay. Watching their tracking data, Lawrence could see they were already spreading too wide, and that was before chute deployment left them vulnerable to wind. From experience, he knew nearly half of them would scatter outside the designated area. Rounding them up would take a long time.

The coastline was visible ahead, growing rapidly. Just how fast they were losing altitude had become apparent with the way the horizon’s curvature was flattening out. When he moved forward in his seat, he could see the archipelago spread out below him. It was as if the dark ocean had been stained with droplets of cream. Hundreds of isles and atolls had been created by the crests of coral mountains that had risen up from the ocean floor over a kilometer down, emerging on the surface to accumulate cloaks of white sand. Waves broke against the reefs in gentle sprays of surf. The larger spreads of coral were hosting tufts of vegetation. Dark meandering mounds were visible in the water between the atolls where the submerged reefs lurked. It reminded him of Queensland’s coastline, where Z-B’s ecological restoration teams had worked their quiet miracles on the ailing Great Barrier Reef. Only the blue tinge of the vegetation was evidence that they were on an alien world.

Closer to the mainland the islands were larger, homes to thick forests. Then the plant leaves were a verdant green, and the beaches protected by long curving wave walls of broken coral. They all had wooden jetties extending out into the ocean. Huts were visible beneath the palm trees; sailing boats and canoes drawn up on the sand.

“Too good to be true,” Dennis said. “Maybe we should just stay here when the starships leave.”

“Nice idea,” Nic said. “But the residents would slice you up into fish-bait if they found you.”

The drop glider shook enthusiastically for a few seconds as their speed fell below Mach 1. The nose dropped, and the familiar sight of Memu Bay was directly ahead, huddled in the folds of unnervingly tall mountains. The speed of their approach made Lawrence’s natural skin crawl. Drop gliders had the aerodynamic characteristics of a brick; the only thing that kept them stable was their forward momentum. And they were shedding that rapidly.

The harbor drifted off to starboard, leaving them pointing at a shallow bay of gingery sand. A marble-walled promenade ran its entire length, separating beach from buildings. What looked like a line of police cars was parked along the top, with blue strobes flashing enthusiastically. Their AS tipped the nose up again, shedding more speed. They lost altitude at a dramatic rate once they leveled out. The beach was less than a kilometer away now, and the waves were only a couple of hundred meters below.

“Stand by,” Lawrence called. “Brace yourselves.”

Myles Hazeldine stood on the balcony that ran around the fourth floor of City Hall, watching the sky over the ocean. His two senior aides hovered behind him. Don and Jennifer had been with him since he was a first-time councilman, twenty years ago now, one of the youngest ever to be elected in Memu Bay. They’d stayed loyal ever since, throughout all the wearying backbiting and dirt slinging of democratic politics; even the dubious deals with the business community that helped his campaign funding hadn’t put them off. All of them had lost their naive idealism—probably back in that first term when he used to make hothead speeches condemning the then mayor. Now, they made a practical levelheaded team who ran the city with a decent level of efficiency, well equipped to deal with the new generation of young hotheads in the council who constantly criticized him. Goddamn, he was proud of the way he’d overseen Memu Bay’s development in recent years. This was a prosperous settlement, high economic index, lowish crime rates … Shit! Social problems, unions, bureaucrats, finance, scandals—he could handle any of that. But this kind of crisis was beyond anybody’s ability to survive.

If he took a heroic stand and resisted Zantiu-Braun, he’d aggravate the situation and the invasion force governor would sling him out anyway. He’d achieve nothing. While if he cooperated and worked alongside the governor to ensure the bastards stole everything they wanted, he’d be a collaborator, a traitor to his electorate. They’d never forgive that.

A swarm of black dots materialized high in the clean azure sky, moving with incredible speed as they sank toward the beach on the east of town. Myles hung his head in shameful fury. Edgar Strauss himself had called yesterday, urging him to cooperate. “None of us want a bloodbath, Myles. Don’t let it happen, please. Don’t let them take our dignity as well.” Another good politician lost to events out of their control. Myles had almost asked: In God’s name why didn’t you fund exo-orbit defenses? Why have you left us helpless against this? But that would have been too much like kicking a man when he was down. The best missiles Thallspring could have come up with would have been a pathetic token gesture. God alone knew how advanced Earth’s weapons technology was these days. And the Z-B starships would have retaliated, made an example. Myles shuddered as he remembered the last invasion: his son dead, the meager ration of food for months afterward as they struggled to get back on their feet. And everyone had accessed the pictures of the new blasted land on the edge of Durrell, that highly unsubtle and very effective demonstration of their capability.

He knew what he would have to do, the public example he would have to set. It would ruin him. He might even have to leave Memu Bay after Z-B withdrew. But then he’d known that when he ordered the police to seal off the beach and clamp down on any physical bravado as the drop gliders arrived. Cooperation would mean keeping a lid on any stupid acts of defiance by the population. Lives would be saved. Although he’d never be thanked. Maybe he did owe Memu Bay’s population for all those crabby back-room deals he’d put together down the years. It was a view that helped ease some of the numb depression.

A barrage of sonic booms made him jump. They were so like explosions. Glass rattled in just about every window. He could see flocks of birds taking to the air above the city, wings flapping in wild shock.

Out in the bay, the first of the drop gliders were splash-landing. Dumpy cones streaking down through the air at nearly forty-five degrees to smack into the lazy waves a couple of hundred meters offshore. Huge plumes of spray shot out from the impact point, then followed them as they skidded along the top of the water, gradually dying away as they slowed. Several of the craft careered into the sand with a drawn-out crunching sound, twisting around sharply. One almost made it to the promenade wall, its nose finishing only a couple of meters short.

“Pity,” Don grunted.

The majority of drop gliders finished up bobbing in the shallows. Their hatches blew off. Burly dark figures jumped out and began wading ashore, kicking effortlessly through the water. Myles recognized that color, size and strength all too well.

A big banner suddenly unrolled down the promenade wall.

Die Screaming
Nazi Fuckheads

Kids raced away from it. The police officers leaning over the rail to watch the drop gliders made no effort to catch them.

“Oh, very original,” Myles muttered under his breath. He could only hope that would be the worst the local hooligans would do.

He turned to Don and Jennifer. “Let’s go.”

The invaders were already running up the promenade steps and spreading out along the top. They seemed to be ignoring the police.

Myles took the elevator down to the mayor’s private apartment at the back of City Hall. He didn’t really like the place, the ceilings were too high and the rooms too big. It was no place for a family to live. But his own house was away on the other side of town, forty minutes away, so during the week they had to stay here.

His office had wide patio doors that opened onto a small central garden. He saw Francine out there, lying on one of the benches under the shade of a Japanese pine. She was wearing a simple black dress with white piping. The skirt was shorter than he approved of, well above the knee. But he hadn’t won that kind of argument with her since she was thirteen. Cindy would have known how to cope with her, he thought. Damn, I should have married again. Never finding the time is such a pathetic excuse.

Francine adjusted her sunglasses. Myles could see a frown on her brow and realized she must be accessing the news channels. He wanted to go out to her and put his arm around her, and offer her some comfort, and promise that it would be over soon, and that she wouldn’t be harmed. The sort of thing real fathers would be doing all over Thallspring right now.

But the senior staff and the party leadership were waiting for him, and they had family, too. He sat behind the desk with one last reluctant look at the patio door.

“I’d just like to say that if anyone wants to resign effective immediately, then I will accept it. It won’t affect your pensions or benefits.” There was a moment of awkward silence, but no one came forward. “Okay, then. Thank you for your support. I do appreciate it. As you know, I’ve decided to follow Strauss’s lead with a policy of cooperation. They’re a hell of a lot more powerful than us, and God knows, more evil. Trying to sabotage the chemical plants or throw rocks at their soldiers is just going to lead to retaliation on a scale I cannot accept. So we just grin and bear it, and hope their starships all hit a black hole on the voyage back. If we do that, I think we can come through this relatively unscathed, at least as far as infrastructure is concerned. Margret?”

Margret Reece, the chief of police, gave a reluctant nod. She was looking at the reports scrolling down her membranes rather than at anything in the room. “I studied the files from last time. They really are only interested in pillaging our industrial output. That’s where their enforcement comes in. We can do what the hell we like in the rest of town, riot and burn it to the ground—they simply won’t care. As long as the factories remain intact, they’re supplied with raw material, and the staff turn up for each shift, they’ll leave us alone.”

“Then that’s what we ensure happens,” Myles said. “The rest of our civic business carries on as normal. To keep the factories operational, we keep the town functioning. That’s the service we provide, no matter what.”

“Do they steal our food as well?” Jennifer asked. “I remember there wasn’t much to go around last time.”

“They’ll only take what they need to eat themselves,” Margret said.“Given that thirty percent of the tourists managed to make it out before flights were grounded this morning, the food refineries we’ve got will give us a large overcapacity for the remaining population. The reason food was short last time is some rebel moron went and firebombed two of the production lines.”

“Which we can’t allow to happen again,” Myles said swiftly. “I’m not having some heroic resistance movement putting innocent lives in danger.”

“I doubt we’ll get an organized resistance,” Margret said. “Z-B always makes sure the punishment for any action against them outweighs the propaganda gains. But we’re keeping a close eye on the people we know can make trouble.”

“What about the tourists?” Don asked. “There’s a lot of them didn’t make it home; the airport looks like a refugee camp.”

“Not my decision,” Myles said. He had to squash his anger so he could speak in a clear voice. “The governor will say how much civil transport will be allowed. Given why they’re here, I expect they’ll want everyone at home being as productive as possible.”

“One of their platoons has reached the main square,” Margret announced loudly. “They’ll be here any minute.”

So quickly? Myles took a breath. So much would depend on what kind of working relationship he could establish with the governor. “Okay, let’s go greet the bastards with a smile.”

Denise milled with the crowd on the edges of the Livingstone District. Human curiosity had won out over trepidation, allowing hundreds of people to come watch the spectacle firsthand. Few children had been allowed out, though. This was mainly adults and older teenagers, staring grimly at the streets that led down to the waterfront where the police had established a no-go zone. Conversation was dark mutters of resentment, folklore of what Skin suits were capable of and the atrocities committed last time.

Bars were still open and well frequented. Most of the men were clutching cans of beer, drinking steadily as they watched on their glasses and membranes the drop gliders bursting out of the sky. The attitude reminded Denise of prematch anxiety, home-team fans barely tolerating the provocative antics of their rivals. Animal territorialism was still a strong component of the human psyche. That was going to work to her advantage. This was a very volatile situation, and most of the police were covering the waterfront and promenade. The mayor had been worried about his good citizens rampaging down onto the sand as the drop gliders beached. Idiot. An open beach was no place for urban conflict, not against well-organized troops.

Her sunglasses were showing datapool video relays of the gliders arriving. The discordant voice of the crowd rose around her. She dispatched a series of coded messages to cell members scattered along the street. Acknowledgments came back. Everyone was ready.

The first Z-B troopers appeared at the end of the street. Five of them, striding along confidently. There wasn’t even a pause when they saw the crowd.

Denise raised her sunglasses and stared at the first one. Her irises focus-shifted for detailed close-up. The Skin was very similar to what she remembered, as if a bodybuilder were wearing a dark gray leotard. They all had very fat fingers and strange bulges along the arm. Their helmet design had altered; the Skin’s pliability ended around the jaw, turning into a protective shell covering the upper face and skull. There was a tiara band of sensors at eye level, and two gill-vents on the cheeks. The only visible weapon was a cumbersome pistol clipped to a belt along with some pouches (must be for effect, she thought). Heat profile was surprisingly uniform, with only a couple of degrees’ difference across the whole suit surface.

Her view pulled back. There were nine Skins walking up the street. A chorus of obscene taunting chants rose from the crowd who were moving back and forth restlessly along the pavement. Nobody ventured closer than four or five meters. Then a young man walked out into the middle of the road directly ahead of the Skins. He was carrying a can of beer, which he drained in a couple of big gulps. The Skins ignored him as they got closer. So he turned his back to them, bent down and dropped his shorts.

“Kiss my ass!”

The crowd laughed and jeered. Several cans clattered onto the road around the Skins, spinning around as foaming beer sprayed out of the open tabs. Still the Skins kept going, silent and seemingly unstoppable. Denise had to admit, their discipline was good. Her ring pearl was picking up short databursts from individual suits. Her Prime started to break down the heavy encryption.

A rock sailed over the heads of the crowd to smack against a Skin’s chest. Denise’s enhanced vision captured the sequence as the outer layer hardened around the impact point. The Skin’s stride halted momentarily as the rock bounced off him. Still none of them retaliated. Emboldened by their apparently passive attitude a couple of tough lads ran out and tried to rugby tackle the invaders.

One Skin stopped as the first lad charged toward him, turning so they were facing. The lad was yelling at the top of his voice as he spread his arms wide ready for the collision. A second before they hit, the Skin darted swiftly to one side, bending slightly, one arm coming round. It was a perfectly timed throw. The Skin’s arm caught the lad in his chest and lifted with tectonic strength. He left the ground, momentum flipping him until he was upside down above the Skin. Then the powered push ended. His boozy battle-cry had turned to pure terror as he found himself inverted, three meters in the air, and hurtling toward a shop wall. His arms and legs flailed wildly as the now-silent crowd watched. There was a wet thud and the sudden loud crack of snapping bone as he hit the bottom of the wall. His cry cut off dead.

The other Skin simply extended his arm, fingers flat and pointing at his assailant. He never moved as the second lad cannoned into him, the extended fingers striking the middle of his chest. There was a bright flash of electricity, and the lad jerked backward, limbs thrashing madly from the discharge. He crumpled onto the pavement, twitching.

The crowd growled its resentment. They began to close in on the Skins. A swarm of beer cans and stones started to fly.

Lawrence had known it was a bad situation as soon as they got off the promenade and he saw the crowd lining the street ahead. He would have preferred the police to let the town’s population through on the beach. The street pushed everyone together. It could cause serious casualties.

“Keep calm,” he told the platoon, mainly for Hal’s benefit. “They have to find out what we’re capable of sometime. Might as well be now. A quickshock demonstration will make them think twice in the future.”

The shouts and insults were nothing. Beer sprayed around their feet, and they splashed through. A very well aimed rock caught Odel on his chest.

“Ignore it,” Lawrence ordered.

“Shouldn’t we tell them to keep back?” Hal asked. There was a hint of unease in his voice. “They’re just getting worse.”

“This is nothing,” Edmond said. “One Skin could take these pimps out. Stop sweating it, kid.”

Lawrence expanded Hal’s telemetry out of the grid, checking the kid’s heart rate. Which was high, but acceptable.

“To these people we must appear invincible,” Amersy said. “Half of that trick is making them believe it. So just swagger along nice and easy. Come on, remember your training.”

Two fury-driven young men charged out of the crowd, heading straight for the platoon.

“No weapons!” Lawrence commanded. “Lewis, shock yours.” The other was heading straight for Hal. Lawrence said nothing, wanting to see how the kid would handle it. As it turned out, the throw was perfect, sending the youth crashing against the bottom of a wall.

“Way to go, kid!” Nic whooped.

“Nice one,” Jones said admiringly. “You could have turned faster, though.”

“You couldn’t,” Hal said cheerfully. “Too old. Your reflexes are shot.”

“Shit on you.”

“Pull in formation,” Lawrence said. He didn’t like the mood of the crowd. “Hal, well done. Everyone, let’s not get excited here.”

The crowd was moving in, winding themselves up for a head-on clash. Cans and stones were coming at them from all directions.

“You going to dart them?” Dennis asked.

“Not yet.” Lawrence switched on his external speaker and cranked the volume up. “Stand back!” He could see the people closest to him wince, putting their hands over their ears. “You are causing a civil disturbance, and I have the authority to disperse you with appropriate force. Now calm down and go home. The governor and mayor will address you shortly.”

His amplified voice was lost under a howl of obscenities. Looking out at the raw hatred facing him he imagined what it would be like standing here without Skin. The lapse made him shiver. “All right, grab your punch pistols, I want …” His suit’s AS flashed a warning at the center of the tactical display grid. Sensors had picked up a thermal point approaching fast.

The Molotov arched through the sky, trailing a streamer of bright blue flame from the hihydrogen fuel. It was spinning as it went, curving down toward Karl.

“Let it hit,” Lawrence ordered.

Karl’s arm was already extended, the nine-millimeter muzzle poking through the carapace. Targeting lasers had found the Molotov. “Oh, man,” Karl grunted. “I hate this, Sarge.”

The Molotov crashed down on his helmet. The glass burst, flinging out a sheet of dense flame that enveloped the whole suit. People nearby yelped, scrambling back out of the way as the flames grew hotter, gorging on the fuel. The rest of the platoon calmly took their punch pistols up and flicked the safeties off.

“Give them the talk, Karl,” Lawrence said.

The flames died away, revealing the Skin suit standing unharmed. “The person who threw that is under arrest,” Karl said through his speakers. “Step forward, please. Now.” He took his own punch pistol from his belt. “I said, now.”

The crowd began shouting and chanting again. More stones were flung. Then another three Molotovs appeared in the air. Again, they were all aimed at Karl.

Someone’s organized, Lawrence realized suddenly. The Molotovs were aimed at the same place, and came from different directions at the same time. “Take them out,” he ordered.

Karl and Amersy shot the bottles in midflight. Giant fireballs ruptured the air and poured down. Flame splashed over a dozen people, who ran screeching in agony. The crowd went berserk, and charged forward en masse.

“Disperse!” Lawrence yelled at them above the bedlam. He aimed his punch pistol and fired. The plastic bullet caught a man in the middle of his chest, slamming him back into the three behind him. They tumbled like human bowling pins. Rushing feet trampled them.

The platoon had formed up in a circle. The punch pistols began firing. Psychologically, they should have acted as a much greater deterrent than darts. A mean-looking weapon, a loud gunshot, and a man goes flying. It was obvious and physical, you could see it happening. You should run away lest it happen to you.

Lawrence’s AS alerted him to the sound of gunshots, simultaneously running an analysis program. Someone in the crowd was firing a pump-action shotgun. He saw Dennis stagger backward, his Skin carapace totally solid.

“Where the hell did that come from?”

Three Skin AS programs coordinated their audio triangulation and indicated the line of fire. Lawrence’s visual sensors showed him a man running through the crowd—something (long, dark) in his hand. He gave the image to Lewis and Nic. “Snatch. I want him.”

They charged forward into the mob, ruthlessly thrusting people aside.

Someone jumped on Odel’s back, an arm around his neck, trying to strangle him. He reached around and picked off the attacker effortlessly. Two men lunged at Lawrence. He hit one, going for the arm. Kicked at the other, hearing the leg splinter. Each time, the Skin’s AS moderated the strength of the blow. A full strike from a Skin fist could smash clean through a human rib cage. Unless you wanted to kill somebody, always go for the limbs.

They were too close now for the punch pistol. He dodged one madman who was swinging a chair at his head. Another broke a bottle across his shoulder; ragged glass spikes slithered uselessly over the Skin carapace.

Jones screamed. Lawrence saw his grid turn red. Graphics swirled madly as the AS tried to make sense of the data. Visual sensors locked on. Jones was falling, arms waving slowly. He hit the pavement, and his fists cracked the stone slabs.

“Jones!” Lawrence yelled. “Status?”

“Okay,” Jones gurgled. “Electric. Electric shock. I’m okay. Motherfuck. They zapped me with a charge. Goddamn, it was a brute.”

“Amersy,” Lawrence ordered. “Dart them.”

Amersy held his arm up high. Nozzles slid out through the carapace around his wrist. Fifty darts puffed out.

It was as if God had reached down and switched people off. The front ranks of the mob crumpled with startled expressions that swiftly faded to the neutral face of the deep sleeper. Within seconds, a fifteen-meter logjam of inert bodies surrounded Lawrence and the platoon. Beyond that, the remainder of the crowd stared down at their comatose compatriots in numb horror.

Amersy fired another salvo.

Screams broke out as more people fell. The remainder began running, vanishing down side streets at an incredible rate.

“One for the good guys,” Edmond said.

“They’re crazy,” Hal whined. “Totally fucking crazy. Is it going to be like this the whole time?”

“One sincerely hopes not,” Odel said.

“Jones?” Lawrence walked over to the trooper, who was now sitting up. “You okay?”

“Shit. I guess so. The insulation blocked most of it. Bloody thing scrambled half of my electronics. Systems are coming back online. E-alpha fortress is rebooting the full AS.”

Lawrence didn’t like the sound of that at all. The suit should have shielded him from just about any kind of current, and the electronics were EMP-hardened. He looked round the deserted street. A lot of the unconscious bodies were bleeding, and he could see several who’d been caught by the Molotovs. The burns looked bad.

Rocks. Molotovs. Shotguns. Electric shock.

We were being tested, he thought. Someone wanted to know our Skin capability.

“Dennis, check Jones over, please.”

“Yes, Sarge.”

“Did anyone see who hit Jones with the shock?”

“I was busy,” Karl said. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay, we can run the sensor memories.”

“Newton?” Captain Bryant said. “What the hell’s happened?”

“Crowd got out of control, sir. I don’t think …” The display grid with Nic Fuccio’s video and telemetry flickered and turned black. A medical alarm began to shrill in Lawrence’s ears.

“Sarge!” Lewis cried. “Sarge, they shot him. Oh Jesus. Oh fuck. They shot him.”

“Dennis!” Lawrence yelled. “With me.” He was sprinting, moving at incredible speed over the sprawled bodies, then powering down a narrow side street. Bright indigo navigation displays scrolled down, guiding his feet. Left turn. Right turn. Curve. Right turn. Clump of people across the narrow road, standing staring. He slammed them aside, ignoring the pained protests.

A Skin was lying spread-eagle on the cobbled road. Dark red blood was spreading out from it in a thick glistening puddle. A fist-sized hole had ripped into the carapace between Nic’s shoulders. It was bad, but his Skin could have sustained him. The suit’s circulatory system was still plugged into the jugular and carotid splices; in such extreme damage situations the AS would keep the brain supplied with blood until the field medics arrived. Whoever the sniper was, he must have known that. The second shot had been fired when Nic was down. It had taken off the top half of his head, leaving nothing from the nose upward.

Lewis was kneeling on the road beside him. Emergency disposal valves had opened on his lower helmet, allowing a stream of vomit to splash down his chest.

“He’s dead,” Lewis wailed. “Dead. Never had a chance.”

Lawrence glanced around. The civilians were backing off fast. Heads vanished into windows, which were slammed shut.

“Where did it come from?” Lawrence asked.

“Oh God. Oh God.” Lewis was rocking back and forth.

“Lewis! Where did the shots come from?”

“I don’t fucking know!”

Lawrence looked up and down the nearly empty street, reviewing the last of Nic’s telemetry. He was running eastward, so judging from the impact he had been shot from behind. There was no obvious window or balcony for the shooter. When Lawrence raised his view, he saw a church tower standing above the roofs. The whole street was exposed to it. But it must have been over a kilometer away.

Myles Hazeldine’s single quiet hope that the governor would be a shrewd political operator open to compromise vanished into the air before they even met. He stood outside the main doors of City Hall, watching the Skin-suited invaders march across the main square. The few locals who stubbornly stood their ground were shoved violently out of the way. Z-B’s goons never bothered to modify their suits’ strength, so the victims really did tumble backward to land awkwardly on the hard slabs.

The three leading the column trotted up the broad stone steps to the doors. At the last minute Myles realized they weren’t going to stop. He hurriedly stepped aside as they barged in, nearly breaking the heavy glass-and-wood doors.

It wasn’t their strength that made Myles’s heart sink, but the deliberate arrogance. “Hey!” he began.

“You are the mayor?”

It was an unnecessarily loud voice booming from one of the Skins that had stopped in front of Myles and his people.

“I am the democratically elected leader of Memu Bay Council, yes.”

“Come with us.”

“Very well. I’d like to—”

“Now.”

Myles shrugged to his aides and went back into City Hall. The Z-B goons were spreading out through the large entrance hall. Their tough heels made a clattering noise like hooves on the marble tile flooring. Nervous staff peering through open doorways moved aside briskly as the big, impassive suits started to check out all the offices. Several of them were jogging up the twin looped stairs to the first floor.

The main group made their way directly to the mayor’s apartment. Myles had to take fast steps to keep up with them. Nobody asked him directions. The layout would be in their suit memories, of course.

I should have changed the architecture around inside, he thought. That would have pissed them off and spoiled the know-it-all effect.

The doors to his inner study were flung open. Seven of the Skins walked in. Myles saw Francine jump up from the bench out in the garden. She grabbed hold of Melanie and lifted the little girl up so she was cradling her. Melanie’s face was sulky with resentment, but not fearful, Myles saw proudly. He made a brief calming gesture at his daughters.

One of the Z-B goons stood by the door and pointed at Myles’s aides. “You,” the voice reverberated. “Wait out here.” A chubby finger beckoned Myles. “You, inside.”

Myles found himself standing in front of his own desk as the doors were slammed shut behind him. One of the suited figures sat down in his own chair. Myles winced as the antique pine creaked under the immense weight.

“You should learn to control your suits more carefully,” he said calmly. “There won’t be a door left in Memu Bay by the time you leave.”

There was silence for a moment; then the figure’s suit split open down the chest. That was where the impressive routine of invincibility fell apart slightly. He had to struggle to pull his head out of the helmet, and when he did his face was covered in a sticky blue goo.

Myles grinned. “Did you sneeze in there?”

“I am Ebrey Zhang, commander of Z-B forces in Memu Bay and the surrounding settlement regions, which makes me governor of the civil population. I’m now going to give you the only piece of advice you’ll get for the whole occupation: don’t play the smartass with me. Understand?”

He was about what Myles had expected: somewhere in his forties with dark Asian skin and slightly narrowed eyes; black hair that was receding. His eyeballs were covered in an unusually thick optronic membrane, similar to lizard scales. It didn’t make his scowl any more effective. Just a standard-issue military bureaucrat trying to appear uncompromising and totally in control.

“Straight talk, huh?” Myles asked.

“Yes. I don’t like politicians. You twist words too much.”

“I don’t like occupying armies. You kill people.”

“Good. Then we have a deal. You’re the mayor, Myles Hazeldine, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I want the access codes for your civil administration network.”

They didn’t need them, of course. With their software they could probably establish total control over the network in seconds. That wasn’t the point. This was the defeated barbarian chief kneeling before Caesar, acknowledging Rome’s authority and glory.

“Certainly,” Myles said. He told his desktop pearl to display the codes.

Ebrey turned to one of the faceless suits. “I want us interfaced and supervising the local datapool in ninety minutes. Get me a full industrial capacity review and a police file interrogation. I want to know what they’ve got, and who’s likely to resist.”

“Sir,” the suited figure replied.

“Mr. Mayor, I’m officially appointing you as my civil deputy. It’s now your job to make sure that civil services in this town carry on working smoothly, so you’ll be doing essentially the same thing as before but with some exceptions. We keep an eye on your work. The council is suspended for the duration—I’m not putting up with a herd of blabbermouths whining away to me night and day. Second, you can’t resign. Third, in public you will give me your full and utmost cooperation as an example to everyone else. Fourth, my second in command will now assume control of your police force. Laws will remain the same, with one principal addition. Interfering with our activities is a capital crime. And we’re going to start with the little shit who just went and shot one of my men.”

“Shot?”

“Killed, actually. I take it you deny all knowledge.”

Myles looked round the suited figures, wishing desperately that he could see their faces. “I didn’t know that …”

“I’ll accept your avowal for now. But believe me when I say we’ll find whatever resistance movement you people have cobbled together and exterminate it. I will not tolerate interference with our operation, and certainly not at that level.”

“Somebody shot one of you?”

“Yes. And the platoon leader seems to think it was a deliberate trap.”

“But … wasn’t your man in a Skin suit?”

“He was. That’s what I really don’t like about this.”

“Jesus.”

“Quite. Now, I take it you’ve heard about our good behavior collateral policy?”

The news about the death had made Myles’s heart jump in panic. Z-B hadn’t been in Memu Bay thirty minutes, and already their commander was being forced to consider reprisals. Now the mention of collateral made the muscles across his chest tighten up. “I’ve heard.”

“Of course you have.” Ebrey Zhang reached into one of the pouches on his belt, and produced a loop of what looked like white plastic string. “We are going to select a thousand or so honest and true citizens of Memu Bay and put these necklaces on them. Each necklace contains a small discharge mechanism filled with nerve toxin. It’s quite painless—after all, we are not savages—but it will kill the recipient within five seconds, and needless to say, there is no cure or antidote. Every mechanism has a specific number, and for every act of violence committed against Zantiu-Braun one or more of those numbers will be selected at random. They will be transmitted by our satellite. The mechanism will discharge, and the wearer will die. If anyone attempts to tamper with or remove their necklace, the mechanism will discharge. The mechanism also has an inbuilt twenty-four-hour timer, which the satellites have to reset every day, again by broadcasting a code. So if anyone thinks he can escape by hiding away underground or in a shielded room, he will only be able to do so for twenty-four hours. Any questions?”

“I think you’ve made yourself clear.”

“Very well. Let us hope that it works, and we don’t have a repeat of today’s murder.” The plastic was rubbed absently in his thick Skin fingers.

Myles couldn’t shift his gaze away from the awful thing. “Are you going to put that on me now?”

“Good heavens, no, Mr. Mayor. What would be the point in that? They are supposed to guarantee good behavior in others. If your political opponents saw you’d been fitted with one, I imagine they’d go straight outside and start hitting my people over the head with rocks. You see, I don’t want to make you a martyr, Mr. Mayor, I simply want you to back up all those fine words of conciliation and submission with some positive action. Let me show you how that’s achieved.” He twisted around in the chair and smiled at Francine, who was still standing in the middle of the little garden.

“No!” Myles shouted. He began to lunge forward, but a heavy Skin hand clamped down hard on his shoulder. It was impossible to shift. His vision blurred with tears as the hand gripped tighter; he was sure his collarbone was about to snap.

Ebrey Zhang beckoned. Francine gave him a sullen, rebellious look, then gently put her sister down and whispered a few words in her ear. Melanie ran away across the garden, disappearing through a door on the other side. Francine straightened her back and walked into the study.

“I have a gift for you, my dear,” Ebrey Zhang said. The loop of plastic came open.

“For fuck’s sake,” Myles shouted. “She’s only fifteen.”

Francine gave her father a brave little smile. “It’s all right, Daddy.” She knelt in front of the governor, who put the length of plastic round her neck. The two ends melded together, and it contracted until it was tight against her skin.

“I know,” Ebrey Zhang said sympathetically. “You want to kill me.”

Francine ran across the room and threw her arms around Myles. He clung to her, stroking her chestnut hair. “If anything happens to her, you will die,” he told the governor. “And it will be neither quick nor painless.”

It was one of Memu Bay’s attractive wide boulevards in the center of town, the pavements lined with tall sturdy trees whose canopy of leaves created a pleasant dappled shade for pedestrians. Karl Sheahan walked along the center of the tram lines, praying that some shithead civilian would try to trip him up or just look at him funny. Anything that would give him a legitimate excuse to smash some local bastard’s skull open. He wanted revenge for Nic, no matter what the price.

They’d left Amersy and the kid standing guard over the body to continue their deployment pattern. Karl had argued against that. They should all stay: it was respect if nothing else. But the goddamn sarge had insisted they carry on. So they’d taken their assigned streets, and now he was supposed to be checking for signs of organized resistance.

At least the anger was helping to cover his nerves. Some of them. God-damn, this bunch of fish fuckers had guns that could shoot through Skin as if it weren’t there. That was bad, real bad. It meant they’d all be vulnerable right up until the moment the guys from intelligence tracked down the cache. They’d do that, though. They would find it. He had to believe that. Intelligence division was creepy, but effective. In the meantime, he had to walk about in the open with his ass hanging out ready for someone to kick. Bad. Bad. Bad.

He kept a keen lookout as he walked along, scanning anything that looked remotely like a rifle barrel. His punch pistol was held high and prominent; so far it looked like it was intimidating people like it was supposed to. They were all staying indoors, glancing out at him through windows. There’d been a few catcalls, but that was all. News about the shooting had flooded the local datapool. That and the mass darting had cleared people off the streets pretty fast.

Some old geezer shuffled out of a side road, a walking stick waving about aggressively in front of him. Acting like he owned the place. Karl kept walking.

“Hey, you, sonny,” the old man called.

“What?”

The old man had stopped at the edge of the pavement. “Come here.”

Karl swore inside his helmet and angled his walk so he’d pass close. “What do you want?”

“I’m looking for your mother.”

Karl’s sensors zoomed in for a closer look. The old man really was ancient. Probably caught too much sun over the years. “My mother?”

“Yes. She pimps your sister, doesn’t she? I want to know how much she charges. I’d like to give you people a good fucking.”

Karl’s fists clenched. The Skin AS had to modify his grip on the punch pistol to prevent him from crushing the casing. “Get back to the nuthouse, you old fart.” He turned away and started walking. Goddamn parasite colony bastards. He never did understand why Z-B didn’t just gamma soak the whole lot of them and send down its own people to run the factories.

The walking stick whistled through the air to crack across Karl’s back. His carapace didn’t even have to harden to protect him.

“Goddamn! Stop that. Crazy old bastard.”

“They’re going to bury him here, sonny.”

The stick had a pointed end, which the old man was now using to try to gouge out one of the helmet sensors.

“Stop that!” Karl gave him a light shove. He nearly fell backward, but quickly regained his balance to make another stab with the stick.

“You can’t take the bodies home, they weigh too much, and Z-B’s too cheap. Your friend will have to be buried here. I’m going to dig him up again when you’re gone.”

“Fuck off.” Karl swatted the walking stick away.

“We’ll piss on him and use what’s left of his skull as a trophy. And we’ll laugh about how he died, with shit dribbling out of his ass and pain blowing his brain apart.”

“Bastard!” Karl grabbed the insane old jerk, and drew his fist back. The old man started a cackling chuckle.

“Karl?” Lawrence asked. “Karl, what’s going on?”

That goddamn suit telemetry circuit! Karl had lost count of the number of times he’d wanted to rip it out. He took a breath, his fist still cocked back. “Caught a ringleader, Sarge. He knows about the gun they used.”

“Karl, he’s about two thousand years old. Put him down.”

“He knows!”

“Karl. Don’t let them get to you like this. It’s what they want.”

“Yes, sir.” Karl let go of the old man, then realized there was a form of revenge available to him. “Hey, fuckface, you’re my trophy now. How do you like that, huh?” He opened the pouch on his belt and pulled out a collateral necklace. The deranged old fool just kept laughing at him the whole time he fitted the thing around his neck, as if it were the best thing that could ever happen.

Michelle Rake had spent the whole morning sitting on her bed hugging her legs. She was fully dressed, but couldn’t bring herself to venture out from the little apartment. Some of the other students in the residence house had gone out to see the invaders march through Durrell. Michelle knew what that meant. They’d end up throwing stones at the terrifying Earth-army troops, who would shoot them with agonizing stun bullets and drag them away to have explosive collars fastened around their necks.

So she had kept indoors and accessed the datapool news services. That way she’d been given a close-up view of the drop gliders landing on the edge of town and disgorging thousands of the big Skin-clad troops, who had promptly swarmed along the streets. And she was right. People had lobbed rocks, and bottles, and even some kind of firebomb. Barricades were thrown up across streets, then set on fire. The troops just walked through as if it were rain, not flame. Nothing affected them or slowed them down.

There had been other forms of resistance. The news reported that one of the spaceport’s hydrogen storage tanks had exploded. A few civic buildings had been set on fire, sending up thick columns of smoke over the capital city. The datapool was slow, and sometimes her connection dropped out for minutes at a time as strange software battles were fought within the city’s electronic shadow.

A quarter of an hour after the gliders arrived, small pods full of equipment fell out of the sky, dangling beneath big gaudy yellow parachutes. They were all drifting into the parks and meadows to the west of Durrell. Cameras followed several whose chutes had tangled, hurtling down to smash apart in a cascade of metal and plastic fragments.

To start with, she’d kept a line open to her parents over at Colmore, a settlement two thousand kilometers to the south. It might have been weak of her, but they understood how frightened she was by the invasion. This was her first year at the university, and she didn’t make friends too well. All she wanted was to go home, but the commercial flights had all stopped within half a day of the starships’ being detected. She was stuck here for the duration.

Every time she thought about it, she told herself that she was an adult and should be able to cope. Then she started crying. Durrell was the capital, there would be more of the invaders here than anywhere else. Everything was bigger in Durrell, including the potential for trouble.

An hour after the drop gliders landed, her link to Colmore was cut. Nothing she could do would bring it back; the datapool management AS kept saying that the satellite links were down—nothing about how or why they were down.

She’d hugged herself tighter, flinching at every tiny sound in the building. Her imagination filled the stairs and corridors with Skin suits as the invaders dragged students out of their rooms and snapped the explosive collars around their necks. They’d do it because everyone knew students always caused trouble, and rioted and demonstrated, and campus was a perpetual hotbed of revolutionaries.

There was a knock at the door. Michelle squealed in shock. The knock came again. She stared across the room at the door. There was nowhere for her to hide, no way she could escape.

She uncurled and stood up. The knock came again. It didn’t sound authoritative or impatient. Hating herself for being so fearful, she padded across the threadbare carpet and turned the lock. “It’s open,” she whispered. She was trembling as if the world were in winter while the door slowly swung back. Somebody was standing there, giving her a curious look. He was so totally out of context that she thought her feverish brain was producing hallucinations.

“Josep?” she muttered.

“Hi, babe.”

“Ohmygod, it’s you!” She jumped at him, clutching him so hard she would surely squeeze him to death. But … Josep!

They’d met that summer when she was on vacation, celebrating her entrance exams—the first vacation she’d ever had by herself. It had been the most incredible time. Before then she’d always laughed at the clichéd stupidity of a vacation romance. But this had been different, she really had fallen in love. And at night she’d almost been frightened by her body’s passion, the things they did with each other in her hotel bed. Almost. Leaving Memu Bay had torn her very soul in half.

She sobbed helplessly as he held on to her. “I thought you were one of them,” she babbled. “I thought I was going to be made a hostage.”

“No, no.” His hands stroked her back. “It’s only me.”

“How did you get here? Why are you here? Oh, Josep, I’ve been so frightened.”

“I caught the last flight out of Memu Bay. I told you, I wanted to come with you and enroll at the university here. I’d just decided to leave the diving school when these Z-B bastards arrived.”

“You came here … for me?”

He took both of her hands, pressing them together inside his own until they stopped shaking. “Of course I did. I couldn’t forget you, not ever.”

She started crying again.

He kissed her gently on the brow, then moved down her cheek. Each touch of his lips was like a blessing. He was here, wonderful Josep with his strong, exciting body. And all the badness that had fallen upon their world wouldn’t, couldn’t touch her anymore.

Steve Anders made his way carefully down the concrete steps into the basement underneath the bar. The concrete steps had worn and crumbled in the coastal humidity, making them treacherous. He hadn’t even known the bar had such a room underneath, but then it was a long time since he’d been in one of the tourist traps along the marina waterfront. His walking stick tapped its way gingerly across each curved surface before he put his feet down. At his age he didn’t want to risk a broken bone.

He chuckled at that. It was his age that had brought him here. By God, it was good to be helping fight back against the swine who’d killed his son last time around. Good that he could do something, that his age was finally an asset.

It was a typical bar’s storage room. Crates of empty and full bottles stacked against the walls. A trapdoor with a power platform to bring the beer barrels in and out. Broken chairs, advertising placards from years ago, boxes of old tankards, torn sheet screens rolled up and stuffed behind a pile of elaborate clay pots that still held desiccated plants.

He reached the floor and peered around the gloomy shapes. The place was lit by a single green-tinged light cone.

“Hello, Mr. Anders.”

He squinted at the girl who came out of the shadows. Pretty, young thing. “I know you,” he said. “You’re the schoolteacher.”

“Best not to label people,” Denise said.

“Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. I thank you for what you’ve done. It was very brave.”

“Pha.” His free hand came up automatically to stroke the plastic collateral necklace. “It was easy enough to get. And I had fun annoying that young shit who put it on me.”

Denise smiled and indicated a chair. Steve nodded gruffly, covering his rising nerves, and sat down. He watched with interest as she took a standard desktop pearl from her canvas shoulder bag. The unit was a rectangle of black plastic, fractionally larger than her hand, with its pane furled up along one edge. Nothing special.

She put it on her open palm, as if she were holding an injured bird. Her eyes closed and the slightest frown creased her forehead.

Steve Anders wished he were sixty years younger. She was enchanting. Some young lad didn’t know how lucky he was.

The desktop pearl changed shape, stiff plastic flowing into a crescent with needle-sharp tips.

“That’s unusual,” Steve said, trying to keep his voice light. Before he’d retired, he’d been a protein cell technician. Nothing fancy, just a time server at Memu Bay’s food refinery. But he knew Thallspring’s level of technology.

Denise’s eyes fluttered open. “Yes. Are you ready?”

Steve suddenly had a lot more confidence he was going to live through this. “Go ahead.”

Denise brought the device up and touched its tips to the collateral necklace. Steve tried to look down at what was happening.

“It is melding with their systems,” she said, understanding his apprehension. “By echoing them we can understand their function. Once that state has been reached, they lie open to us.”

“It sounds more like philosophy than hacking.” Did she mean duplicating their software, or hardware? Either way, he’d never heard of a gadget that acted the way this one did. It excited and disturbed him at the same time.

“There we are,” she said contentedly.

The necklace loosened its grip. Denise took it from his neck. Steve let out a whoosh of breath. He saw that the tips of her gadget had sprouted a kind of root network, fibers as thin as human hair that dipped into the necklace plastic.

No, nothing native to Thallspring could do that.

“That’s it?” he asked.

“That’s it.”