Author: Nancy Hanger
Last saved by: Arnold Bailey
Company: Windhaven Press
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Redliners
David Drake

Copyright © 1996 by David Drake

ISBN: 0-671-87733-X

Cover art by Gary Ruddell

First printing, August 1996

Drake, David.
Redliners / David Drake

ISBN 0-671-87733-X (HC)
I. Title
PS3554.R196R43  1996
813'.54—dc20	96-17559
	CIP

PROLOGUE
When I entered Category 4 of the Unity civil service thirty-seven years ago, I gave up my former name and life to become a servant dedicated to all mankind. There are those who say I ceased to be human when as part of the process a computer was embedded in my central nervous system.
I am called John Smith, though my name might as easily have been Xiang Quo or Krishna Singh or Ali Nasr. I am now Chief of Administration, the highest permanent official of the Unity. There are those who say I have the powers of a god and the ruthlessness of an avalanche.
Since I entered Category 4, my only desire has been the long-term good of mankind. Since I became Chief of Administration, my will has been the only will of mankind.
There are those who say I have no more mercy than a surgeon treating cancer.
There are those who say my planning has been mankind’s only salvation during these seven years of war with the Kalendru, who understand the concepts of “master” and “slave” but not of “equals.”
There are those who say that even such as I must retire, as a blade is retired when grinding use wears it to a sliver—be that sliver ever so sharp.
They say, they say . . .
And they are all of them correct.

Operation Active Cloak
—1—
Major Arthur Farrell’s bones vibrated to the howls of the generators braking the captured Kalendru starship to a soft landing in the main military port of the world Unity planners had labeled Maxus 377. The engineers hadn’t bothered to jury-rig displays after they gutted the ship’s hold for the assault force. If the strikers of Company C41 wanted, they could tap visuals from the flight deck onto their helmet visors and look at the warped-looking Spook structures they would attack in the next few seconds.
Farrell didn’t bother to watch. Instead he rechecked his stinger. He wore crossed bandoliers of ammo packs and dangling blast rockets; a medical kit; two supplementary communication units; two knives—one of them powered, the other with a shorter fixed blade that could double as a climbing spike; and a packet of emergency rations. The integral canteen of Farrell’s back-and-breast armor held two quarts of water, but he carried an additional three gallons in a backpack. The weight slowed him and made his armor sag brutally against his shoulders, but the cost was worth it to him.
When you’re pinned down in the hot sun, thirst is the worst torture. Worse than the ripping pain of your wound, worse even than the stench of your friend’s half-burned corpse on the ground beside you. Art Farrell knew.
The starship quivered, still twenty feet above the ground though she was nearly in equilibrium with the field her generators had induced in the magnetic mass on which she was landing. “Wait for it!” ordered Captain Broz, C41’s executive officer, over the command channel.
Nadia Broz was following standard operating procedure, but on this mission there wasn’t any risk that a striker would unass early. Normally C41 inserted aboard a purpose-built landing vessel. The hatches opened minutes before contact. For Active Cloak camouflage rather than speed was the requirement. At touchdown the flight crew would blow explosive bolts to separate the outer bulkheads from the skeleton of support members, but until then the freighter’s hold was sealed like a prison cell.
“Hey, I think I changed my mind,” a striker called over the ship noises. There was brittle laughter.
Kurt Leinsdorf stood stolidly at Farrell’s shoulder as he always did during an insertion. On C41’s table of organization, Leinsdorf was a communications specialist. In reality he was Farrell’s bodyguard, a huge, strong man who carried a single-shot plasma cannon in addition to his other weapons and equipment.
“I wanna be a Strike Force ranger . . .” sang Horgen, a Third Platoon striker. “I wanna live a life of danger . . .”
The starship sank the last few feet like a leaking bladder. Wait for it, Farrell mouthed, but no sound passed his dry lips.
A locator chart overlaid the upper left quadrant of Farrell’s visor: seventy-eight green dots, each one a striker. They were crammed too closely together at the moment for him to count them individually. Every one was a veteran: not only of combat, but veterans of C41 itself.
Strike Force companies were prefixed B, C, or D depending on their size. C-class units had a nominal strength of one hundred personnel. C41 had received eight replacements since the last operation, but Farrell decided not to bring them along on a mission as rough as Active Cloak looked like being. The replacements were good people or they wouldn’t have passed Strike Force screening after they volunteered, but they hadn’t worked with C41 before. There was no margin here for somebody who misunderstood an order or reacted in an unexpected way.
The Spooks had a civilian colony of five hundred thousand on Maxus 377 in addition to the logistics bases that served their military on fourteen worlds. There was no margin at all when C41 seized the planet’s main port ahead of the full-scale Unity invasion.
The tripod landing legs touched the ground in sequence. The freighter rang in three descending notes. “Go!” Farrell shouted, unheard over the clangs of the bolts shearing. He and a dozen other strikers shoved at the toppling bulkhead.
They’d landed just before local noon. Sunlight quivered through heat waves from the port’s white concrete surface. Anti-emitter missiles launched in snarling cacophony from the freighter’s upper cargo deck, homing on every operating radio-frequency antenna within their ten-mile range.
Major Arthur Farrell hit the ground running, headed for the port administration building with his headquarters group and two squads of Third Platoon. C41 had begun the invasion.
The rest of the Unity armed forces better follow soon.

The pair of Spooks in the cab of the maintenance vehicle goggled to see the recently-landed freighter fall apart as they drove past. Sergeant Guilio Abbado killed them both with a single burst from his stinger before he jumped to the ground.
“Three‑three to the truck!” Abbado shouted. Most of his squad was already running toward the eight-wheeled vehicle. It slowed but still coasted forward after the driver died in a spray of coppery blood. Horgen and Glasebrook leaped aboard, flinging the dead Spooks out of the way. Horgen managed to turn the vehicle before it plunged into an open sump, but she couldn’t seem to find the brakes.
One of the Spooks hung out the open door. Abbado kicked the body the rest of the way to the ground as he climbed into the cab beside Flea Glasebrook. The other five strikers of Third Squad, Third Platoon clambered onto the back of the vehicle, shooting at any visible Spook to keep the enemy’s panic boiling.
Horgen goosed the throttle. She steered east and accelerated without needing orders.
The truck was a godsend if you believed in God, which Abbado more or less did. The navy flight crew had landed the captured freighter on the magnetic mass nearest the port’s northwest corner according to plan. Abbado could see the sense of that, since the port garrison’s compound and the administration building were immediately north of the site and the transient military barracks were adjacent on the west.
The trouble was 3‑3’s objective, the huge maintenance hangar along the east edge of the field, was almost four hundred yards from the ship. That was a hell of a long way to run across bare concrete with a combat load. By the time the exhausted strikers got to the hangar, the Spooks would have had time to wake up.
They were waking up already. A hundred-foot-wide segment of hangar door had been open when C41 appeared. It was closing now, rolling down from the building roof. “Don’t stop!” Abbado said, not that there was any likelihood Horgen had planned to.
Abbado hooked his left arm around the frame of the shattered windshield and sprayed a crackling burst from his stinger across the shadowed figures moving within the hangar. Two of them flopped to the ground; one sprang up again and limped out of sight behind his fellows.
The stinger’s coils accelerated 15‑grain projectiles to 10,000 feet per second. The pellet wasn’t effective beyond 500 yards, but the strikers carried rockets to handle the occasional distant target. Stingers had the impact of a grenade on a target at short range. With thousand-round ammo packs containing both pellets and a fresh power supply, they were the weapon of choice for the sudden assaults in which C41 specialized.
The truck had a three-man cab, but the three weren’t supposed to be humans in battle gear. The Kalendru were long-limbed, gray-skinned humanoids. From a distance they appeared hairless, but if you looked closely you saw that their skin was covered with fine down.
Kalendru were on average taller, slimmer and significantly quicker than Terrans. Because Spooks weren’t as strong, their troops carried lighter, less-powerful weapon loads. A striker learned fast, though, that if you missed your first shot the Spook was going to get in the second one.
Horgen had the truck up to forty miles an hour. Immediately ahead the hangar door closed with a rattle that Abbado hoped meant it was fairly flimsy. “Hang on, boys!” he said as he pulled himself into the cab and crossed his arms over his faceshield. “The party’s about to start!”
They hit the quivering door with a crash louder than the battle going on all over the spaceport.

Each of the two 16‑round cannisters of plasma cartridges weighed a hair over forty pounds, and there was the weight of the air-cushion dolly besides. Striker Esther Meyer liked to tell herself she was as tough as any man in C41, but right at the moment she was glad Sergeant-Gunner Bloch and Santini, the other loader, had paused to lift her dolly from the hold instead of leaving her to struggle with it alone. Meyer could keep moving despite the heat and constriction of her hard suit as long as anybody, sure; but hefting a full ammo dolly was largely a matter of mass and peak strength.
Stingers and the 4‑pound rockets most strikers slung from their belts already raked the port area. Fourth Platoon (Heavy Weapons) was the last out of the ship. With their full armor and bulky loads they’d have needlessly slowed less heavily equipped strikers.
There was no return fire as yet but it’d come soon enough. When it did, the maneuver platoons would be damned glad of 50‑pound missile launchers and the plasma cannon.
Sergeant Bloch was a big man who looked gigantic in his polished white armor. His dolly supported the cannon itself and a three-round belt of ready cartridges. Twenty yards to the northeast was a pit holding a transformer beneath surface level where it didn’t interfere with starships being hauled across the port in giant cradles. Bloch hunched toward it at a dead run. The pit was the best cover in his sector.
All Fourth Platoon personnel wore hard suits. The crews handling the triple launchers had to worry about the backblast of their own heavy missiles, and a mist of ions as hot as a sun’s corona bathed the cannoneers as soon as they began to fire their belt-fed weapons. The armor’s protection from enemy counterfire was a secondary concern.
Meyer heard the high-pitched scream of Spook lasers in addition to the snarl of stingers and the crackWHAM! of the strikers’ rockets. The port’s surface flared white at the corner of her eye as a beam burned concrete to glass and quicklime. The Spooks were awake, though for the moment they seemed to be spraying the landscape in panic.
Bloch stepped into the waist-high transformer pit and wrestled the gun onto its bipod in firing position. Santini simply pushed the ammo dolly in ahead of himself. The cannisters were padded against shock, but a direct hit from a laser might penetrate. The best result the crew could hope for then was a low-order explosion that might not kill them. If the bead of deuterium at the heart of each cartridge detonated, hard suits weren’t going to make any difference to the resulting thermonuclear explosion.
The captured freighter erupted smoke and another sheaf of anti-emitter missiles. Those were launched automatically when the unit’s artificial intelligence sensed Kalendru-type radio frequency emissions. The streak of light that ended in a lightning-sharp explosion in the transient barracks was a missile from one of 4th Platoon’s triple launchers. That was fast work, but the team had set up beside the ship because there wasn’t any cover in their direction anyway.
Meyer jumped her dolly into the transformer pit and followed it. Bloch fired his ready ammunition in three ravening pulses as fast as the gun would cycle. The ringing air glowed like the heart of a rainbow.
“Feed me!” the sergeant screamed as Santini dragged a 16‑round belt from one of his cannisters. “Feed me!”
As she opened a cannister one-handed, Meyer looked over the rim of the pit. She dialed up her visor’s magnification. The gun was placed to cover the main highway entering the starport from the north. Seven miles up that road was the planet’s largest military base, code-named Active Grid for this operation. That was probably where the tank at which Bloch was hammering had come from.
The plasma bolts had grounded the huge vehicle in an iridescent fireball, but they hadn’t destroyed it. Air shimmered in a corona discharge as the tank’s generators rebuilt its magnetic shielding.
The Spooks were awake, all right.

The front door of the guard barracks started to open while Striker Caius Blohm was still twenty yards from the building. He fired one of his penetrator grenades through the panel. An instant later the warhead’s atomized fuel mixed with the air and detonated, blowing splinters of the door in one direction and the charred fragments of the Spook in the other.
Blohm liked to be on point. In this war the choice was to be quick or dead, and the Spooks were plenty damn quick. Your best chance of survival was the Spook’s hesitation, and if you hesitated you were handing him your head as well as maybe the heads of the strikers behind you. Technically the building’s ground floor wasn’t Blohm’s responsibility, but this wasn’t a time to stand on ceremony.
Blohm trusted himself not to hesitate. Never. Not so much as a heartbeat.
First Platoon’s objective was to clear the garrison’s three-story barracks. The planners had nixed putting a heavy rocket into the structure because the port command center might be either in the barracks or in the administration building.
The command center would be hardened. Burying it in the rubble of the upper floors wouldn’t keep the Spooks in the center from using their outlying gun and missile positions to blow the hell out of first C41, then any Unity vessel that appeared on this hemisphere of the planet.
Blohm and Sergeant Gabrilovitch were C41’s scouts. They’d been assigned to lead the four survivors of the platoon’s understrength First Squad through the top floor of the barracks while the remainder of the platoon took care of the lower stories. If there was a control room in the basement, Lieutenant Kuznetsov wanted to be able to open it without worrying about Spooks coming down the stairs behind her.
At the base of the wall Blohm armed his jump belt. He paused and bent over when he heard the roaring ignition of one of Heavy Weapons’ 50‑pound rockets. An instant later the transient compound to Blohm’s left disintegrated in a green flash and a thunderclap.
The rocket warheads pulsed electricity through an osmium wire whose resistance blew it apart with enormous force. Batteries stored energy more efficiently than chemical high explosives. The bursting wire propagated shockwaves at several times the rate of HE, giving the warheads great shattering force. The blast slapped Blohm hard, but it didn’t send him tumbling as it would have done had it hit him while he was airborne on the jump belt.
Blohm looked up the barracks’ facade, then triggered his belt. The four self-stabilizing nozzles lifted him vertically at a controllable ten feet per second. He hovered beside the window he’d chosen for entry and fired a penetrator through the pane. The projectiles were fuzed to burst a tenth of a second after impact and spray their filling into the space beyond.
The blast blew the remainder of the pane—clear thermoplastic rather than glass—out past Blohm in a gulp of red flame. He pulled himself through the opening and unlatched the jump belt with his left hand as soon as he was into the smoldering corridor beyond. The belt still had another thirty seconds or so of fuel, but the weight was more of a hindrance than any possible gain it could offer the striker now. The ground wasn’t so far away that Blohm couldn’t jump down without serious concern.
The bodies in the hallway looked like charred logs. The explosion had destroyed the light fixtures and filled the air with swirling hot smoke. The faceshield of the striker’s helmet offered light enhancement and thermal imaging as viewing options, but neither would have helped a great deal under these conditions.
Blohm didn’t bother. He had four rounds left in the magazine of his short-barreled grenade launcher. He ran down the hall, firing one round into each room as he passed. Because the fuze required impact to arm it, Blohm shot through the wall if the door was already open. He had to hope that the internal partitions would be thin enough for the grenade to penetrate.
Blohm compensated reflexively when explosions rocked him from side to side. He wasn’t thinking or seeing as a human does. He’d programmed himself like a machine to accomplish a particular task as fast as possible.
“Coming through!” Gabrilovitch shouted. The hall darkened as the sergeant’s armored body filled the window sash.
Blohm crouched against the wall as he reloaded. The launcher wasn’t a weapon he particularly liked, but he’d spent the voyage out practicing with it until he could perform all the necessary operations instinctively. It was hard to breathe. His helmet filtered toxins, but the fuel-air grenades had used up a lot of the available oxygen.
There were three rooms left on the corridor. The Spook troops in them could have used the pause to ready their own weapons, but there was no time to worry. Just to act.
Blohm straightened. Gabrilovitch’s stinger rasped behind him as the sergeant shot a body that was still twitching after the grenade went off.
Blohm lunged forward, firing three times in a single flowing motion. Between the first shot and the second he heard Gabrilovitch scream, “Cease fire! Cease—”
But the words didn’t penetrate until Caius Blohm had completed his mission.
“—fire! They’re not soldiers, they’re kids!”
—2—
Meyer’s helmet highlighted movement on the panorama display at the lower edge of her visor. Three Spooks were running toward the rear of the gun position.
She turned, bouncing her armored hip against the transformer as she raised her stinger. Her burst went wildly high. The Spooks dropped into a sunken track twenty feet from the transformer pit. It held one of the cogged tramlines that spiderwebbed the port to haul ships after landing.
Meyer should have been watching the south. The cataclysmic destruction of the tank had drawn her attention three miles down the road in the wrong direction. She didn’t know where the Spooks had come—
Two more Spooks ran from the underside of a starship a hundred yards away. They weren’t wearing uniforms, but one had a laser, and the bag the other carried probably wasn’t full of apples. Their long legs covered ground as fast as a shadow spreads when the sun goes behind a cloud.
Meyer shot the leader with the satchel. The second Spook fired as he ran, but his laser threw up chunks of concrete nearer his own feet than his target. Meyer sighted and sawed the slim body nearly in half. The Spook’s corpse hit face down, but his toes pointed in the air.
A 50‑pound rocket lit, blasted from its launcher, and banked in a screaming turn that took it southward out of the port area. Meyer could see the target only as a series of dots low in the distant sky. A dot and the missile’s tracking flare merged. A flash that grew into a fireball filled several degrees of horizon.
The target was probably a personnel carrier, armored against small-arms fire but still light enough—unlike the hundred-ton tanks—to fly. All the dots vanished. Only one had been destroyed, but the others would have to slow down and hug the ground during the remainder of their approach to the battle.
The visor would magnify by up to a thousand times, but Meyer needed as broad a range of vision as possible to do her own job. She’d almost gotten herself and the rest of the crew killed by looking in the wrong direction.
A Spook threw a grenade out of the tramline. It landed short and went off in a yellow flash. The shock buffeted Meyer; a few fragments cracked against her armor. She fired at the top of the trench, blasting powdered concrete from both sides without harming the Spooks below. One of them popped up ten feet from where Meyer was aiming and fired his laser. If he hadn’t been more concerned to duck back to safety than to aim, he’d have burned her head off.
Meyer swung her stinger and shot holes in the air. Two more grenades sailed from separate points along the tramline. The grenadiers weren’t showing more than a hand and wrist for a fraction of a second. One grenade landed wide, but the other bounced toward the lip of the transformer pit.
“Down!” Meyer screamed to the gun crew as she hunched low. Fragments of casing and concrete flew in all directions.
The plasma cannon stopped in mid-burst when the grenade exploded. Bloch bellowed a curse. One of the cannon’s bipod legs had been blown off. Santini stuck his left forearm under the gunbarrel to support it.
A second tank, starkly terrible in the glow of ions from bolts which its shielding had shrugged off, glided around the wreckage of its sister vehicle.
Meyer jumped out of the transformer pit and ran toward the tramline. Sooner or later the Spooks were going to throw a grenade into the pit. If the blast didn’t kill the strikers outright, it would stun them for the fellow with the laser to finish off.
She was ten feet from the tramline when a grenadier raised himself to throw. He saw Meyer’s armored figure stumping toward him and dived back with a gobble of horror. The Spook with the laser rose an instant later. Meyer was standing almost on top of him. Her stinger blew him inside out.
Without lifting her finger from the trigger, Meyer hosed the two grenadiers cowering against the cogged track. Sparks, concrete dust, and bits of flesh sprayed from where the pellets hit.
Meyer turned toward the transformer pit. The cannon was firing again. Only a series of plasma bolts in rapid succession could hammer through a tank’s magnetic shielding. The tank halted as its fusion powerplant shunted all available power from the lift fans to the shield. It wasn’t enough. A moment later Bloch’s sixth pulse of thermonuclear energy hit the tank itself.
The shockwave spalled the inner face of the armor across the fighting compartment. The Kalendru crew were all dead before the next round ruptured the powerplant’s containment bottle in a greater secondary explosion.
Meyer hadn’t noticed her hard suit’s weight and chafing when she charged the Spook position. Now she felt drained and dizzy. She sucked at the teat supplying water from the integral canteen as she took a second step toward the pit.
A black spot flecked the sky at the corner of her eye. Meyer threw herself to the ground. She was still falling when the missile launched from Active Grid plunged into the transformer pit.
The concrete rippled, slamming Meyer on the chest. She flipped onto her back like a pancake. The walls of the pit channeled the blast and fragments skyward, but the gun, the crew, and the transformer itself vanished utterly in a white flash.
Where the hell was the rest of the Unity invasion force?

The steps to the admin building’s second floor were individually taller and more shallow than those of human structures. The Spook running down them hooting had no trouble until Leinsdorf ripped his white tunic to bloody shreds an instant before Farrell got his stinger on target.
A striker with smoke still curling from the nozzles of her jump belt appeared at the top of the stairs. She shot the Spook again as he toppled forward.
The floor plan of the port administration building was almost circular: almost, because of Kalendru distaste for right angles and constant-radius curves. The ground floor was a bullpen with office cubbies around the outer walls and an open concourse in the center.
Farrell didn’t suppose there could be a design that would have provided a better kill zone for the volley of grenades and 4‑pound rockets his strikers sent through the clear facade of the building as they charged. There’d been twenty-odd Spooks present, but only one or two had survived long enough to be killed by stinger pellets. The upper story must be broken into smaller spaces.
Strikers now crouched at the side windows and the door to the parking lot behind the building. Farrell’s visor overlaid images from the helmets of a guard from each quadrant. The ghost viewpoints were each an eighth-field 30 percent mask across the top. They interfered to a degree with Farrell’s normal vision, but he was used to operating that way. He had to keep track of everything that was happening or else he’d get his people killed.
The breaching charge went off in the armored stairwell opposite the main doors. The electrically-generated pulse sounded like starships colliding: sharp, metallic, and immensely loud.
The well channeled the backblast upward to tear a ten-foot hole in the bullpen ceiling. Farrell hoped none of the squad clearing the second floor had been standing in the wrong place. A striker with a grenade launcher chugged his entire magazine through the opened door at the bottom of the stairs.
The stairwell belched red flame. Two strikers went in with their stingers pointed. Spooks couldn’t carry the weight of armor sturdy enough to survive the grenade blasts, but it was possible that the first door opened onto an anteroom and the real control room was still sealed.
Farrell instinctively started to follow his troops; Leinsdorf blocked him without hesitation. Art Farrell was a big man. Leinsdorf was bigger and even stronger.
Leinsdorf’s job was to keep the major alive. When that meant stopping Farrell from doing something stupid, Leinsdorf did whatever had to be done.
Nadia Broz carried a jamming rig instead of extra weapons. While shooting was still going on she’d attached the jammer to an antenna lead from one of the building’s wrecked consoles. An anti-emitter missile had cut the roof mast while C41 unassed, but the stump was sufficient for Nadia’s purposes.
She glanced up from her display and caught Farrell’s eyes on her. “The port defenses shut down when we blew the vault,” she said, shouting over the racket instead of using helmet commo to speak to Farrell ten feet away. “The missile batteries at Active Grid are live, though, and the base has links to the sensors here. There’s nothing I can do about that.”
“We’ve got support coming,” Farrell said, wondering how many of his people were going to die before that support arrived. “They may be hitting Active Grid already.”
There were in the order of 50,000 Kalendru troops quartered at Active Grid. The sprawling base was targeted for massive strikes: initially from orbit, followed by dedicated ground-attack vessels making low-level passes. The crucial low-level phase couldn’t begin until the Kalendru hemispheric defenses had been knocked out.
It would take the Spooks hours, maybe days, to bypass the control net centered on the vault Farrell’s strikers had just opened and destroyed. The missile artillery at Active Grid could pulverize C41, though.
The jammer provided a partial defense. Terminal guidance made artillery accurate to within ten feet. If the missile depended on data loaded into it before launch, accuracy dropped to a Circular Error Probability of sixty-five feet.
The captured freighter erupted when half a dozen Spook rounds hit it in rapid succession. The starport and military base had been designed and built as a mutually-supporting pair. Buried cables linked sensors in the port area to consoles at Active Grid, allowing the Kalendru gunners to refine their targeting with sensor data. While the result wasn’t as good as terminal guidance, it was good enough for targets the size of a starship.
Pretty quick it would dawn on the Spooks they could now shell the port administration building off the map without harming any of their own people.
“The building’s secured, sir,” reported Sergeant Bastien, the acting commander of Third Platoon. “Shall I shift a squad across to help Abbado?”
A 50‑pound rocket slammed from its launcher, supersonic within the first twenty feet of flight. The missile screamed downrange.
C41’s plasma cannon were firing also. One of Farrell’s overlaid remote images showed a huge explosion in the distance along the highway. The shockwave reached him in two pulses, through the ground and an instant later on the air. Leinsdorf, restive as he looked across the concourse and out the back door, unslung his single-shot plasma weapon. Another Spook tank was maneuvering past the mushrooming tombstone of the first.
“No, withdraw both squads to the warehouses,” Farrell ordered. “Abbado has to take his chances. Nobody’s going to make it across that bare concrete till the fleet takes care of Active Grid.”
He turned. “Nadia,” he said, “leave the jammer set up, but we got to get out of here. The—”
Farrell’s visor flashed red, indicating a signal from orbital command. One of his supplementary commo units was a dedicated link to the flagship.
“Primrose Charlie Four-One, this is Primrose,” an emotionless voice said. “The operation has been aborted. A large Kalendru fleet is approaching the planet. Can you extract your unit yourself? Over.”
“Primrose, hell no!” Farrell said. At the corner of his eye he saw another missile hit the remains of the freighter. “Primrose, for Chrissake, get us a strike on Active Grid. They’ve got the port observed. They’re chewing us up and you won’t be able to get a boat in. Over!”
“Charlie Four-One, Negative,” the voice said. Farrell wondered if it was an AI program speaking. No, a computerized voice would have more feeling. This was a human officer who wasn’t going to let emotional loading get in the way of precise communication. “If possible, withdraw your unit to a site out of Kalendru observation and await pickup. Primrose out.”
Out was the operative word. C41 was shit out of luck.

One of the strikers who entered the barracks behind Caius Blohm had clamped a line to the sash for them to leave by. It was about the only useful thing anybody in 1‑1 had accomplished during the operation.
Blohm rappelled down the side of the building. First in, last out. The grenade launcher slapped against his breastplate each time he braked with his gloved palms. The weapon was heavy. He’d locked in a fresh magazine to replace the one from which he’d fired three rounds.
His boots hit the ground. The ship that brought C41 was a shattered wreck, the upper half molten. Another missile hit the derelict, lifting a mighty fireball. The Spooks used chemical explosives. The general level of noise was so high that the blast didn’t sound particularly loud.
Blohm glanced up the way he’d come. Flames wavered sluggishly from several of the third-floor windows. The fuel-air bombs had ignited fabrics, paper, splintered furniture. Spooks didn’t have hair to burn, not really, but the explosions had charred the victims’ flesh deeply.
There’d been a lot of them on the top floor of the barracks. Over a hundred, Blohm figured, judging from the one room he’d taken a good look into after Gabrilovitch shouted at him.
Kalendru females were shorter and even slimmer than the males, and they were never members of the fighting forces. Some of the burned corpses were females but most were children. Maybe dependents, maybe overflow from civilian facilities on the south side of the field. Certainly not combatants. But certainly dead.
And very certainly killed by Caius Blohm. He’d completed the job before anybody else arrived. Nothing wrong with his reflexes, no sir.
He ran past the shattered transient compound, following Gabrilovitch. A Spook missile hit twenty yards away and blew a hole in bare concrete. Again a red fireball pulsed upward through sooty black smoke. The air zinged, but none of the fragments hit Blohm.
If a missile went off at his feet, it might burn his shattered body as black as that of the Spook child on the threshold of the room Blohm had looked into.

The good news was that the hangar door ruptured when the truck hit it. Stiffeners sang like guitar strings, parting the welds that anchored them to the edges of the track.
Horgen skidded all eight wheels as she braked. There was nothing to hit in the left bay except bodies and whatever gear the Spook repair staff had dropped when the strikers drove into them shooting.
Abbado’s visor reacted automatically to the lower light levels within the structure. He pointed his stinger toward a group of Spooks trying to get behind a large toolcart and held the trigger down. The fishtailing truck ripped the stream of pellets across the Spooks and they all dropped.
The bad news was that a Kalendru corvette filled the hangar’s central bay.
This was a land-force logistics base, not a fleet repair facility. There weren’t supposed to be naval vessels present, not even relatively small ones with their Tokomak powerplant lifted half out of the cylindrical hull on a gantry. Spooks swarmed up the ramped hatchway. Mostly they were maintenance staffers clothed in motley blues and grays, but a few were mauve-uniformed naval personnel.
An officer with a tuft of black feathers on either epaulet fired a laser pistol at Abbado. The Spook blew two divots from the truck’s door before Abbado killed him. Glasebrook leaned through the shattered windshield and fired a rocket into the corvette’s airlock, shredding the officer’s body and a half dozen other Kalendru. Horgen had dived from the truck, so the backblast didn’t fry her.
The hatch rotated closed. The edge mated solidly with the coaming despite the fact that a Spook’s arm lay across it.
Abbado jumped. There’d been nearly a hundred Spooks in the hangar when the heavily-armed strikers entered. Now, seconds later, the only Kalendru still visible and moving were those who thrashed in their death throes.
Some Spooks hid beyond the corvette or behind pieces of equipment, but they weren’t an immediate concern. The ones still alive aboard the vessel were a real threat.
The corvette’s armory probably held enough small arms to outgun all the strikers in C41, but even that was a secondary danger. If the crew got the ship’s main battery in operation, it was Katy bar the door for the whole operation.
“Fire control!” Abbado said. The code phrase keyed his words to Lieutenant Whichard of Heavy Weapons Platoon. “Give me a rocket soonest, mark!”
He focused his eyes on the ship’s closed airlock and blinked twice. That highlighted the image his helmet was transmitting to Whichard and—Abbado prayed—to the sergeant of one of the rocket batteries. “Break, Three‑three personnel take cover! Out.”
By this time all six heavy rockets might have been launched or destroyed by Spook counterfire. If there was a round left, Abbado couldn’t be sure it would bear on the target. At such short range the rockets didn’t have much room to maneuver between launch and impact.
The one certain thing was that 3‑3 would get the support if it was possible. There wasn’t a more important target on the base. Nobody’d dreamed there was going to be a warship in the hangar. The planners might have scrubbed the whole operation if they’d known.
Abbado threw himself on the hangar floor and tugged a personal rocket from his bandolier. He twisted the base cap to extend it and arm the rocket. A 4‑pound rocket was unlikely to do serious harm to a starship’s hull, but unless Whichard came through they were the best 3‑3 had to go on.
A striker threw an electrical grenade into the cab of the travelling hoist above her. The sharp blast flung the operator out in a shower of glass. Both electrical and fuel-air grenades had specific advantages. Electricals offered fragmentation and higher peak impulse, but fuel-air provided incendiary effect and greater total impulse.
Abbado had heard arguments on the subject go on for hours, but the truth of it was that the choice was personal whim. Combat troops like to claim that their decisions are in some objective sense “right,” but they know in their hearts of hearts that they’ll probably die for no better reason than that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Three‑three,” the squad channel warned in a voice that wasn’t Whichard’s. “Shot!”
The eight strikers within the huge hangar crouched in the best shelter they could find. Over the general chaos, Abbado heard the crack of a rocket igniting.
The hangar’s central door burst inward from the supersonic shockwave and the missile that detonated against the corvette’s airlock. The hangar roof billowed up from the joists. Sheared rivets rained onto the floor.
The rocketeers had set the fuzing circuit for point focus because the warship’s hull was too thick to be pierced by an omnidirectional blast. The pulse ruptured a cone of wire, forming the electrical equivalent of a chemical shaped charge. The shockwave forged a thin disk of uranium into a molten spear that struck like an asteroid.
The corvette rocked on its landing struts. The heavy-metal spike blew a hole big enough to pass a fully-equipped striker through the center of the hatch. The blast skidded Abbado three feet backward on the smooth floor, and his ears rang despite the cancellation pulse his helmet produced to save his hearing. He scrambled to his feet and ran for the opening, clasping the rocket in his left hand and the stinger in his right with the buttplate against his biceps.
It didn’t occur to Guilio Abbado to order his strikers to follow him. It wouldn’t have occurred to them to do anything else. If they hadn’t been that sort of people, they wouldn’t have been in C41.
Two strikers fired rockets through the opening before they charged. Glasebrook threw in a fuel-air grenade. That was useful for the purpose of clearing defenders from the corridors nearest the hatch, but the airlock focused the thumping explosion and knocked Abbado flat on his ass. By the time he got up, Horgen was into the ship ahead of him.
Abbado was on her heels, though he had to shove Jefferson aside. Rank hath its privileges. At a mental level pretty well buried for the moment, Abbado was afraid to die; but he was more afraid that his squad wouldn’t follow him the next time if they had the least doubt that he was willing to lead from the front.
The airlock’s inner valve had been half open before most of the outer door hit it and tore it off its hinges. Horgen was left-handed so she turned right down the smoky corridor. Abbado went left, sternward.
Although the Kalendru had pulled the main powerplant, the corvette’s internal lighting was on. There must be an auxiliary power unit somewhere. If the lights worked, so would the guns and missile launchers.
Abbado swept the corridor with his stinger for the second and a half it took to empty the magazine, then fired the rocket in his left hand. He didn’t have a target—any target, though slender bodies writhed on the decking—but he needed his hand free to reload the stinger. Launching the rocket was faster than throwing it away.
As Abbado knelt, Jefferson stepped by him and hurled a grenade into a weapons bay. A Spook jumped from behind the control console and shot the striker in the face. The grenade detonated, blowing the shredded Spook against the ceiling.
Abbado tugged an electrical grenade off his belt left handed and threw it into the compartment’s opposite bay. A Spook hopped up from that console also. Abbado and Glasebrook shot him together. As the body fell back, Glasebrook tossed a fuel-air grenade on top of it.
When the bomb blew, the two strikers ran to the last compartment sternward. Neither man sent a grenade ahead to warn the Spooks they were coming. They’d worked together so often in similar situations that they coordinated without overt signals.
The Kalendru repair crew had removed the compartment’s upper plating in order to lift out the powerplant. A sailor was trying to climb out of the ship through the large opening. Glasebrook shot him.
An officer’s mauve-clad legs lay in the well where the Tokomak had been bolted. Abbado’s randomly fired rocket had hit him in the chest.
Two Spooks waited by the bulkhead just inside the corridor hatch. One of them managed to trigger his laser as Abbado’s stinger tore them point-blank. The saffron pulse ruptured a pouch of stinger reloads and gouged a collop from the sergeant’s breastplate beneath.
Abbado, Glasebrook, and Foyle an instant behind hosed the lockers and netting-secured bundles that festooned the aft compartment. Stinger pellets hit too hard to ricochet, but the long bursts ripped sparks from the fittings and bulkheads. The compartment roared like a megawatt short circuit, giving the air a lambent neon radiance.
Forward, a pair of fuel-air explosions thumped. There was a sharper blast and the corvette’s lighting went off. Horgen or one of the strikers with her had found the APU.
Abbado reloaded. There were no Kalendru alive aboard the ship. The seven pips on the corner of his faceshield indicated that they’d only lost Jefferson in clearing the vessel, better than he’d figured. Last year on Mulholland—two years ago?—Abbado and Jefferson had drunk their way through a case of whiskey they’d stolen from an admiral’s private suite.
“Three‑three come on, we’re not done here,” Abbado ordered. “We’ve still got a hangar full of—”
“C41, all personnel,” Major Farrell’s voice broke in over the command channel. “Evacuate the port area soonest and reform in the equipment storage lot behind the warehouses west of the concrete. We’ll set up a perimeter there and wait for pickup. Soonest, people, soonest! Out!”
“What the hell?” said Flea Glasebrook. He’d been counting stinger magazines remaining. His index finger still pointed to the pouch he’d reached when the call came.
Abbado tried to suck a drink of water. He coughed and spewed it across the inside of his faceshield. “Three‑three to the truck,” he ordered when he got his voice back. “Watch that there’s not somebody waiting when we come through the hatch.”
He hoped the truck still worked. He really hoped the truck still worked. He was afraid to think any farther ahead than that.
— 3 —
Blohm lay in the crawlspace beneath a warehouse, ten feet back from the wall. He could see wedges of the port through half a dozen of the open ventilators, but he was practically invisible from the outside.
A pair of Kalendru crouched at the base of a freighter in the middle of the field. They held shoulder-stocked lasers. Blohm aimed his stinger and squeezed twice: separate short bursts rather than a single long one. The projectiles’ vaporized driving bands fluoresced in the dimness.
Pellets that missed sparkled like fairy dust against the starship’s hull. The Spooks toppled. Blohm scrambled a few feet sideways. Somebody might have noticed the vague flicker from his stinger’s muzzle.
You’ve got to be fast. You’ve got to act without thinking. Otherwise you’re as dead as a child in a fuel-air blast.
On a corner of Blohm’s visor was a remote image from Sergeant Gabrilovitch. Gabe had retreated with most of C41 behind the line of warehouses. The lot there was half the size of the huge landing field. It held thousands of vehicles and pieces of heavy equipment in open storage ready for transshipment, but even that quantity of matériel didn’t fill the space. The pickup ship could land without scratching its paint on the Spook hardware.
If a ship arrived. If anybody in C41 was alive when it arrived. But worrying about that was somebody else’s job.
A vehicle drove through one of the smashed doors of the huge maintenance hangar across the port. Blohm aimed, dialing up the magnification of the stinger’s holographic sight while keeping his visor at 1:1 for breadth of field.
No target. It was a Spook truck, all right, but there were three strikers in the battered cab and others clinging to the back. Abbado was bringing his people back, most of them at least. A pair of missiles hit close enough to stagger the vehicle, but it continued to accelerate. Two of the left-side tires were flat, giving the truck a shimmy.
Blohm wished he was alone on a planet. No decisions to make, no responsibilities. Nobody to worry about but himself.
Something rustled; the local equivalent of a rat, or perhaps just leaves blowing. Blohm didn’t look away from the ventilators, his firing slits. His helmet would warn him of any infrared source corresponding to a human or a Kalender. Even a Kalender child.
Three Kalendru ran out of the distant hangar. Two had lasers; the Spook in the middle lifted a long launching tube to his shoulder.
Blohm shot the rocketeer first. The Spook dropped his tube and staggered backward, but he stayed on his feet.
This was long range for a stinger. The pellets depended on kinetic energy for their effect, and air resistance scrubbed off velocity. Kalendru lasers had better performance than stingers at ranges of three hundred yards and beyond, but it wasn’t often you had to worry about shooting the breadth of a starport.
Blohm raised his point of aim slightly for the second target. The burst hit the Spook in the face and throat. He flung up his hands and fell backward.
The third Spook looked around wildly. Blohm nailed him in the upper chest, then gave him a second burst when he didn’t go down. That Spook and the rocketeer collapsed together in a tangle of spindly limbs.
Blohm hoped Abbado made it clear. Well, he’d done what he could.
There was lots of room in the crawlspace. The extruded-metal joists were several feet off the ground across most of the building. A guy could live in a space like this if he had food and everybody left him alone. He’d have no decisions to make at all.

The truck went over a sunken tramline at forty miles an hour. They must have crossed the same trench headed for the hangar, but Abbado didn’t remember the jolt being so bad. The present condition of the truck’s running gear probably had something to do with it.
Glasebrook bounced high enough to dent the cab roof with his helmet. He shouted a curse.
“Quit bitching, Flea,” Abbado said. “There’s people who’d pay good money for a ride like this!”
A shell landed where the truck had crossed the tramline seconds before. Horgen dragged the steering yoke to the right, fighting the vehicle’s tendency to drift left because of the flat tires on that side.
“They can have my fucking ticket then!” Glasebrook said. He fired at a freighter on which nothing moved but wisps of smoke from all the open hatches.
More shells hit, well behind and this time to the left of the truck. Horgen continued to steer right. Her elbow rang on Flea’s breastplate.
A heavy weapons squad had set up in a pit near where C41 landed. Abbado couldn’t tell whether they’d been a rocket or a plasma cannon crew, because a shell had scooped everything out and sprayed it high in the air like ejecta from a volcano.
Bits of hard suit lay in a circle around the pit where they’d fallen. None of the pieces was larger than a gauntlet and half a forearm. One of the strikers lay spreadeagled nearby with a full complement of appendages attached to the armored torso. Blast effects were funny things. Sometimes you’d find a corpse with all his clothes blown off but not a mark on his skin.
“Hang the hell on!” Horgen said as she fought the yoke. She wanted to turn into the alley between the warehouses and the collapsed ruin that had been the big transient compound, but the vehicle wasn’t responding the way it should.
The truck was supposed to steer all eight wheels, but there seemed to be more damage than just the flat tires. Glasebrook gripped the right horn of the yoke and forced it down against whatever was dragging.
The truck skidded. Metal shrieked, but they were turning, they were going to make it.
Movement caught the corner of Abbado’s eye. He turned his head and looked squarely at the shape waddling into the port from the north.
Abbado pointed his stinger by instinct, but he didn’t bother firing. While doing so would definitely get its attention, he could piss out the truck’s window and have just as much chance of damaging a Kalendru tank.
* * *
“They’re eight minutes out,” Nadia shouted to Farrell. He’d handed responsibility for orbital communications to her when they left the jammer to automatic operation in the admin building. “They’ll be approaching from the west. One vessel.”
It’d be a tight squeeze getting C41 aboard a standard landing boat intended for fifty strikers. Of course they didn’t have the usual amount of heavy equipment on this extraction.
And again, a fifty-place vessel might be about the right size.
Farrell was in the cab of a construction tanker with plow-like nozzles on the underside to inject plasticizer into the ground. It was in the row nearest the back of the warehouses. Leinsdorf squatted beside Farrell, nursing his plasma tube and looking grim. Captain Broz stood on the tread of the giant earthmover adjacent. Farrell liked having Nadia close because of her electronics skills, though that increased the risk he and his XO would buy it simultaneously.
The rest of the strikers were spread through the ranks of Kalendru vehicles, mostly near the back of the field. The Spook artillery hadn’t begun targeting the storage field.
Spook sensor technology was excellent, but the amount of metal and electronics in the park were perfect concealment for the scattering of humans. C41 was going to need all the help it could get to stay alive until the boat arrived.
If the boat wasn’t shot down. If Primrose didn’t abort the pickup for reasons that a mere striker wouldn’t understand. If the boat didn’t land on the wrong fucking side of the planet, because that was sure the way C41’s luck had been running so far.
If Art Farrell got his people aboard the pickup vessel, his job was over. Even if the ship blew up in the next instant, it was no longer his responsibility.
The Kalendru who’d been in the port area when C41 arrived were either dead or cowed into keeping their heads down. The locals had reacted fast, but they weren’t most of them soldiers and they’d been up against the best. The Spooks’ quick individual responses meant they’d been mowed down in uncoordinated firefights against humans with better weapons, better armor, and better aim.
The Kalendru whose APCs had landed in the scrub woodland south and west of the port were infantry operating in formed units. There were already several hundred of them and they should have been dangerous, but so far every Spook who reached a firing position had been killed instantly.
The Kalendru infrared signatures made them stand out like flags against the foliage and damp ground. Human troops wouldn’t have been any better off. The strikers could track targets crawling forward for hundreds of yards. When a Spook raised his head, several stingers or a 4‑pound rocket blew him apart. Sun-heated equipment hid C41 as effectively as absorbent sheeting could have done.
The orange digits 3‑3 lit a corner of Farrell’s visor indicating a priority report from the squad leader, Sergeant Abbado. “Six, a tank’s entered the field from the north. We’re observing, but we don’t have shit to stop it. Over.”
Farrell switched to visuals from Abbado on the left side of his visor. The Kalendru tank was an opalescent dome moving onto the field with the care of a blind man. It was too wide to pass through the space between the transient compound and the end warehouse without touching, but the tank’s armored sides would simply brush the rubble apart.
“Three‑three,” Farrell said, “take firing positions but don’t do anything till I get there. Out.”
He grimaced to Leinsdorf and ordered curtly, “Come on. Nadia, you’re in charge.”
“Five minutes!” she called back.
C41 didn’t have five minutes before the tank had joined them in the storage lot. The pickup boat would have to abort if there was a hundred-megajoule laser waiting for it.
The magnetic shielding that protected the tank against directed-energy weapons was also its main weakness. The flux was so dense that it bent light itself: the driver and gunners looked out through a rainbow curtain as dazzling as the light-shot mist at the base of a waterfall. Inertial guidance took the vehicle over mapped terrain and computer enhancement aided image resolution, but the tank crew still had to grope across the landscape unless it dropped the shield. Besides the blindness, the laser couldn’t fire while the shield was in place. The tank was limited to its secondary battery of projectile weapons.
Farrell ran toward the channel he expected the tank to use. The driver might plow directly through the warehouses, but that risked filling the drive fans with debris and immobilizing the vehicle. Though the intake ducts were kinked and protected with several sets of baffles, sand and tiny pebbles showered from a collapsing building could still choke the fans.
Farrell’s quartet of 4‑pound rockets rattled against his breastplate as he jogged along a line of vehicles. Leinsdorf had a dozen more. The bodyguard almost never fired rockets during an operation, but he carried a triple load on general principles. Even if Abbado and his strikers had used up their rockets in their assault on the hangar, Farrell and Leinsdorf between them carried enough for the purpose.
The magnetic shield didn’t affect projectiles—in either direction. The tank’s outline quivered within the iridescent dome as an automatic cannon fired at the block of warehouses, perhaps the only target the gunner could make out. Explosions clocked at half-second intervals.
The 4‑pound rockets wouldn’t do more than scratch the tank’s paint. Even a 50‑pounder—the last of them had disintegrated an APC that rose to scan the storage field for targets—couldn’t have penetrated the tank’s armor. A volley of light warheads might cause the Spooks to lower their shielding for a moment to see what was happening, though.
What would be happening then was Leinsdorf nailing the tank with his single-shot plasma weapon.
The roar of the tank’s fans staggered Farrell as he stepped into the gap between buildings. The walls channeled sound the way a tidal bore focuses surf. Though the tank was only halfway across the port, its shimmering mass filled the field of view.
Abbado’s strikers squatted in the wreckage of the transient compound. They’d slewed a heavy truck across the middle of the open space, but that was more to draw the Spooks’ attention than in any hope of blocking the tank.
The tank fired a dozen explosive shells into the truck, which shuddered on its suspension. Tires and upholstery began to burn. Rounds that missed burst among vehicles parked in the field beyond.
Leinsdorf drew Farrell down in a crouch at the corner of the warehouse. He was waiting for the shooting to stop before they darted across the open space. The tankers couldn’t see a moving figure through the enveloping rainbow curtain, but Leinsdorf didn’t want his major to run into a random shell.
Though Farrell knew he might as well. His plan wasn’t going to work. The crew of this tank had seen two of their sister vehicles blasted by the strikers’ plasma cannon. They weren’t going to risk lowering their shield for even an instant, and not even Art Farrell could blame the pilot of the extraction vessel for refusing to land on top of a Kalendru tank.
No member of C41 was going to survive the operation.
— 4 —
“C’mon, Meyer, get your ass in gear!” Santini screamed. He was wearing a sweatband and a fatigue shirt with the sleeves cut to fringes, the way he did when he worked out in the weight room on board ship.
Esther Meyer opened her eyes. Had she been drinking? Her head buzzed and the whole universe was a rainbow blur.
“Move it, Meyer!” shouted Sergeant Bloch, gesturing her forward with a sweep of his arm. “We got a tank to take out!”
The rainbow was sunlight distorted through the magnetic shielding of a tank. Santini and Bloch were dead, so dead that she’d be breathing bits of them if it weren’t for the hard suit’s filters.
The tank moved no faster than a blind man walking. A rigid-walled plenum chamber enclosed the air cushion which supported the massive vehicle. Air blasting beneath the skirt’s lip skidded Meyer an inch along the concrete, but the tank was going to miss her.
A salvo of 4‑pound rockets spat from somewhere the other side of the slagged-down freighter in which C41 had inserted. The warheads twinkled harmlessly on the bow slope. The tank’s secondary armament chugged a dozen explosive shells in reply, sending distorted images across the shield’s filmy surface.
It’d take a fair-sized meteor to damage a tank’s frontal armor with mechanical effect. If strikers were using personal rockets, it meant they didn’t have anything better.
We’ve got a tank to take out.
That was a job for Heavy Weapons, and it looked like the call was for Striker Esther Meyer. Bloch and Santini might be willing to trade. . . .
Meyer rolled into the gutted transformer pit. The plan of action formed in her mind as her muscles acted. The tank didn’t shoot at her. She was probably just a shadow through the shimmering distortion.
Darkness, brightening in a microsecond to a quivering ambience like the sun viewed from under water. The circuitry had amplified the apparent view through Meyer’s visor. The tank’s skirts danced no more than a finger’s breadth above the field’s surface. Her helmet enhanced to normal viewing levels the light coming through that crack, though objects’ edges were slightly fuzzy.
Wind like a tornado’s shearing boundary layer pounded Meyer, shaking and bruising her despite her hard suit. Her helmet suppressed as much of the noise as possible, but the low-frequency harmonics made all her muscles quiver.
Air pressurized by four fans supported the vehicle’s hundred-plus tons. The forty inch high walls of the plenum chamber held the air in a resilient bubble, spreading the vehicle’s weight evenly over the ground. The tank could glide over surfaces in which wheels or treads would have bogged.
The weight didn’t go away, though. Meyer’s hard suit kept air pressure from crushing her, but the fans’ output ducts buffeted her like water from a millrace. Against it, she fought her way from the transformer pit to where she could look up into one of the fans. She still had the pair of 4‑pound rockets hanging from her belt.
On the tank’s upper surface the inlets to the drive motors were screened and baffled. The output duct into the plenum chamber was angled for protection from mines, but there was only one coarse grating downstream of the nacelle. Scrabbling forward to keep up with the tank’s slow advance, Meyer pulled a rocket from her belt and twisted the cap to arm it. She aimed it up the duct, trying to keep the nose straight against the roaring, bone-shaking gale. Strike Force warheads didn’t have arming-distance delays: risk was the striker’s responsibility.
Ignition and the bang of the warhead blowing apart the grate were lost in the thunder of the fans. Bits of casing cracked against Meyer’s armor. She didn’t know if any fragments had penetrated.
Meyer armed the second rocket. It was getting harder to fight the wind. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to aim the rocket even the short distance to the nacelle. Her brain responded to crushing fatigue by pulsing waves of color across her vision.
She fired. For an instant she thought the blue glare was another trick of her mind. Her visor muted the light instantaneously. The fan duct was a tube of arcing electricity and reflections as the nacelle destroyed itself. The solid column of air that had rammed Meyer as she squatted in the duct had ceased.
Metal shrieked over the rumble of the remaining fans. The skirt’s lip was rubbing against the concrete. Three fans could no longer support the tank when the open duct of the fourth vented the pressurized cushion to the atmosphere.
The tank skidded to a halt, trapping Meyer beneath its armored mass.
The tank settled, closing the gap between skirt and concrete. “But we got the fucker, sarge,” she whispered as darkness closed in.

Blohm fired at the twisted image of the tank’s main gun, a high-powered Cassegrain laser. The chance of getting a pellet through the tiny objective opening to damage the mirrors within wouldn’t have been high even if Blohm had been able to see the target clearly, but it was the best option going.
The magnetic dome in his sight picture changed hue. One of the intake ducts was arcing. The ionized particles couldn’t penetrate the magnetic shield, so they swirled around the tank like swarms of angry blue hornets.
The tank slid to a halt. The scream of metal on concrete was so penetrating at close range that for a moment Blohm saw double. A pall of white dust rose around the vehicle, the ejecta of a four-inch trench pulverized from the starport’s surface.
Blohm locked a fresh magazine into his stinger’s butt well. Instead of firing, he paused to see what the changing situation would bring.
The tank tried to lift on the thrust of three fans. Air backed mournfully through the fourth duct. The shimmer of magnetic shielding vanished. The crew was throwing overload power to the remaining engines in order to get the tank moving again. The power plant didn’t have enough headroom to accomplish that and meet the enormous drain of the shield at the same time.
Blohm could see the squat laser tube clearly for the first time. He hadn’t fired more than a half-second burst into it before the dazzling radiance of a plasma bolt struck the turret. That didn’t surprise him. Nobody survived in C41 unless he was fast, and Kurt Leinsdorf was damned near as fast as Blohm himself.
Blohm swapped magazines again. Part of him wondered how many kids Leinsdorf had killed over the years.

The red mask of a priority message flicked three times across Abbado’s visor. “C41, two minutes!” his helmet ordered. “All strikers commence withdrawal. Out!”
“Time to go, kiddies!” Abbado said after he pulled his own boots clear. Rubble shifted when the automatic cannon raked the transient compound, though nobody’d been hit by the shells themselves. He paused an instant to make sure his strikers were all moving.
The tank moved, but it was drifting like a cloud. Its guns were silent. The crater glowing in the turret face was the only exterior sign of damage.
Abbado’s legs wobbled for a few steps before he found the rhythm. He followed Glasebrook, the last of his strikers, toward the pickup point. Two missiles hit the transient compound. A salvo of at least a dozen landed an instant later in a fury of noise, black smoke, and debris.
Major Farrell rose from the shelter of the warehouse. “There’s a striker—” he shouted. Abbado looked back.
The tank erupted a hundred feet from where the plasma bolt hit. A white-hot plume ate away the turret, spattering ash and molten metal to all sides. For a moment the huge vehicle continued to drift; then the skirts grounded again. The hull sank slowly as the walls of the plenum chamber softened and collapsed.
A striker in a hard suit climbed from the tramline the tank had crossed just before it stopped. The figure moved toward safety through the fiery drizzle.
Farrell started to go back. Leinsdorf grabbed him.
“We’ll cover him!” Abbado called. Glasebrook was with him; the rest of 3‑3 had paused among the first line of parked vehicles.
Leinsdorf nodded gratefully. He half-walked, half-carried the major ten strides toward the pickup point before Farrell gave up and jogged willingly on his own. Thunder pulsing intermittently from the west might be the extraction boat.
Abbado sighed and armed his remaining rocket. He and Glasebrook would help the striker from Heavy Weapons—carry him, needs must, because whatever the guy’d done was damned sure the reason that tank wasn’t squatting on the pickup point right now. But first the striker had to make his own way through the circle of debris that only a hard suit could survive.
And maybe the boat would still be waiting when the three of them got to the pickup point.
* * *
The range to the hilltop where the pair of Kalendru were setting up a clip-fed rocket launcher was nearly a thousand yards. Farrell could see them clearly, magnified a hundred times in his stinger’s holographic sight, but he either couldn’t hit them or the pellets didn’t have enough energy at that range to put the targets down.
The extraction boat would land in the center of the storage lot. As strikers withdrew toward that point, C41’s base of fire collapsed. Now the Kalendru could raise their heads long enough to observe and engage the strikers.
Farrell lay full-length on the roof of an APC swathed in anti-oxidant fabric. He took a deep breath and squeezed a short burst from the trigger as he breathed out. The stinger’s butt was against Farrell’s shoulder and he gripped firmly with both hands. Even so the weapon’s slight recoil jerked the magnified sight picture up from the target.
A Kalendru shell hit between a pair of tarpaulin-covered trucks and detonated with a bang. The whole line of vehicles shuddered away from the blast. They’d been stored without fuel cells, but fabric and lubricants started to burn. Some of the Spook troops must be observing for the batteries back at Active Grid.
If the extraction boat didn’t come soon, there wouldn’t be anybody to extract.
Farrell lowered his weapon onto the distant target again. One of the gunners jumped up and clawed at his face. The other Spook was staring behind him at the roaring western sky. Farrell’s finger squeezed without his conscious volition. As he did so, another striker’s rocket hit the Spook weapon. Gun and crew vanished in a blue-white flash.
The boat came in low. It was a flattened cylinder eighty feet long and twenty wide, with the hatches already open along the rear two-thirds of the hull. Oval intakes sucked air through a fusion torus. The gas—any atmosphere would do—was expelled as high-velocity plasma to drive and support the vessel until it reached an altitude from which its magnetic drive could push against the planetary field. Lasers and light shells sparkled against the boat’s blackened armor as it overflew the Kalendru infantry.
“C41, go! Go! Go!” Nadia Broz shouted over the command channel. “All strikers aboard in sixty seconds!”
The landing boat hovered, then dropped hard onto the field. The pilot landed with the thrusters shut off to avoid endangering nearby strikers. Three Spook missiles detonated twenty feet above the vessel. Smoke drifted from the point defense turrets in the bow and stern. The triple shockwave rocked the boat but didn’t damage it. Strikers started jumping aboard.
Something blew a sullen smoke ring from the Spook-held woods. The fighting had lit several fires. One of them had reached a case of ammunition or grenades.
Farrell looked over his shoulder. Dust and varicolored smoke rose from beyond the warehouses. Some of the buildings were burning also. Farrell’s eyes didn’t see any strikers that his visor’s location chart had missed.
“For Chrissake come on, sir!” Leinsdorf snarled. He gripped Farrell’s shoulder and slid him off the APC by main force. Farrell had stopped to provide cover while his strikers withdrew, so he and Leinsdorf still had a hundred yards to run to the boat.
The coil guns in the pickup boat’s two lateral blisters raked the Spook positions. The weapons worked by the same principle as stingers but flung half-ounce projectiles. Trees shattered and rock outcrops disintegrated into sparks and lethal fragments.
Salvos of three or four shells each dived on the boat at intervals of a few seconds. Most of the rounds blew up in midair. Clouds of dirty black smoke spread above the vessel. The point defense system cycled flechettes so fast that the mechanisms screamed like saws instead of crackling.
Two of the Spook rounds hit the ground west of the boat. A striker went down; a buddy helped him to his feet. Because the missiles had been badly aimed, the defense system hadn’t bothered to engage them. The software targeted only threats to the vessel itself.
Pain crackled along the right side of Farrell’s chest. He flipped his visor up so that he could breathe without the constriction of the helmet filters. He should have switched to his oxygen bottle instead. The atmosphere was hot and metallic, sharp with ozone. His legs moved like wooden stumps.
The pickup boat was ten yards away. Strikers in the open bay fired toward the Spook infantry. Abbado and Glasebrook helped the hard-suited striker climb the high step and flop forward on the deck.
Nadia Broz was waiting at the flank of the ship. “Come on!” she screamed. The pilot blipped his air pumps. The thruster inlets honked air and a burp of iridescent plasma seared the ground.
“Go!” Farrell shouted to the pilot on the ground-to-air channel. He turned his head for one last check on any of his people who might be staggering toward pickup without the helmet that ID’d strikers on the locator circuitry. More shells were shrieking down.
Leinsdorf and Broz each grabbed an arm and together hurled their commanding officer aboard the pickup boat. An intense red flash silhouetted them and flung them after Farrell. A shell had landed just short of the vessel.
The boat lifted. The hatches were already closing.
“Medic!” Farrell shouted. He tried to sit up against the weight of Leinsdorf’s torso. “Medic!”
The strikers’ body armor had performed very well, but there was almost nothing left of either Leinsdorf or Broz below the waist.
“Medic, for the love of God!”

Interlude: Earth
My aide entered the office as I studied the holographic starscape filling the back wall. “I will be retiring soon, Miss Chun,” I said.
When I was aide to Chief of Administration Singh thirty-seven years ago, she always called me “Mr. Smith.” I have held many positions in the Unity bureaucracy since that time, but my first supervisor marked me more than I realized until I became Chief myself.
“You have several years left, sir,” Chun said. She glanced at the starscape. It was a raw blaze of color against blackness, all the stars within the volume the Unity called human space; whether or not the stars had planets, whether or not those planets had life, whether or not there was a permanent human presence in the system.
“I was thinking of Stalleybrass, Miss Chun,” I said with a smile. Her implant would have told her if I had careted one of the stars on the display, but even a biocomputer as sophisticated as a Category 4 civil servant cannot read minds.
“Not the choice I would have expected, sir,” she said, perfectly deadpan though she knew there must be a joke of sorts somewhere in my statement.
Miss Chun was not afraid of me, but she knew that if I ordered the guards outside to kill her, they would obey me without hesitation. Implants do not rob us Category 4’s of personality, but the .8 probability was that Miss Chun would commit suicide if I ordered her to do so. Any decision I made would be, must be, for the benefit of mankind.
“The learning curve ensures there will be a dip in the performance of this office when Ivanovitch replaces me as Chief,” I said. “Better that the change not occur in two years, after age and stress have made noticeable degradation in my abilities. The Kalendru leave us very little margin.”
Instead of repeating her comment about Stalleybrass, Miss Chun looked again at the starscape.
Stalleybrass is a fleet base. It has a permanent cadre of fifty thousand and a transient population of up to three times that number. Those civilians on the planet are as directly concerned with the war effort as the military personnel who outnumber them.
There are plants and shellfish in the seas of Stalleybrass, but the continents are wastes of sand with no indigenous life except lichen. Existence on Stalleybrass is viewed as a penance by all the humans stationed there.
I have been thinking a great deal about penance since I made my decision to retire.
“Not for myself directly,” I said. “The Maxus 377 expeditionary force has returned to Stalleybrass.”
Chun nodded grimly. “An expensive bit of bad luck for us,” she said, “but not nearly as expensive as it would have been if the Kalendru fleet had arrived immediately after our landing instead of immediately before. There would have been tens of thousands of casualties among troops on the ground while Admiral Gage fought off the enemy—if he in fact was able to do that. If the Kalendru had pushed Gage out of the system, the entire landing force would have been lost.”
“A .2 probability,” I agreed. “Instead we lost only twenty-six personnel.”
“Deaths as a result of enemy action,” Miss Chun said in the interests of precision. “There were a hundred and five accidental fatalities during the voyage and return, though of course the serious costs were logistical.”
“The serious costs to the Unity were logistical,” I said, precise in turn. “And our duty is to the Unity. But Miss Chun—have you considered the problem of reintegrating former combat personnel into civilian society?”
Miss Chun stiffened almost imperceptibly. She was wondering if my mental condition hadn’t deteriorated abruptly after all. “I’m aware that the problem exists, sir,” she said. “It appears to me as inevitable as the danger posed by lightning storms. Neither threatens society as a whole because of the relative rarity of the event.”
“They aren’t criminals in the normal sense,” I said. “The likelihood of a former combat soldier violating laws for the sake of gain is significantly lower than that of a non-veteran doing the same thing. The risk is that they may react with extreme violence to social constraints on their behavior.”
Miss Chun walked to her console in the corner. Even with an implant the amount of information one can absorb is limited. Until now Miss Chun had scanned only a summarized report on the Maxus 377 expeditionary force. She called up the full data, from inception to the present.
I had viewed the same file a few minutes before she entered the office.

Interlude: Stalleybrass
Because the driver was afraid of getting into trouble, the surface-effect truck slowed only to about twenty miles an hour. Abbado and his strikers had inserted from vehicles moving a lot faster than that. They unassed from the right-side cargo door, the side opposite the enlisted personnel club, and landed without even bothering to roll.
Methie stumbled because the leg burned at Active Cloak hadn’t fully healed on the voyage back. Glasebrook kept him from tumbling.
The driver accelerated, leaving a wake of dust stirred from the barren landscape by the truck’s stub wings. He’d tried to argue 3‑3 out of hiding in the back as he deadheaded to the port, but he’d given in when Abbado insisted. The driver’s kid brother had been a striker in B-4 before he was killed.
“All present and accounted for, Sarge,” Horgen said. Abbado waited till the pall of fine red powder had settled a little, then tugged down the kerchief he’d tied over his nose and mouth to filter some of the solids out of the local atmosphere.
Abbado didn’t want them to look as though they’d come to stick the place up. They just wanted a beer or two—dozen. He and his six strikers sauntered in line abreast across the “street,” a hundred-foot channel between buildings. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, but twice they had to wait for a vehicle to pass in the other direction.
The club had been converted from a warehouse like those to either side of it. The unit insignia painted over the door was too dusty to be legible. A Sergeant 4th Class watched through a clear window as 3‑3 approached. He looked pissy.
Abbado didn’t blame the locals for being in a bad mood. Glasebrook must have been thinking the same thing because he said, “You know, I think I’d eat my gun before I’d let them stick me here in the permanent garrison.”
The doorman was in his late thirties, ten years older than Abbado. He wore a dove-gray rear echelon fatigue uniform that was so clean he must have changed into it after he entered the club. Nothing could exist in the open on Stalleybrass without getting a coating of dust.
“Good afternoon, Sergeant,” Abbado said. He was a Sgt3 himself, and the one-step difference in rank made no matter off-duty. “What’s the beer like on Stalleybrass?”
He pulled at the doorhandle. The door didn’t open.
“You’re barbs from the fleet, right?” the garrison soldier called through the panel. “Anyway, you’re out of uniform for this club. Better get your asses gone before the Shore Police show up to ask what you’re doing out of your compound.”
“Hey, look, Sarge,” Abbado said. He licked his lips. His mouth had a dangerous adrenaline dryness. He didn’t like being called a barbarian, especially not through a locked door. “We’re Strike Force, yeah, but we just come here for a drink. Our base element got screwed up or something and there’s no beer in our assigned compound. We’re all the same army, right?”
“I don’t know what army you’re in, buddy,” the older sergeant said. “I just know you’re not wearing rank tabs, you’re not wearing a uniform prescribed for military personnel on Stalleybrass, and you’re not getting into this club.”
His hand moved. A buzzer sounded somewhere behind him.
“What is this shit?” Horgen demanded. She tweaked the mandarin collar of her field-service fatigues. “These are the only fucking uniforms we got!”
The fabric blurred like a chameleon’s skin, suggesting the color and patterning of its surroundings. For the moment, that meant it was dull, dusty red.
“Then you’re in the wrong place, barb, just like I told you before,” the doorman said. “Beat it!”
Abbado nodded. He was starting to tremble. “Let’s go in, Flea,” he said quietly.
Glasebrook put his massive right boot on the doorjamb and gripped the handle with both hands. He pulled. The mortise split and the latchplate pulled completely out of the panel.
“Let’s not have a problem, Sarge,” Abbado said as he strode past the doorman. “We’re just after a—”
Music, a ballad wailed a cappella by a trio of androgynes, continued on a holographic stage against the wall opposite the bar. The garrison soldiers inside had formed a rank. They shifted forward. None of the locals was Glasebrook’s size, but there were more than a hundred of them in the cavernous hall.
“Three‑three!” Abbado shouted as he kicked an oncoming garritrooper in the nuts.
He knew it was all over before it started. The only reason it took nearly two minutes before Glasebrook flew out into the dust with the rest of them was that the locals were packed too tightly together to use their numbers to full advantage.
The Sgt4 stood in the doorway, panting and livid. The doorpanel had been demolished at some point in the proceedings. The front of the doorman’s neat tunic was ripped down to his waistband.
“Go back to the reservation, barbs!” he shouted.
Abbado picked himself up. “Everybody all right?” he murmured. He could feel his cheek swelling. A chair had hit him in the face.
“I’m better than somebody’s going to be right soon,” Flea Glasebrook said. He started forward again. Abbado caught his arm.
“Go away and stay away!” the doorman said.
“We’ll be back,” said Guilio Abbado. His throat was as dry as a grindstone. “But we’ll be in uniform when we come.”

Interlude: Earth
“After all, Miss Chun,” I said, “a grenade isn’t trying to get rich either.”
I smiled.

Interlude: Stalleybrass
“Shit!” Horgen shouted when she realized they were coming in too fast. She goosed both lift fans but the armored personnel carrier still hit like a ton of old iron. They pogoed in the dust cloud before Horgen could chop the throttles, but Abbado and four strikers were already out.
The regular land-force driver had been willing to look the other way while his APC disappeared, but he’d refused to drive 3‑3 on the operation. All the strikers knew the basics of an aircar, but they didn’t have the trained reflexes. The APC’s mass made it react deceptively slowly to control inputs.
Abbado hoped the vehicle was still in shape to extract 3‑3 in a few minutes, but that wasn’t the first thing on his mind just now.
Methie’d transferred from a mechanized infantry unit to the Strike Force. Because he’d used a coil gun and because of his bum leg, Abbado assigned him to the APC’s turret. Methie sawed a line of half-ounce slugs through the club’s facade ten feet above the ground. The air cracked like stones shearing.
Somebody had rehung the door in the hours since the strikers had been here previously. The latch was tacked back to the panel with a sheet of brown plastic. Abbado blew the mechanism apart with his stinger and slammed through. A kick would have been quicker, but the weapon made a point he hoped the locals understood.
Some of him hoped the locals understood. The rest was perfectly willing to splatter the guts of any bastard who came for him.
The doorman, the same sergeant who’d been there the first time, bellowed with pain. The stinger pellets along with everything they hit at such short range had disintegrated. The bits the doorman got in the way of had eaten away a chunk of his uniform and the skin beneath. It must have felt like being sandblasted.
Could’ve been worse, buddy.
The strikers wore helmets and body armor. Abbado hunched so that the point of his shoulder caught the sergeant in the pit of the stomach as he went by.
The visor’s capabilities hadn’t been much help outside because the swirling dust was opaque across the whole RF spectrum, but enhancement turned the dim interior lighting as bright as a drill field. There were a lot more people present than there had been earlier in the evening. Very few of them even had the sense and reflexes to flatten when coil-gun shot cracked overhead in a shower of splinters from the front wall.
They could scream though. They were doing that even before Abbado’s stinger sawed a zigzag in the drop ceiling.
Other strikers were firing. Light enhancement turned the stingers’ muzzle aura into flaring brilliance. C41 didn’t go in much for non-lethal weaponry, but Matushek had found a crate of riot gas grenades. He lobbed them into the middle of the room.
As ordered, Methie shut down the coil gun after the initial burst. Abbado’d been afraid Methie would get overexcited and drop the muzzle with 3‑3 in the club. Besides, the projectiles travelled a hell of a long way. Even on Stalleybrass there were places Abbado knew he’d afterwards regret having shot up.
Large chunks of the ceiling came down. Half the overhead lights were out; flickers showed where powerlines were arcing.
“Watch it, Sarge!” Glasebrook warned. Abbado ducked. The doorman flew past and hit the bar with his arms and legs flailing. Something crunched and it wasn’t the furniture.
The part of the crowd that could still move stampeded toward the rear of the hall. A place this big probably had an oversized fire exit with crash bars. If it didn’t, well, safety regulations for rear-echelon motherfuckers weren’t Abbado’s concern.
He slapped a fresh magazine in the stinger’s butt, then emptied it into the back ceiling in a single slashing burst. Flocked insulation swirled down like an explosion in a pillow factory. Pellets flashed when they hit the metal stringers. Reloading again, Abbado let the spring-loaded sling snug the weapon back against his right armpit as he used both hands to vault the bar.
Gas spread like thin smoke from the middle of the room where the grenades had landed. Abbado switched his visor from enhancement to infrared before he bent and began jerking dispenser trays out of the beer cooler. The gas scattered light in the visible band, but it didn’t seem to affect the longer IR rays.
His helmet filters were in place but he felt the back of his hands prickle. He sure hoped the shit wasn’t absorbed through the skin. The gas wasn’t supposed to be fatal. From the look of the REMFs puking their guts up among the overturned tables, though, some of them wished they were dead.
Abbado slapped trays up on the bar behind him. Matushek was emptying another cooler. Two of the bartenders huddled at the far end, their hands clasped over the back of their necks. The remainder of 3‑3 was hauling the loot outside or chewing more of the building apart with their stingers. One good thing about a rear-echelon base was you could count on weapons being locked in armories. Even strike companies had to turn in their hardware.
Some of their hardware.
Abbado jerked the last tray out of the cooler and shouted, “Let’s go!”
He grunted as he rolled himself back over the bar. Enough of the hormones had worn off that he was aware of his armor’s weight again.
One-handed, Abbado tugged down his stinger and put half a magazine into coolers there hadn’t been time to empty. Chrome-faced doors flew apart. At the other end of the bar Matushek paused to pat the upraised fanny of one of the bartenders, an even better way to increase the REMFs’ demoralization.
Abbado ran for the door. Glasebrook was ahead of him with a stack of dispenser trays so high that the transom scraped the top one off. Abbado caught it as it fell without really thinking about what he was doing. He dived with his burden into the waiting APC.
“Go!” Methie yelled, keeping count from the turret as 3‑3 reboarded. The coil gun put another twenty rounds into the bar ceiling. The burst must have severed a major beam because a quarter of the roof twisted and sagged with a tortured moan.
The APC lifted. The side panels were still lowered. Abbado saw movement—an aircar with a pulsing red light closing fast from the west.
“Goose it, Horgen!” he said. “The Shore Police’s woke up!”
There was a bang from above him. Abbado thought for an instant that the SPs were shooting; then he saw a spark curving in the direction of the cops’ flashing party hat. “What the fuck was that?” he demanded.
Methie looked down from the cupola. “We got two anti-emitter missiles with the bus,” he said. “I figured this was a good time to use one.”
The red light spun like a flipped coin and vanished from the sky. Abbado didn’t see the flash of an explosion. He felt the future opening before him like a black cone: a complete absence of experience, stretching on forever.
“You blew up a carload of cops?” Caldwell said. “Ah, they’ll shoot us for that.”
She didn’t sound excited. They were all too flat after the operation to be excited.
Horgen kept the APC low so it would be harder to track if anybody was trying. They were flying fast enough to keep ahead of the dust they raised. The compound was still a few minutes out.
“Hey, I’m an expert, remember?” Methie said. “I tuned it to home on the RF signals from their front fan, not the radio in the cab. I didn’t even arm the warhead! They just had an engine failure.”
Glasebrook laughed in a deep rumble.
“They may still have broke their necks when they went down, you know,” Abbado said.
“Hey, they took that risk when they got out of bed in the morning,” Methie replied.
Abbado’d been sitting on the floor. Now he swung down a seat from the central spine.
“Somebody pass me a beer, will you?” Horgen called from the cockpit. “You got the beer, right?”
“You bet your ass,” Glasebrook said with deep satisfaction. He pulled one of the dispensers apart and began tossing cans to the other strikers.
Abbado looked out into the night and sipped his beer. There wasn’t a lot to see as the APC roared across a darkened waste of stone and lichen.
There’d be hell to pay in a couple hours, Abbado knew from experience. But for the moment, he was home.

Interlude: Earth
Miss Chun’s eyes were slightly crossed while she took the data dump. They focused again. “I see what you mean, sir,” she said. “I’d expected that the psychological casualties would have been reported.”
She shook her head in amazement that formal reports had been faked. Real information on C41 had to be extracted from second-order effects.
“The entire strike company engaged on the ground has redlined,” Miss Chun continued. “We may be able to return some of the personnel to combat duties in the future, but frankly I don’t regard that as more than a .3 probability.”
“Acceptable parameters for strike force personnel are looser than regulations might suggest,” I said. “Sergeant Third Class Guilio Abbado has been broken to Basic twice already in the past six years for conduct like this most recent incident. Broken to Striker, I should say, since he’s remained in the Strike Force throughout the period.”
“Then you believe these personnel are still functional, sir?” Miss Chun said. She spoke in a perfectly flat voice. If there had been any tone coloring the words, the question would have become an insult.
“I believe that personnel who remain in a Strike Force company for more than one operation are almost by definition unsuitable for other duties,” I explained. “Officers higher in the organizational chain know that and make allowances for behavior that would be unacceptable in other units. The strikers avoid psychological support between missions because they believe—correctly—that they’re at great risk of being redlined if they do seek help.”
My aide watched me, assimilating what was only data to her. Miss Chun was highly intelligent or she would not have been accepted for Category 4, and her implant gave her access to more information than a thousand unaugmented geniuses could have absorbed; but she was twenty-five Earth years old.
There aren’t enough human beings in the universe for statistical techniques suitable for, say, gas diffusion analysis to predict low-order behavior; nor was twenty-five years long enough to gain an intuitive feel for all of those behavioral patterns.
“But you’re quite right, Miss Chun,” I said. “Strike Force Company C41 has to be treated as having crossed the red line. The fifty-four personnel who came back from Maxus 377 in adequate physical condition are as useless to the Unity armed forces as the twenty-six who died or were permanently disabled in the operation.”
Miss Chun nodded. “I’ll give the order,” she said, reaching for the console. “Separated from service with full pensions, I assume, rather than merely assigned to rear echelon duties?”
“No,” I said.
And I told her what I proposed to do.
My aide’s left eyelid quivered, her only failure of control over her body. “Sir,” she said calmly. “You can’t do that. You must rethink your proposition.”
“ ‘The word must is not to be used to princes,’ Miss Chun,” I quoted. “If ever there was a prince in the sense Queen Elizabeth meant the word, I am he. Until I retire, I have any power I choose to exercise. This is the course I choose.”
“Sir,” said Miss Chun, “if you believe this is the proper way to deal with the redlined military personnel, I defer to your greater experience. But I don’t see how the involvement of civilians in this fashion can be consistent with our duty to the Unity.”
I stood up slowly. My implant gives me great knowledge and control over my body and its processes. It also provides a harsh record of the degree to which stress and age have ground away at my health.
“Do you believe that the Unity owes its soldiers nothing but burial or a pension, Miss Chun?” I said. My voice didn’t rise, but it had less give than the face of an anvil. “Do you think it is to the long-term benefit of the Unity that our citizens regard discharged soldiers as trash that litters our streets and occasionally explodes lethally? Do you?”
Miss Chun’s face tightened into marble smoothness. I was angry at myself, at what I had been and still was. She misunderstood, and I could not explain in a way she could understand. She was only twenty-five.
“I regret the necessity of many things I have done for the Unity, Miss Chun,” I said more softly. “I regret the cost this colony draft will pay. The cost these people, these civilian human beings who are drafted into this colonization project, will pay. Nonetheless I see it as necessary.”
Miss Chun nodded; acknowledgment that she heard me, not that she agreed.
“I will give the operation a top project manager,” I added.
Miss Chun stood perfectly still, her head and torso framed by the starscape. She understood: not why, but what I intended.
“Yes,” she said. “We will.”

A Place Out of Time
Farrell’s strikers clustered about him on a bare concrete plain. He watched the shell for the whole course of its flight. The gun crew weren’t Kalendru, weren’t human. They were just figures, and he couldn’t understand where they were or why he could see them.
“Major, you’ve got to get us out of here!” Nadia said. All of them were watching him, every striker who’d served in C41 since Major Arthur Farrell was appointed to command.
The shell hit and exploded. Farrell didn’t hear the blast, only the screams of his dying strikers. There was no cover, nowhere to run or hide.
“They’re going to kill us all, sir!” Leinsdorf said. He didn’t have any legs but he was standing anyway, staring with accusing eyes at the commander who let him die.
Another shell approached. It moved as slowly as a tachometer needle rising to redline.
Nowhere to run. All around the plain stood figures watching. They were not involved in any way; just watching.
The shell hit. Another silent blast and the screams. The screams came in pulses, pausing and then vibrating again through Farrell’s mind. He looked at blood and body parts and the staring faces of the betrayed.
“Major, why don’t you get us out? We trusted you!”
He heard the sound of a last shell diving toward him. All his strikers were dead. Everyone but Arthur Farrell was dead, and he had killed them.
The shriek of the incoming round was louder, closer. The shell throbbed with red light, again and again.
Farrell bellowed as he awakened. The room was dark except for the incoming message light on the communications set beside the bed.
He lifted the handset. “C41, Farrell,” he said. His throat was raw from shouting in his sleep. He heard the identifying background hiss of Dirac communication.
An interstellar message was so unlikely that Farrell wondered if he were still dreaming. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. The sheets were sweat-soaked and wrapped around his waist.
“Major Farrell,” said the female voice on the other end of a line light-years long, “this is Department One, 701st Regimental Command.”
Earth, operations office. For administrative purposes the Strike Force was listed on the Table of Organization as the 701st Regiment of the Unity Military Establishment. Operations were always conducted at company strength and tasked through theater commands, however. Nothing came from Earth HQ except pay, supply vouchers, and personnel assignments.
“This is a warning order,” the voice said.
Though the signals were relayed by a constellation of ordinary geosynchronous comsats, the interstellar transceiver itself was a satellite the size of a planetoid. It trailed Stalleybrass by three light-seconds in heliocentric orbit. The construction was so complex and expensive that only a dozen of the hundred-plus human-settled worlds had Dirac installations.
“Warning order?” Farrell repeated. The dream had disoriented him. Whenever he opened his eyes, the room spun. “Sir, there must be a mistake. C41 is on stand-down.”
“Major Farrell, there is no mistake,” the voice said. “Have your unit prepared for operational deployment in twenty-four hours. Hard copy will follow through Theater Base Headquarters.”
“Sir!” Farrell said. “We aren’t ready for action. We won’t be ready for, for . . .”
This was insane. Farrell’s head buzzed. He didn’t know if he was awake or dreaming. If he turned the lights on, would he find himself standing on a plain with the bodies of his people around him?
“Major Farrell,” the voice said, “I suggest you recall that in the Strike Force our tradition is to carry out orders, not to argue against them. Transmission ends.”
The hiss stopped. The air was dead, as dead as Nadia Broz.
Our tradition. You rear-echelon bitch.
Farrell felt the handset squirm in his grip. He cradled it. That was only an illusion, a part of his nightmare.
Farrell got up. The sheets dragged after him. He jerked them from the bed and hurled them into a corner of the room. He needed to put a uniform on. Then he had to go to the dayroom to tell whoever was on duty as Charge of Quarters to start alerting people.
Life was a nightmare.

Earth: The Next Step on the Road
As soon as C41’s command group got out at what was supposed to be a major starport on Earth, the aircar lifted again with a spray of gritty soil. The pilot hadn’t said a word to the three strikers during the flight from Oakland District to Emigration Port 10 on the Balcones Escarpment. Farrell wondered if the fellow had dropped them at the wrong place.
The hull of automated transport 10‑1442 was complete. From inside, the whining of power wrenches, the angrier howl of saws, and extrusion equipment that sounded like lions vomiting indicated that construction continued. Sixteen similar vessels were spaced a quarter mile apart at decreasing levels of completion. The monorail that joined the sites in a racetrack pattern brought materials graduated by the stage of construction.
An empty eighteenth site waited immediately west of where Farrell stood with his patched-together command group. The prickly nut grass crawling across the ground there was yellowed. The roots had been cooked by eddy currents between the buried magnetic mass and the starship launched a few days before.
“I don’t remember the last time I was in a civilian port,” said Lieutenant Marina Kuznetsov. She’d been CO of First Platoon. By virtue of being the only other officer who survived Active Cloak, she was now Farrell’s XO. “This isn’t much like I expected, though.”
Sgt5 Daye, C41’s First Sergeant, said, “Active Cloak was a civilian port. Part civilian, anyhow.”
“It wasn’t a lot noisier when we were there either,” Kuznetsov agreed.
Pallets just unloaded from a ten-car train were being gobbled by construction crews. The port’s only permanent buildings were five-story rammed-earth barracks, one per site. Every room had a balcony, and the walls’ basic dirty-yellow hue was overpainted in garish patterns. Farrell found the result attractive if not in any sense of the word beautiful.
Even when the facilities are the same, civilians live better than soldiers. Well, they’ve got something to live for.
Farrell would have tried to find a reporting office in the nearest barracks except for the high fence which surrounded the building. There was an eyeprint lock on the gate, and the sign said Site Personnel Only.
It was hot and dry. Mesquite and prickly pear cactus ten feet high grew between the sites. The strikers didn’t have helmets or other equipment, just battledress uniforms so new they had a chemical odor. Farrell felt naked and angry and very, very tired.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s see if there’s anybody in charge in the ship. If there’s no billets for our people . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence. There was no finish. The rest of his strikers were scheduled to arrive in forty-seven minutes. If nobody’d arranged for C41’s housing and rations, if they’d been sent to the wrong place, if they had to spend the night in a fucking scrub desert with no gear at all . . .
What else was new?
10‑1442 was constructed with the extreme simplicity of an object which would be used once and then scrapped. The entrance hold was the entire bottom deck. For the moment it was bare of everything except grime and cryptic symbols chalked on the plates around the support pillars. Inside a workman in blue coveralls was fitting a fresh bottle of insulating foam to his spray head.
“Hey, buddy,” Farrell said. “We’re looking for the project manager, Jafar al‑Ibrahimi. Got any notion where he’d be?”
“Nope,” said the workman. He pulled down a clear mask to cover his face and began spraying the bulkhead. The foam went on a dull white but darkened to gray in seconds. The smell made Farrell sneeze; his eyes watered.
Daye switched off the sprayer.
Kuznetsov lifted the man’s mask away and tossed it behind her. “Do better,” she said. Her voice had sounded like a crow’s ever since she took a bullet through the throat.
“Hey, I got a deadline!” the workman said.
“So do we,” said Farrell. “Forty-three minutes. Where do we find the project manager?”
“The upper decks got finished first,” the workman said. “I’d guess he was up in the nose, somewhere around there. But look, I don’t know. Can I do my job now?”
“Maybe in a bit,” said Daye. “How do we get to the nose?”
The workman grimaced and pointed toward the pillar along the axis of the ship. “The lifts are that way,” he said. “Three and Four work, the others I don’t know about. They didn’t this morning.”
“Thank you, Citizen,” Farrell said. “Marina, would you wait by the hatch? I don’t know how long this’ll take, and I don’t want our people to arrive and not have anybody meet them.”
“Yeah,” rasped the lieutenant. “They might get the idea that nobody gives a shit about strikers.” She walked back outside, whistling a snatch of Tchaikovsky.
There were eight lift shafts in a central rotunda, but hoses and power cables snaked into five of them. The door of the sixth was open into an empty cage. Busy workmen in blue, puce, or orange ignored not only the strikers but anybody wearing a uniform of a different color. They shouted to their fellows or into epaulet communicators.
Lift Four arrived as Farrell and Daye entered the rotunda. Three workmen, one of them carrying a powered jack as long as her arm, pushed aboard with the strikers. The cage would easily have held twenty.
There wasn’t a call button inside, nor had Farrell noticed one in the rotunda. The cage paused twenty seconds at each deck with the door open, then rose again without command. A workman hopped off at the next stop. Three more got on two decks above.
Farrell frowned. He hadn’t realized the degree to which the transport was automated. He’d thought the term applied only to the navigation system. It looked like the passengers would be treated as canned goods in all fashions.
Well, at least the strikers were used to that.
“Sir,” Daye said, “what the fuck are we doing here?”
“All I know is that C41 is the security element for a new colony,” Farrell said. “The planet’s BZ 459, and I haven’t gotten to a database that has anything to add to the bare listing.”
Daye frowned. “External security, sir?” he asked. “Or police for the folks themselves?”
“I don’t know,” Farrell said. He stared at the door, wishing there were answers written there instead of the stencilled notice mount this direction with an arrow up.
“We’re not cops, sir,” Daye said. “Shit-fire, they wouldn’t be that dumb, would they?”
“I don’t know,” Farrell repeated. Though the real answer was: that dumb, no; that callous, maybe.
“Shit-fire,” Daye repeated softly.
For the first half dozen times the door opened, racket from the deck beyond made the cage vibrate. The last workman got out on Deck 10; above that the pauses were quiet. Only occasionally did Farrell glimpse somebody in the corridor. It occurred to Farrell that he didn’t know how many levels the ship had.
When the lift reached Deck 25, Farrell heard angry voices. He nodded to Daye and the pair of them stepped out of the cage just before the door closed. Insulation covered the floor as well as bulkheads and ceiling. It was as soft as a deep-pile carpet. Foot traffic had already dented it.
A young woman stood at the door of an austerely furnished office/conference room. She nodded as they approached and called, “Major Farrell and Sergeant Daye have arrived, sir.”
Farrell had no idea who she was.
A man in his sixties sat behind an electronic desk which was welded to the floor. Like the woman he wore loose, many-pocketed clothing that would have been battledress if there’d been any badge or patch on it.
The cloth was brown rather than chameleon-dyed, but it was still the same synthetic that went into the strikers’ uniforms. The fabric was tough and breathed even better than natural fibers, but it was harsh enough to take your skin off when pressed against you by armor and equipment. Maybe these civilians wore underwear.
The three other civilians—a man of thirty, a woman in her fifties, and another man who was probably as old as the fellow at the desk—turned when the strikers entered. All of them wore ordinary business clothes of excellent quality, though the older man’s socks were mismatched.
The younger man had been shouting in a resonant tenor voice. The three were standing, though the bulkheads had fold-down seats. Two short benches could also have been pulled up from the floor to face the desk.
“Gentlemen,” the young woman said, “this is Project Manager Jafar al‑Ibrahimi. I’m his assistant, Tamara Lundie—”
Farrell saw a thought flick behind Lundie’s eyes, though she didn’t blink physically.
“I’m a Manager 3, that’s the equivalent of a senior lieutenant,” Lundie continued. “Manager al‑Ibrahimi is the equivalent of a full colonel and is in sole charge of the project.”
Farrell felt his mouth smile. Did she think strikers were so rank-conscious that they needed to have civilian pecking orders explained to them? Oh, God, his poor strikers, being dropped into another ratfuck . . .
“Major,” al‑Ibrahimi said, “is the remainder of your unit on schedule?”
The project manager was a slight man who appeared brittle, an appearance Farrell decided was false as soon as he heard the man speak. Al‑Ibrahimi wasn’t going to break, and Farrell didn’t think he’d be easy to grind down either. What surprised Farrell was the degree to which something had already ground al‑Ibrahimi down.
There was plenty of steel left, though.
“Yes sir,” Farrell said. If there’d been a problem, somebody would have reported through the finger-sized communicator he carried in his pocket in lieu of the helmet he was used to. This wasn’t a combat operation where no news might mean—usually meant—that everybody in the silent unit had been killed instantly.
“Good,” said al‑Ibrahimi. “Major, Ms. Susannah Reitz is president of the building council and therefore de facto leader of the colony. Dr. Joao Suares—”
He nodded toward the older man. Suares looked surprised.
“—and Mr. Matthew Lock are her co‑councillors. Madame, gentlemen, Major Farrell is head of our security element, and Sergeant Daye is his ranking enlisted man. We’ll be working closely together after landfall.”
“Mr. al‑Ibrahimi,” Lock said, “I demand that you halt this process until my request for an injunction can be heard. The very idea of assigning the residents of an urban apartment building as the initial colony on a totally unsettled planet is insane!”
Farrell didn’t let his face show surprise, but that was at least one thing he and the councillor could agree on.
Lock was in good shape. He must keep fit with sports and exercise equipment. It was a civilian sort of “good condition” though, and it looked soft to eyes like Farrell’s. He was used to strikers whose flesh had been pared off by discomfort, stress, and the lack of appetite caused by exhaustion.
Farrell found it odd to look at civilians close up. Real civilians, not Unity bureaucrats providing support to the armed forces. Farrell hadn’t been on leave in a real rear area during the past five years, and civilians sure as hell didn’t show up in the places he did go.
“Tamara,” al‑Ibrahimi said, “brief Major Farrell on his unit’s billets, supplies, and duties during the voyage. The remainder of C41 can be expected in thirty-nine minutes.”
The project manager hadn’t checked either a clock or a schedule, so far as Farrell could see.
Lundie turned on her heel. She was pretty enough but not Farrell’s type. Farrell’s type was a woman who didn’t look at him as if he were a pallet of rations—and an equally unlikely love object.
“As for you, Councillor Lock,” al‑Ibrahimi continued as the strikers followed Lundie out of the office, “I will carry out Unity policy as it devolves on me, and you will do the same. Failure to comply with a Colonization Order means loss of citizenship—”
“I know that!” Lock said. “But—”
“—and a life sentence to a labor camp,” the manager continued. Lundie had led the strikers back to the rotunda, but her chief’s crisp voice was still perfectly clear. “Now, during the voyage each two decks of colonists will be separated by a deck of supplies and . . .”
A lift cage arrived. The strikers stepped aboard in unison with Lundie. Daye looked as worried as Farrell had ever seen him.
The only thing that kept Daye going was the hope that his CO had the situation in hand. Farrell knew that was a vain hope if ever there’d been one.
Lundie led them off on the next deck down. “Your quarters are here on Twenty-four,” she said, the first words she’d spoken directly to the strikers since introducing them. “Your rations and equipment will be stored with you. The remaining volume on this deck will store colony supplies that won’t be needed until after landing on Bezant 459.”
She led Farrell and Daye down a corridor. The doors to either side were ajar. The rooms had eight pull-down bunks, a shower stall, a double washstand, and a latrine. The space and amenities were better than those of a troopship and enormously better than an assault vessel’s, but Farrell didn’t imagine the civilian colonists were going to be happy.
“Ma’am,” said Sergeant Daye. “Ah, can I ask a question?”
“Yes, of course,” Lundie said. “And please refer to me as you would refer to one of your own officers.”
“Yes ma’am,” Daye said. Farrell wondered if he was having as much trouble as Farrell himself was imagining the young woman in C41. “What that fellow said about a whole building being turned into a colony—is that true?”
“Yes,” said Lundie. “Horizon Towers in the Central Chicago District. Every resident of Earth is subject to Colonization Orders, but this particular technique has never been used before.”
“Did some computer blow a fuse?” Farrell asked. “Or did some dickheaded human really think this was a good idea?”
“I can’t answer that,” Lundie said. When she spoke on most subjects, her voice had the false rhythms of an AI program forming words. This was so flat that perversely it indicated real feeling.
“Rations and other consumables for your company have already been loaded into these two compartments,” Lundie continued. “And there’s a large compartment here—”
“C41 bunks aboard while the ship’s being finished, you mean?” Daye interjected.
Lundie looked at him. “The ship will be finished very shortly,” she said. “Liftoff is in six hours, twelve minutes.”
She opened the door as she’d started to do. There was nothing to be seen but an empty room. Throughout the vessel, ringbolts on all flat surfaces provided anchors for cargo nets and tie-downs.
“—for your personal stores and equipment. There’s a separate compartment for use as an armory.”
“We keep our hardware with us in C41,” Farrell said flatly. “Is that going to be a problem?”
Lundie’s face was still. “That isn’t necessary on the voyage,” she said carefully.
“It’s necessary if I’m going to sleep,” Daye said. “I’m itchy right now, ma’am.”
“C41’s pretty stressed,” Farrell said. He didn’t know how to explain to a civilian. “I know there’s a risk, but I think the risk is worse if I, if we . . .”
Daye grimaced. “Look, ma’am, if you can get us reassigned to something we know how to do, that’d be great. We’re strikers, we’re not, we’re . . .”
“Arrangements for security personnel are yours to determine, major,” Lundie said. “Assignments to the Bezant 459 project are of course from higher levels of the government.”
She cleared her throat as a period, then continued, “The colonists will be arriving in three hours. Since your helmets have full communications and mapping capacity, we’ll use your personnel as guides for corridor assignments. Initially only the upper seventeen decks will be complete, so . . .”
Farrell continued to listen to the young woman. From long experience he’d be able to reel off her statements word perfect when he assigned individual missions to his people.
But Farrell’s heart was in a dark place of its own, and his soul was as dead as the strikers C41 had left scattered across a galaxy at war.

The landscape of spiky trees and spiky grass, scattered sparsely over gritty dirt, could easily have been a frontier planet. Abbado hadn’t known there were parts of Earth that looked like this.
It was probably news to the colonists being herded off the train by uniformed police, too. The largest expanse of vegetation most of the civilians would have seen before was their apartment building’s roof garden.
The poor bastards stared at their surroundings with shell-shocked expressions. “They better get used to it,” Abbado said aloud. “I don’t know about Bezant, but I’ve seen a lot of planets that make this look like an R&R base.”
The police carried shock batons. They weren’t hitting people with them that Abbado saw, but they chivied the civilians with their free hands while the batons waved.
“This ain’t right,” Glasebrook muttered. “I don’t like us being mixed up with it.”
“Cheer up, Flea,” Abbado said. “This assignment got us off Stalleybrass fast. I wasn’t much looking forward to answering questions about a little problem there at a cadre bar.”
Abbado had been more relieved than he would admit to his strikers. The morning after they’d shot up the REMFs he’d been asking himself how the hell he’d let himself do that; but at the time, at the time . . .
The police wore riot helmets and breastplates, not a patch on Strike Force equipment for weight but not particularly comfortable in this climate either. That was probably part of the reason they were treating the civilians like animals.
Already some strikers were shepherding ragged columns of civilians toward the starship. “Sarge, we’ve found ours,” Horgen called over the squad push. “We’ll see you at the billet. Out.”
“The ones we’re looking for are going to be the batch that caught the wrong train,” Abbado grumbled to Glasebrook. Matushek, the third member of the group, was scanning civilians to match the holographic portraits downloaded into his helmet database.
For the loading, Top Daye had broken 3‑3 into fire teams under Horgen and Abbado to get colonists to decks 18 and 19 respectively. Methie and Foley were detached to help the two survivors of Heavy Weapons guide the building support staff.
The apartment block from which the colonists came had eight stories. For the voyage the residents were split into east and west corridors and each group was supposed to be on a single car of the train. If there’d been a little coordination back when the train was loaded the strikers would know exactly which carload went to which deck, but of course that hadn’t happened.
“Don’t see why civilians can’t count the decks up to nineteen themselves,” Glasebrook muttered.
“Buck up, Flea,” said Abbado. “Nobody’s shooting at us, right?”
The monorail shivered for its full length as current to the magnets raised the hangers a hair’s breadth from the elevated track. The train accelerated slowly, but it was up to ninety miles an hour by the time the last car whipped past Abbado and his strikers. Suction dragged at them, but the only sound the train made was a hiss and the faint click of couplers.
“Sarge, got them!” Matushek reported. He was standing twenty feet from the others, so he used helmet commo to speak over the nervous chatter of a thousand colonists and their guides. “They were on the other side of the track! Over.”
“Fucking typical,” Abbado said as he strode toward the clump of fifty-odd stunned-looking civilians. In a louder voice he shouted, “Six West! Form on me!”
The track serving Emigration Port 10 had loading platforms only on one side. Naturally, one of the cars had been misaligned so that its doors were on the wrong side; and naturally, the folks Abbado was looking for were on that car.
The police had noticed the misplaced civilians also. Half a dozen of the nearest strode under the support rail ahead of the strikers. A tall, badly overweight cop bellowed, “Hey you assholes! What’re you doing over there? Move it!”
He grabbed the nearest civilian by the arm and jerked her in the direction of the starship. She was carrying bulging net bags, far too much of a load for a woman in her sixties. One of them spilled packages onto the ground.
“That’s okay, buddy, we’ll take care of this!” Abbado said. His voice was thinner than normal because he was going to be reasonable, he wasn’t going to do what he wanted to. “Folks, we’re your—”
The cop turned and said, “When I want your opinion, dickhead, I’ll—”
Abbado kicked him in the balls. Shit, he’d known he was going to do that all the time.
A cop holding a shock rod faced Glasebrook, who took the rod from him and broke it over his knee. The blue sparks snarling against Flea’s left palm stopped when the shaft fractured.
“Fellas, we can let this stop right here,” Abbado said. The big cop had settled to his knees. His riot helmet had skewed and now hid his eyes, though the faceshield was up. “Let’s do that, right?”
“Yeah,” said Matushek. “Let’s.”
He bobbled a grenade in his open right hand. For an instant Abbado was afraid somebody might not believe the grenade was real or that Matushek really would throw it. A grenade wasn’t much of a weapon for close enough to spit, not if you cared about surviving yourself.
“Ace, put that fucking thing away,” Abbado said as he stepped between his striker and the police. Christ on a crutch! He’d thought this was a cush assignment and he’d be able to keep out of trouble.
Glasebrook helped up the man Abbado had kicked, holding the fellow by collar from behind. “All under control, right?” Abbado said.
A cop looked over her shoulder. Maybe she was expecting to see help coming. What she saw was the rest of C41. There were about as many cops in the escort detail as strikers, but the police didn’t have lethal weapons and C41 didn’t have anything else. The company’s baggage hadn’t been delivered yet, but the strikers had been nervous about the screwy situation. Most everybody’d brought a security blanket.
Abbado keyed the unit channel. “C41, doesn’t anybody have a job to do?” he snarled. “Come on, there’s not a problem! Out!”
“S’okay, we’re going,” a policeman said. The group of them moved down the trackway.
“Have a nice trip,” Ace Matushek called. He dropped the grenade back into a side pocket.
“Six West!” Abbado called to the civilians staring at him. “We’re going to take you folks to Deck 19, but we’ll wait a bit to let some of the folks ahead of us clear the lifts, okay? Let’s just relax for a bit.”
A woman started to cry. A pretty one, too. Jeez, he’d really stepped on his dick this time!
“Can I help you pick those up, ma’am?” he offered brightly. And it wasn’t till he knelt to help the old lady with her packages that Abbado realized he was holding his powerknife. The blade trembled like caged lightning in the bright sun.

“Look,” Seligman said to Esther Meyer as they waited for a construction crew to lay decking over the maze of conduits in the corridor floor, “the cits who live in the building, if they want to go play colonist, that’s fine. But it’s not right they take us staff along! I’m a services supervisor, I’m not a fucking farmer.”
Seligman was an overweight, middle-aged man with a red face and wavy hair implants that didn’t match the fringe remaining around the edges of his scalp. He acted angry because he was scared and ashamed of it.
He ought to be ashamed. Scared of going off-planet!
“You think this was their idea?” Meyer asked. “I heard they got drafted into this, same as you.”
Meyer hadn’t been drafted. Everybody in the Strike Force was a volunteer. Sometimes she tried to think back to when she took that step forward. Stupid fucking thing to do, but she couldn’t imagine an existence in which it hadn’t happened. Funny.
“Don’t you believe that crap!” Seligman said. “Horizon Towers isn’t full of peons, these are cits! They don’t get orders they don’t want. Or if they do, they call somebody so high in the Unity you and I couldn’t breathe there, and the order gets cancelled. If they’re going off-planet, it’s because that’s what they decided. And they’re dragging me along, just like I was their pet dog.”
The service personnel were supposed to operate the colony’s heavy equipment and provide the sort of support that they’d given the building residents, the citizens, on Earth. The Population Directorate was like a hog processing plant: it used every part of the pig except the oink.
“Life’s tough all over,” Meyer said. Two workmen held plating in place as a third drove a welder down the seams. As soon as the deck was complete, she could deliver Seligman to the storeroom where he’d wait the arrival of the on-voyage consumables for which he’d be responsible.
The welding trolley reached the end and turned around. With the other two workmen jogging behind, it whined toward Meyer and Seligman. One was talking into a lapel microphone.
“Hey, is this safe to walk over?” Seligman asked as the crew came past. They ignored him.
“They’re walking on it, aren’t they?” Meyer said as she started down the corridor. She’d be glad to see the back of Seligman. Civilians had to be told every fucking thing. It gave her the creeps, being around people who didn’t know how to react.
“All right, this is where you go,” Meyer said, opening the door. “It’ll be keyed to your palm-print after the goods arrive.”
They stepped inside. Meyer bumped the doorframe. She’d projected a corridor map on her helmet visor with a sidebar giving specs of the storeroom and its contents. She was used to looking through a thirty-percent mask, but she moved awkwardly because normally Heavy Weapons set up in open terrain. Working in a ship was a new experience.
The volume was empty except for the omnipresent tie-down anchors. The strip lighting in the moldings flickered; somebody in the construction crew shouted angrily in the corridor. Seligman chalked his initials, WAS, on the door. He didn’t have a helmet database to distinguish between identical panels.
“Ah, hell,” Seligman said miserably as he looked at the barren gray cell. “I told my brother-in-law, you know? He’s in district government. I figure, he can do something. And you know what he says?”
“Look, I got to get back,” Meyer said. She’d done her job.
An insulation sprayer whined in the corridor. Whitish fog entered the room. Seligman sneezed and closed the door.
“ ‘Too bad,’ he tells me,” Seligman said. “ ‘Too bad!’ That’s all he can say about his brother-in-law being shipped God knows where to be eaten like as not!”
“Nobody’s going to eat you—” Meyer said.
The lights went out.
The room was pitch dark. The walls crushed down on Meyer. She was alone and there was only blackness squeezing—
“—you all right?” Seligman cried. He held her arms as she sagged.
Meyer straightened. The lights were on again. She looked at herself through Seligman’s horrified eyes. She jerked the door open.
“I’m fine,” she said in a whisper. “I think . . . There must have been a short circuit, you know? I got a shock.”
She strode down the corridor, bumping her right shoulder on the bulkhead at every other step. A workman called to her.
“Fuck off,” she said without turning her head.
Alone.

The doors of Lifts Four and Six opened. Faces staring from the packed cages matched those projected on Caius Blohm’s visor.
“Come on,” he ordered, grabbing the nearer door with his hand to keep it from closing automatically. Nobody in the cages moved. A baby was wailing.
“Come on, Four East, this is your deck!”
The other door started to close. An older woman reached an arm past the people in front of her and blocked it. “This is where our quarters will be,” she called in a clear voice. “Quickly, now. Let’s clear the lift for the others.”
Blohm’s helmet AI identified the woman as Seraphina Suares. She looked alert if not cheerful. Most of the other civilians had the appearance of the human prisoners Blohm saw in the camp C41 had liberated a year and a half before.
People moved out of the cages. One of the men held the door so that Blohm could step away. “Where do we go?” asked a woman holding an infant. A man with a toddler in either hand stood beside her in the rotunda, looking gray.
Blohm shrugged. “There’s rooms,” he said. “They bunk eight.”
He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t have any connection with these people. They were a different species with their worried faces and their children. God, how many of them had children!
Another lift opened. “Here’s our deck, folks,” Sergeant Gabrilovitch called from the cage. “Everybody out for Deck Nine, that’s home till we get to Bezant.”
This duty didn’t bother Gabe. “Hey, I ran a restaurant on Verugia before I enlisted,” he’d said when Blohm complained. “What’s so hard about showing people to their stalls?”
“All right,” Suares said, “we’ll group ourselves to minimize difficulty on the voyage. Will all the families with children under ten please step this way.”
The words were a question, but the tone wasn’t. People began sorting themselves obediently. The lifts emptied and closed.
Gabrilovitch stepped close to Blohm. “Guess she’s got things under control,” the sergeant murmured. “Her husband’s a building councillor, but it looks to me like it’s her who calls the shots.”
Blohm didn’t speak. Gabe frowned, waited a moment more, and said, “Hey Blohm! You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” the striker said. He was watching the crowd of frightened civilians. The children clutched toys and extra clothing, looking around in wonder as their parents were directed to rooms.
So many children.

Day One
“Your personnel have settled in, Major?” al‑Ibrahimi said. He was looking in Farrell’s direction, but his eyes were focused on the holographic display before him. Because the interference patterns were aligned toward the manager’s side of the desk, Farrell saw only an occasional shimmer like cobwebs drifting through a sunbeam.
“We’ve spent our share of time on troopships, sir,” Farrell said. “This is better than the usual. I’m not used to traveling without flight crew, but it seems to be working well enough.”
The ship trembled every few minutes as it sequenced between bubble universes, navigating by means of the differentials between constants of velocity and momentum from one continuum to the next. To those aboard 10‑1442 the sensation was similar to thunder so distant that it was felt, not heard.
“Statistically,” al‑Ibrahimi said, still watching his display, “fully automated operation is only insignificantly more dangerous than crewed spaceflight.”
He looked at Farrell through the holographic curtain and smiled. “I trust I’m as capable of dispassionate analysis as the next man,” he added, “but speaking as an individual I’d be just as pleased if the Population Authority spent a little more on transport costs.”
Farrell shrugged. “Life has risks,” he said. Some of his people worried more about transport than they did about what the Spooks had waiting at the far end, but it’d never particularly bothered him.
“Tamara’s organizing the colonists into skill groups, but she’ll be back shortly,” the manager said. “I’ll have her download full data on BZ 459 so that you and your company will know what you’ll be facing after we land. Or I can do that myself, if you’d like?”
“We’ve got a week and a half,” Farrell said. “I don’t guess another hour’s going to make any difference.”
He cleared his throat, wondering how to get out what he’d come to ask. This was the first time he’d talked—really talked—to the manager.
“One advantage of the unusual makeup of the Bezant 459 colony,” al‑Ibrahimi said, “is that we have four fully-trained MDs. We don’t have the equipment that would be available on a developed world, but we’re far better off than the normal run of Population Authority initiatives.”
“Look, sir,” Farrell said abruptly. “You could have C41 relieved immediately as the security detail, right? You’ve got that power?”
“Yes I do,” al‑Ibrahimi said. “I could send a message capsule to the base at Varnum, approximately a day and a half from BZ 459. I would expect it to take the base commander a day to arrange for the personnel and transport, then three days for a full-sized vessel to make the return trip.”
Al‑Ibrahimi touched a control on his desk and nodded approval at whatever the database told him. He returned his attention to Farrell, smiled mildly, and said, “I have no intention of doing anything of the sort, however. I’m extremely pleased with the way your company has performed.”
Al‑Ibrahimi’s eyes were an unusually deep blue. Farrell had found it disquieting when the manager watched the display while looking toward him. The weight of al‑Ibrahimi’s direct gaze was uncomfortable, though the fellow was perfectly calm.
“Sir, I appreciate you saying that,” Farrell said. Only as the words came out did he appreciate how true they were.
Mostly in the Strike Force—in life, Farrell suspected, though life wasn’t something he claimed to be an authority on—praise was a gruff, “Nice job!” Followed with a tougher mission the next time to prove the statement was sincere. Al‑Ibrahimi sounded like he meant it, and it was important to him that Farrell knew he meant it.
“The thing is, sir,” Farrell said, “we really need a stand-down. I suppose somebody at Regiment thought that’s what he was doing, pulling C41 out of combat and letting my people, you know, relax.”
“I don’t think BZ 459 is going to be very relaxing, Major,” al‑Ibrahimi said. In a funny way, the manager struck Farrell as having a striker’s personality. The man looking over that desk had the right focus on mission, the willingness to do whatever it took to achieve the objective. “Compared to one of your normal insertions, perhaps; but that’s a relatively short period of time, whereas you’ll be on BZ 459 for at least six months.”
“Sir,” Farrell said. Al‑Ibrahimi hadn’t gone through the roof when Farrell made the request, but Farrell no longer thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell that the manager was going to pull C41 from the project. He hoped he wasn’t whining, but he had to make this cold man understand. “It’s not us I’m worried about, it’s your people.”
He shook his head and continued, “Look, I—shit, I love my strikers if the word means anything at all. But they’re tight, really tight since the last mission. I’m afraid something’s going to happen, somebody’s going to nut and, you know, hurt a bunch of civilians. Hurt them bad.”
He rubbed his forehead with the tips of all eight fingers. He could see it like it had already happened: a striker standing over a dozen bodies sprawled in a circle of guts and blood and scraps of bone. The only thing the image lacked was the striker’s face. It could be anybody, God help them all. Up to and including the company commander.
“We shouldn’t be around where people don’t . . . understand what we’re like, sir,” Farrell said. He met al‑Ibrahimi’s still blue eyes. “We’re not, not the way civilians mean it. We’re not really human anymore.”
“I’m also concerned about my people, as you put it, Major,” al‑Ibrahimi said calmly. “I appreciate the risks to all concerned rather better than you think I do. If I didn’t believe that the risks were justified by the benefits of the colony having C41 as its security element, I wouldn’t have accepted your assignment in the first place.”
Farrell braced to attention. “Yessir,” he said to a point beyond the manager’s right ear. “I’ll return to my strikers then, sir. You’ll find C41 ready to carry out its responsibilities insofar as humanly possible.”
He turned on heel and toe to the door. It was a parade-ground movement that strikers had little call for, but which al‑Ibrahimi’s glacial calm seemed to require.
“Major?” al‑Ibrahimi said. Farrell glanced back over his shoulder.
“Please recall that I am the project manager, Arthur,” al‑Ibrahimi said. “You and your strikers are as surely my people as the civilians they guard.”
He smiled. The manager’s tone and expression were as sad as anything Farrell had seen at a funeral.

“Krishna!” said Caldwell as she watched the projected display. “They’re going to put humans here?”
“They’re going to put us here, Josie,” Ace Matushek said. “I’ve never been sure we qualified as human.”
Bipedal herbivores spread across the holographic landscape, killing everything in sight. “They weigh about forty pounds apiece,” Abbado said, quoting the figure from the database. The creatures’ forelimbs were modified into either horn-edged cutting blades or bulbous tanks of caustic which the creatures could spray a distance of several yards.
Individually the creatures weren’t particularly imposing, but the image taken from a survey ship orbiting Bezant showed tens of thousands in the swarm.
“Like locusts,” Foyle said. “Only they suck the plants dry instead of chewing the leaves off.”
3‑3 had a compartment to itself, so Abbado had the squad view the mission background as a unit. Strikers would repeatedly go over the data as individuals during the voyage, but Abbado knew that mission success depended not only on good personnel but on their ability to work together.
He’d have been more comfortable if the major had been able to brief all C41 together, but the transport wasn’t configured to allow that. The major’d given C41 a pep talk in the rotunda of their deck, the only space available that held everybody—barely. The lifts kept opening, and there wasn’t a large-scale holographic projector. Projection from a striker’s helmet worked for one squad in its compartment, but you couldn’t enlarge the image enough for the entire company to see details.
“These things don’t fly,” Abbado said. “Locusts don’t bash farmers over the head if they’re in the field when the swarm lands, though.”
The creatures spooked an animal from its burrow. The solitary animal was an armored quadruped whose stubby limbs bore long claws. Half a dozen young clung to knobs on the adult’s back. The adult bobbed forward awkwardly, handicapped by its rigid carapace.
“What’re these bastards called, do we know?” Glasebrook asked.
“Anything you like, Flea,” Abbado said. “Or anything the cits like, I suppose. There isn’t anybody on Bezant to name them till we get there.”
Dozens of bipeds stopped feeding and jogged ahead of the main swarm, moving to either side of the quadruped’s track. The quadruped lurched to the right. A biped sprayed a cloud of white vapor over the quadruped’s head and forequarters.
The victim rose on its hind legs, clawing furiously with both forelimbs. Two of the young lost their grip and rolled to the ground. Bipeds chopped at them and the adult indiscriminately. The victim’s claws raked open several of the attackers and flung the bodies a dozen yards away, but the site crawled with more bipeds joining the fray.
A caustic fog covered the climax. Abbado didn’t have any difficulty imagining what was going on.
The viewpoint panned upward. Individual creatures lost definition against the background. A wedge of landscape, broadening as it advanced, showed the ashen gray of vegetation from which all life had been sucked. Another scar, similar but for the moment smaller, appeared hundreds of miles west of the first as the image area expanded still further.
“The analysts figure broods hatch, go on for a while, and die,” Abbado said, reading from a sidebar focused for his eyes only. “The critters must die or there wouldn’t be anything left but bare rock.”
“Can we spray the eggs before they hatch, Sarge?” Foley asked.
“Hell, Analysis doesn’t know for sure they come from eggs,” Abbado said. “Maybe, but for now we’ve got to figure on eliminating a swarm when they’re looking pretty much the way that one was.”
He didn’t even try to keep the disgust out of his tone. Everything on Bezant in the database had come from orbital imagery and a few automated probes to sample the microbiota. Nobody’d bothered to put scouts on the ground. C41 had gotten a lot of tough missions, but Abbado had never before been handed one where he’d had so little hard data to go on.
“Do we have electric fencing?” Horgen asked. “Only it’d take a hell of a lot of fence if the whole settlement area’s going to be covered.”
“That’s one problem,” said Abbado, “but they don’t think fences would stop them—”
He ran the chip back to a close-up of the swarm’s advancing front.
“—and there I got to agree with Analysis. These things dam creeks so they can cross and weave rafts to get over rivers. A fence isn’t even going to slow them down.”
“So what is?” Methie asked.
“We are,” said Abbado. “With our stingers. They can’t run as fast as a man, and they can’t even squirt you without you let them get inside ten feet or so. In broken terrain it’ll be a problem, and they come by the righteous shitload. Fifty, sixty thousand Analysis figures. If a swarm heads in the direction of the settlement, we get in front of them and shoot every mother’s son.”
“Krishna,” Caldwell repeated.
“Now, the chance of a swarm of those critters being in the wrong place may not be very high,” Abbado continued as he indexed to the next set of images. “The large carnivores have overlapping territories, and it’ll be a while before we stop having to kill the ones that replaced the ones we killed the week before.”
An animal with four legs, a short body, and a whip-thin neck appeared in the projection area.
“These’re ambush hunters,” Abbado said, “and they charge at at least 65 miles an hour because that’s what the one they spotted here was doing.”
“Shit,” muttered Matushek. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Esther Meyer sat on her bunk with her helmet on. She viewed the Bezant data at 100 percent on her visor, completely blocking her sight of the compartment around her. Several strikers played cards on a footlocker elsewhere in the room. She was aware of their voices, but the words didn’t impinge on a consciousness focused on the vessel’s destination.
“Hey Essie.”
“Besides being toxic at least to native lifeforms,” said a voiceover from the database as a vine uncoiled in Meyer’s apparent field of view, “this species appears to digest animal carcasses through rootlets—”
“Meyer! You there?” Knuckles rapped on her helmet.
Meyer flipped up the visor. “Nessman, you got a problem?” she snapped. She didn’t like having her concentration broken, and she was plenty willing to revert relations with the willowy blond striker to their old hostile footing.
“Aw, Essie, I’m sorry,” Nessman said, looking and sounding contrite. “I just wanted to know what you think about this place. Did you see what it said about disease? The colonists all need immune boosters!”
“Yeah, I saw,” Meyer said. She ducked forward to lift off her helmet so that she wouldn’t bang it against the upper bunk. “What’s the big deal? We’ve all got boosters since basic training.”
The booster was a porous ceramic shell the size of a little finger implanted in the user’s left hip. It was a biofactory that cleaned the user’s body of everything from viruses to parasites that were almost big enough to see with the naked eye.
The tradeoff for this protection was that each booster cost as much as a mid-quality aircar. For the military, that expense was reasonable. There was no point in training and transporting troops to a distant planet only to have them die of disease even before they closed with the Kalendru.
Colonists were another matter. Planets were scouted thoroughly before settlement, a luxury that an invasion force didn’t have. If the microbiota was too dangerous, the Population Authority could simply pick another world. The number of nearby Standard Planets—Earthlike within tight parameters—was in the tens of thousands.
“But colonists?” Nessman said.
Meyer rubbed her scalp. Nessman looked like he was going to say something he shouldn’t, like, “You want me to do that?” But he shut his mouth again and raised his right palm in a peace sign.
“I can’t figure out what Military Command thinks it’s doing,” Meyer said. “Don’t ask me to figure out the Pop Authority.”
Nessman had been a rocketeer on Maxus. His crew had launched two of their rounds when a Spook lasered the third. Nessman came out of it okay because he happened to be squatting on the other side of his sergeant when the missile blew up in the cradle. He and Meyer were all C41 had left from Heavy Weapons; though Bateson had survived without his legs and when the strikers left Stalleybrass the medics still thought they might save Lieutenant Whichard.
Steve Nessman was a handsome fellow who liked women, or at any rate liked screwing them. He’d made a pass at Meyer a couple days after she was posted to C41.
Meyer turned him down flat. She’d met the type before. They were too full of themselves to be any damned good, and she wasn’t naive enough any more to believe they actually meant any of the things they said before they got into your pants.
A few days after that, she’d been checking inventory alone when Nessman entered and closed the storehouse door behind him. He wouldn’t take no, so she clawed for his eyes instead.
Nessman was stronger and he’d obviously had experience with this sort of thing before. He wasn’t enough stronger that he’d be able to rape her without killing her first, though, and after thirty seconds or so he realized that was the choice. Nessman had banged her head against the floor, but although Meyer was groggy she came close to biting his nose off a moment later.
He’d gotten up then, dabbing at his scratches as he backed out of the storeroom. They hadn’t spoken about the incident afterwards, neither between themselves nor to anyone else. In fact, they’d kept as wide a berth from one another as a unit the size of C41 permitted.
Active Cloak gave them a shared bond. The operation had been tough for everybody, sure, but it was damned near suicidal for Heavy Weapons Platoon. Meyer and Nessman hadn’t become friends, but they were colleagues for the first time. Meyer hadn’t asked to transfer to a different compartment when Kuznetsov automatically billeted her with Nessman and 1‑1.
“I dunno, Essie,” Nessman said. “There’s a fuckup somewhere, and we all know where that leaves strikers. Swinging in the breeze. I don’t like it.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong, Nessman,” Meyer said. “But if you want to know the truth, I’m looking forward to a place that doesn’t have Spooks in it. Especially I’m looking forward to a place that doesn’t have Spook tanks.”
She glanced sharply at the other striker. Nessman was the closest thing Meyer had to a friend in this universe, and even on his best day she couldn’t convince herself that she much liked him.
She chuckled at the irony. Nessman raised an eyebrow.
* * *
Blohm and Gabrilovitch watched as the image of a white mass launched itself from the top of a tree, expanding into a sticky sheet as it fell. It splashed onto one of a herd of small quadrupeds rooting for nuts among the tree roots. A thin umbilicus still tethered the sheet to the high branch.
The victim thrashed wildly. The net grew tighter, constricting as it congealed. The umbilicus began to retract.
“Hell, the animals are bad and the plants are worse,” Gabrilovitch muttered. “This is going to be a bitch for you and me, snake.”
The projected scene was a computer creation based on vertical imaging. You could never be sure how accurate a construct like this was. It was extremely dangerous because it looked perfectly real even though it wasn’t. The virtual run-throughs of Active Cloak had all three floors of the garrison barracks occupied by Kalendru soldiers, for example.
“I don’t see what’s so bad about it,” Blohm said. “Watch what trees you walk under, sure. But they’ll have cleared a hundred square miles to prep for the colony, won’t they? We won’t see anything green till the crops start coming in.”
Blohm liked the sergeant better than anybody else who’d commanded a scout section Blohm was in. Gabe knew that Blohm was quicker and had better instincts than he did. He didn’t let it bother him. Gabrilovitch let Blohm set the agenda for the scouts and used his rank to put that agenda across in command group meetings.
Besides that, Gabe was as good a choice to cover Blohm’s back as Blohm figured he’d find until they cloned Blohm himself.
“Negative on the site prep,” Gabrilovitch said, shaking his head. “The only thing they did was plant a couple of message capsules and a landing grid for us to put down on. There’s a pair of bulldozers with land-clearing blades on Deck One, but nothing in the way of herbicide like you’d figure. It’s going to be a lot of work, and a lot of hand work, to open the settlement.”
On the display the umbilicus continued to shorten, dragging the captured browser toward the treetop. The victim had ceased to struggle. It looked like a gigantic cocoon. Its body would feed the tree for the next several weeks.
“They going to expect us to do it, you mean?” Blohm said. “Hell, Gabe, before I transferred to the Strike Force, they had me burning shit on Christophe where the water table at the base was too high for septic tanks. I guess I can handle a saw if that’s what it comes to.”
“No way C41’s going to be doing the labor, snake,” Gabrilovitch said. “The cits are going to have to handle that while the strikers guard them. Look at how dangerous this place is! The work’s going to have to be done, and the cits are going to be lucky if half of them don’t get eaten by things like that—”
He gestured at the holographic image, by now no more than a normal-looking tree with a white lump perhaps of fungus among the leaves of its peak.
“—for all C41 can do to save them.”
The display blacked out and segued into the next potential danger. For the moment the image looked like an ordinary bramble bush, but Blohm knew that would change shortly.
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “I don’t know it’s going to be that hard. We’ve got the database loaded in our helmets. The visor’ll cue us if we come on one of these. Or whatever.”
His finger prodded the image, scattering it into discordant shimmers until he withdrew and permitted the interference patterns to reform. An animal the size of a pig appeared, cropping shoots several yards away from the bush.
“And we’ll, we’ll clear it with a grenade or whatever.”
“Some stuff isn’t going to be in the database,” Gabe said.
“That’s so,” Blohm agreed. “Especially at first. Sure, we’ll have to be careful, but we’re used to that