IMPERIUM SERIES

Mech: Garm

Mech 2: Neu Schweitz

Mech 3:Ignis Glace

HAVEN SERIES

Amber Magic

Sky Magic

Shadow Magic

Dragon Magic

Blood Magic

Death Magic

Other Books by B. V. Larson

Swarm

Velocity

Shifting

Spyware

Visit www.BVLarson.com for more information.

MECH 2: Neu Schweitz

(Imperium Series Book #2)

by

B. V. Larson

Copyright © 2010 by the author.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book (not just the sample) and did not purchase it, please purchase your own legal copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

“Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

One

Soon after the defeat of the alien invasion of Garm, Planetary Governor Lucas Droad resigned his post. He left the shaken people of Garm, with fully half their population lost in the struggle, to fend for themselves. Or at least, those were the terms his political rivals used to describe his retreat.

One brooding night in his apartment soon after his farewell holo-vid speech, a sensor began musically warbling, indicating there was someone waiting at his door.

“Open,” he said, and the door obeyed.

Sarah Engstrom stood there, looking concerned and angry at the same time.

“Come in and have a drink with me,” said Lucas, indicating a chair. He smiled easily, his glass of crimson hork-leave wine having already been drained and refilled twice.

She stood in the doorway. He thought at any moment she might put her hands on her hips and scold him. Instead, she took his invitation and sat in the offered chair. He filled a glass for her and she stared at him.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Well what?”

“Why are you abandoning Garm?”

He laughed bitterly. “Most seem to think I’m doing the planet a favor.”

She waved away his words and political opponents with a fluttering of fingers. “We need you. We need to rebuild.”

He nodded and sighed. “I can see how it might look from your point of view. But I’m not leaving in shame. I simply think I can do more good elsewhere.”

She shot down her drink, which made him smile with half his mouth. Whatever else she was—beautiful, capable and good in bed—she was able to put down a drink the way only a true spacer could.

She crossed her arms and leaned back, frowning at him. “This hasn’t got anything do to with me, does it? With us?”

He looked startled. “Why, no.... Ah, I see—”

“You see what?” she interrupted.

“Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lead you on—about us. I hadn’t meant to initiate anything permanent.”

She looked, if anything, more angry than before. She stared at him with eyes half-closed in annoyance.

He sighed and spread out his hands. He had never been good with women. Giving orders, getting laid, political maneuvering, these were all natural for him. But any kind of relationship with serious feeling involved had always fallen on its face. It was one of the reasons he had taken this undesirable post and shipped out to Garm in the first place.

“Look, I—” he began, but she cut him off again.

“Just shut up. You pulled us all together. You saved my life and the lives of a million others. Don’t you see you are a hero here? These people need you to help them through the recovery. They need you to rebuild this colony into what it could be, not the corrupt mess that it once was. Without a strong hand, they will all slide back into their natural paths.”

Lucas heaved a sigh. “You’ve found a sore point for me. An appeal I can’t ignore. If it is any consolation, I think you are right. I could do a lot of good here on Garm.”

It was her turn to look baffled. “Then why? Why leave us?”

Lucas stood up and walked over to a cabinet. It was locked and made of brushed stainless steel. She watched as he worked on a lockpad. He typed in a large number of characters.

“I’ll show you something. I shouldn’t, but maybe I owe you this much. Don’t spread it around, however.”

She got up and moved to stand at his side. He finally got the locked cabinet open. The steel doors swung open soundlessly.

She saw what was inside and sucked in her breath.

“Don’t worry, they’re very dead,” he said.

“Are you sure? How can anyone really be sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said, and reached inside. There were alien body parts in there, desiccated, burned, cracked. They were instantly recognizable to anyone who had spent time in their nests.

“Not only are they blown apart,” said Lucas, not liking the look of the crab-like shells and bits of dried up muscle any more than she did. “We also irradiated them excessively to make sure there were no spores or anything like that. This box maintains an environment that keeps them from decomposing.”

“Why do you keep them?”

“I’m taking them with me,” he said simply. “This entire storage unit is going with me.”

“Where?”

“Back to the Kale system. Back to the universities on Neu Schweitz. We don’t have the best equipment here.”

She nodded. “Okay, I can understand all that. But I don’t know why you have to leave.”

“Because without me, I fear they won’t truly understand.”

“Understand what?”

He sighed and leaned on the cabinet, poking at the scraps of dead aliens. “I shouldn’t tell you, but I’m going to. Who knows? Maybe it will do some good. The aliens used radio signals to contact one another.”

“I know that.”

He nodded, leaning against the antiseptic steel case. It was cool to the touch and felt good on his skin. He tapped something that resembled a cracked conch shell. “You see this thing here? That’s a powerful transmitter. Grown just for the job of transmitting messages over long distances.”

“How far?” asked Sarah, poking at it in disgust.

He didn’t answer right away. She looked up at him and met his eyes. He could see in her the first inkling of understanding.

“Interstellar?” she asked, her voice hushed.

He nodded slowly. He put the thing back into the steel box. The body parts rustled against each other as he laid them down carefully and he thought he saw her suppress a shudder. He sealed the clamps and reset the lock.

“Who were they calling?” she asked him. Gone from her voice was any kind of recrimination or anger. She sounded frightened.

“We don’t know.”

“The Nexus has to know about this. They have to be convinced of the danger.”

“Exactly. That’s why I’m going myself. I have to convince them. I won’t send an underling who might be ignored with unwelcome, bizarre news.”

She nodded slowly, thinking hard. He watched her, and thought about the gentle curve of her lips. He would miss her.

She looked at him, catching his gaze. “Droad?” she said, sounding professional again.

“Yes?”

“Will you take Bili and me with you?”

He blinked at that. He had not expected it. “Yes. I can use a good pilot,” he heard himself saying.

And then they were kissing and he stopped thinking entirely, for once.

Two

Nine days before the last nife commander on Garm was reduced to glowing slag along with his Parent and her brown resin throne, he had sent out a battery of messages. A specialized life form had been grown for this purpose, a life form with a single significant organ. Like the translation mouth that had adhered to the roof of the nest so that the Parents might converse with captured food-creatures, this transmitter organ subsisted upon the secretions of the nest itself. The organ was simply an enlarged version of the communications organ built into all Imperium life forms. The only difference was the power of this one’s transmitter, which was capable of beaming a signal to the stars themselves.

The creation of the nest organ and its subsequent usage to relay after-action reports had all been part of the standard genetic coding. It was all quite routine, actually, and bored the nife intensely. But, being a product of intensive genetic specialization himself, he had followed his compulsions and made the reports anyway, despite the fact there was no one out there to receive them. Having no known friendly base to inform of their progress, the reports had instead been transmitted on tight beam patterns toward the nearest twelve star systems.

Right up to and during the moment of his incineration, the commander believed his reports to have been an utter waste of time. However, his reports did reach a receiver capable of interpreting their stealth encoding, three years after the extermination of all Imperium forces on Garm. The receiver in question was a lifepod. The lifepod, grown in roughly the shape of a walnut—albeit a walnut the size of a grav-tractor—was awakened from a very deep, very long slumber by the signal. A tiny portion of its sub-brain, which was by any definition tiny to begin with, felt tickled by the persistent beaming signal.

The sub-brain itself wasn’t capable of operating anything more complex than a grasshopper. Wisely, it decided to ignore the signal for a thousand hours or so. But, in the manner of a sleeping human being tormented by a whining mosquito, the sub-brain could not stay dormant forever. Each tickling, buzzing transmission awakened it fractionally, until it was alert.

The occupants of the lifepod, which had floated between the stars for many centuries, had effectively died long ago. Detecting no possible source of rescue, the tiny ship had doused its occupants liberally with anti-freeze agents and placed them in cyro-suspension for an indefinite period. And the duration of their aimless floating in space amongst the ice chunks that served the local star system as an Oort cloud had indeed turned out to be indefinite.

They might have never woken up at all until eventually, a billion years after their original escape from a losing battle with the Tulk, their lifepod was incinerated by a supernova. Or crushed via collision with a trundling ice-comet. Or, if they had survived all such dangers, then left to float forever in the darkening, expanding cosmos.

But the signal interrupted all that, buzzing and poking until the sub-brain awakened the primary brain and requested that it decipher the source and meaning of the transmission. The primary brain drew delicately on glucose reserves, and was soon thawed enough to function. It quickly determined the source of the transmissions to be military, and definitely of Imperium origin. This was significant, if only because it might indicate a possible source of rescue.

The primary brain was not capable of deciphering the details of the signal from Garm, it simply didn’t have the neuron-count nor the experience for such operations. Accordingly, the lifepod’s primary brain followed its dictates. Protocol demanded one of the occupants be unthawed. There were no parents handy, unfortunately. Instead, there was an unusual type aboard, a Savant. Calculating the chain of command carefully, the lifepod decided the Savant had the best command capacity.

Long-dry arteries gurgled into life as the ship began revival procedures. Happily, the lifepod chugged body fluids into the Savant and threw in a healthy dose of its limited glucose supplies. It would be best to get the new commander’s mind unfogged and fully functional as quickly as possible. There was nothing the lifepod wanted more than to turn over operations to its frozen occupants. Passing on all responsibilities to the awakened Savant would be a huge relief. After all, it was only a ship, and a tiny, lost, foggy-minded ship at that.

#

The Savant, once she had been revived fully enough to think, sucked a whistling gulp of space-cold air into her single, quivering lung. She hadn’t taken such a breath in a thousand years. A painful coughing spasm sprayed the compartment with protoplasms. She fumbled with the lifepod life-support controls, squeezing nodules to warm the pod’s cramped interior. Her tentacles writhed with pain. They were still half-frozen. What kind of awakening was this? If an underling were responsible, there would be sensory punishments applied, she promised herself.

Although ancient chronologically, the Savant had spent the vast majority of her existence hibernating. Mentally, she was quite young. She had only just been hatched from her cocoon when disaster had struck the cruiser she had been born upon. Never, in her short life, had she experienced even the simplest pleasures, such as the tug of planetary gravity or the wriggling of live prey. And so it was with a wave of self-pity that she surveyed her situation.

The pod was secure and undamaged, but that was a small consolation. They had lost the battle and the war, apparently, or she would have been picked up by now. In fact, she wondered if there had been some kind of malfunction. Why had the lifepod awakened her at all? She would have preferred to float for eternity, never having experienced this sad, painful moment of realization.

Then she managed to process the data that the lifepod’s ignorant primary brain was attempting to transmit to her. She allowed the input, and coiled her tentacles thoughtfully. A military signal? But from so far away. The primary brain was a fool. This signal meant nothing. The source was lightyears distant. No one would be coming to rescue them. If she signaled back, she might well give away her position to the enemy.

At least, she allowed, the signal did prove she wasn’t alone in the universe. The struggle went onward. Her species would persevere elsewhere. Eagerly, she reviewed all the messages, one after another, in sequence. She fluttered her mandibles as she read of the great struggle on Garm, learning of humanity. They seemed like the perfect opponent. They struggled enough to give one a thrill, but clearly were doomed from the start of the campaign. What’s more, according to the reports, they tasted quite good. Her foodtube dribbled digestive juices as she contemplated a planet full of weak, slow, tasty aliens. She had, in her short waking life, never tasted a food-creature. Bland ship’s rations of syrup and protein slurries had kept her alive throughout her existence.

She skipped ahead toward the end of the transmissions, which mysteriously had cut out about a week earlier. She quivered in disbelief as she reviewed the final reports. The humans had overcome the invasion forces. It didn’t seem possible, but there it was. This absurd species had defeated the Imperium. She read the final analysis the nife commander had transmitted years earlier with growing dismay. These simpletons had a broad empire of colonized worlds. They had spread, so far as the nife could tell, to hundreds of systems, infesting every rocky water-world they could locate.

After ruminating over the report for some time, she turned her young orbs toward the nearest system. It was far. There was little there that looked encouraging. But according to stolen intelligence from the failed Garm Campaign, the humans had a colony here somewhere, probably on one of the rocky inner planets.

She coerced the lifepod’s crusty engine into life and applied steady thrust, taking her closer to the star system.

When she was in range, she studied each planet with the feeble sensory equipment the lifepod provided. She fantasized about going back to sleep, but her genetics simply wouldn’t allow such nonsense. Unlike the combat varieties of her species, she would not die young, either. She had a very long lifespan. It had been determined that research methodologies, the specialty of savants, took a long time to come to fruition even with the best genetically attuned mind.

Suicide wasn’t even an option, unless she were about to be captured by an enemy judged capable of learning useful intelligence from her. She knew that as a captive she could provide them little information. They would not understand her language and there wasn’t much to be learned from her, not even by dissecting her corpse. They had already done plenty of that to her fallen comrades, she was certain. But none of these ruminations mattered to her lower cortex, where compulsions toward duty and self-sacrifice emanated. She would have to do anything and everything she could to survive and overcome all odds.

There would be no more sleeping for the Savant. Nor could there be a quick clean death. She had to do the impossible. She had to take this world for the Imperium, which was by all accounts an even tougher world than the last one. According to intelligence, this system was more capable and populated than Garm had been. She would have to be cautious and avoid underestimating her opponents. After all, a trained Parent with a well-equipped seedship had already failed to conquer them.

She weighed her options, which were few and depressing. Heading directly toward the inner planets seemed like a suicidal strategy. The aliens would detect her, and certainly by now they had learned of the fate of their sister world. Their own radio signals were no doubt streaming in at the speed of light, warning the aliens of the danger represented by small organic ships like hers. She would be blown from the skies before planetfall could even be achieved.

So she studied the system in detail. It was an odd one. There was only a single star, an orange K-class. Unlike most K-class stars, this one wasn’t an ancient giant, but rather a young, smaller star approximately a billion years old. Providing a relatively safe environment for planetary formation, the system had four major worlds in stable orbits. Three rocky planets swung in close to the K-class, while the system boasted only a single gas giant world which trundled along in a far-flung, elliptical path. The relative lack of gas giants to clean up the system, and the youth of it, had left a good deal of floating debris. All of the planets had at least a dozen moons of various sizes, along with dusty rings. In addition, there were two asteroid belts that no doubt represented the residue of past planets, ground down into a river of rocky chunks by collisions at some point in history. The Oort cloud, too, was crowded with comets. Disastrous celestial events were probably common in this system.

Looking more closely, she strained her orbs and the lifepod’s pathetic passive radiation sensors to locate signs of technological activity. She was surprised to find a cacophony of transmissions. These aliens, just as the military reports had shown, threw about signals without shielding, without focusing tight beams. There was no hint of security concerns in their actions.

The Savant felt some stress-relief as her pleasure centers produced the proper, hopeful sensations. Even though the humans must have been recently warned, they showed no signs of having altered their behavioral patterns into a more defensive posture. In fact, they showed no signs of alertness to attack at all. Ships buzzed everywhere around the system. There was a baffling lack of consistency to it all. In an Imperium system, optimal paths would have long since been established. Clearly demarked trails would be followed by one and all. Instead, in the Kale system every vessel operated like a scout. They wandered about with individual direction, almost aimlessly. One asteroid was mined while the richer one next to it orbited unmolested, ignored. If these creatures even possessed a central hive control, it must be running with the hind-brain in charge and damaged at the stem!

She gave up wondering about her baffling prey and focused instead on finding an appropriate target. After a long internal debate, she decided to head toward the gas giant. There were ships there, but not a great number of them. There seemed to be some transportation going on between the nearest habitats and moon bases. The ships in the region traveled to the outer asteroid belts occasionally, or drank gases from their massive planet below, or even sent off haulers for ice to the Oort cloud. But only rarely did they have any direct interaction with the more thickly inhabited rocky planets of the inner system.

Isolated and weak. That was a description that gave her a chance. She would make her move there. She would land and she would dominate—or she would die.

Defeat was unthinkable, she chided herself. She would dominate.

She applied what gentle thrust the lifepod was capable of and directed it into a one-way course toward the gas giant. Tiny and almost undetectable, the lifepod accelerated obediently. She used all the power she could, reserving only enough for deceleration and landing maneuvers. Even so, it would take precious months to arrive.

Three

The trip from Garm to Neu Schweitz was relatively uneventful. Like all such affairs since the voyage of the Mayflower, it was long, uncomfortable and tedious. The ship spent the first half of the trip accelerating to reach a top speed of around eighty percent the speed of light, before turning the engines in the opposite direction and decelerating for the second half of the trip. While the humans aboard were not in their cyro-sleep chambers, the acceleration and deceleration thrust-levels were muted to about 1.5 gees so people could move about without too much discomfort. When the humans were safely frozen in their chambers, however, the ship ran the engines at full-throttle and exerted maximum thrust continuously.

Even with cyro-sleeping and the relativistic effects of time dilation due to travel at a velocities nearing lightspeed, the journey took the better part of a year off their lives. Each time they awakened, Sarah searched Bili’s face and body carefully, despite his protests and rolling eyes.

“I’m fine, Mom,” Bili said. She always made a tremendous fuss every time they went to sleep or woke up. Bili thought it was embarrassing to have a mother who worried so much about him.

“Just hold still for one second.”

“Why do you have to do this every time?”

“Young people don’t always do well with interstellar travel. You’re still growing. I’m just making sure that things are okay.”

“Is that a tear? Are you crying, Mom? I can’t believe it.”

Sarah sniffled. She forced a smile. “I think you’ve grown. You must be a centimeter taller, and I missed it.”

Bili rolled his eyes again. “Okay, are you done? I’m fine. Let me go feed Fryx. He hasn’t had live food for at least a month.”

“Okay. But give me one more minute,” said Sarah.

Bili suspected she wanted to blow her nose. He was already looking toward the corridor, however. He wanted to run around and do something. He wanted to move, to get strong again. He felt like he’d overslept, like he’d dreamed strange things that were best forgotten. If he exercised hard, he figured he would be stronger than the other boys when he got to Neu Schweitz and was shoved into some new school. He would have muscles hardened by exercise in 1.5 gee, while they would be weaklings. Neu Schweitz’s gravity was only 85% of standard.

It took a second for him to realize his mother was still going on about something. He tuned her back in.

“—and don’t let that thing touch you with any of its spines. It’s not a pet, Bili.”

“I know, I know. I’m not an idiot. Fryx is smarter than any fish.”

Before she could scold or cry over him anymore, he ran out into the corridor. Running was a little harder in 1.5 gee, like running in huge, wet shoes—while wearing a backpack full of bricks. But he forced his legs to pump and not just walk, but run. He grinned as he did it. The new kid in school was going to be a legend.

Fryx was his first stop, just as he always was. Bili breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the creature, shivering and floating in its tank. Fryx was something called a Tulk, an intelligent alien life form that lived inside of other creatures. Looking like a spiny glob of pink-gray jelly, it was hard to tell how happy Fryx was. Bili suspected he didn’t like the fish tank, but it kept him alive. No one felt like letting Fryx crawl inside their skulls, so there weren’t many options.

Bili tapped the glass. At first, when he had done that, Fryx had shrunken up into a ball and stuck out his spines in every direction. No doubt he had squirted his neurotoxins to the tip of every spine, just in case someone were about to touch him. But now that Fryx had become used to Bili’s tapped greeting, he floated upward to the surface.

“Greedy for a fresh fish, aren’t you, boy?” asked Bili, smiling. Despite what he had told his mother, he did think of Fryx as an exotic pet. He shook a live, silvery wriggle-fish into the tank’s upper portal and let the spring-loaded hinge snap back down.

Fryx didn’t eat the fish the way a shark might. Instead, he floated close and when the fish came to investigate, he stung it with his spines. The fish spasmed and shook. It lost control of its muscles and floated gently toward the surface. Fryx, cautious as always, snuck up on the paralyzed creature and enveloped it. After a day or two, Bili knew from experience, there would be nothing left but a set of gray-white bones resting on the colorful gravel at the bottom of the tank.

Droad had put Fryx into a tank of saline to keep him alive for the trip. They had decided not to try to freeze Fryx. No one knew if they could bring him back to life if they did. Of course, the heavy gees of acceleration might have killed him too, but everyone figured that if he just floated in the tank he would be protected from a lot of the pressure and hopefully would survive.

Bili had an open mind when it came to aliens. He felt sorry for Fryx, even though he was disgusting and had caused that Skald guy, Garth, to go crazy. Bili thought was it rather mean of Droad to bring Fryx along, especially since no one knew if he could even survive through the gee forces. But Droad was the ex-governor and that meant he did pretty much what he wanted on Garm. Droad had said he wanted the labs back at Neu Schweitz to have a look at old Fryx. Hopefully, they wouldn’t cut him up with scalpels. All the adults had assured Bili that wouldn’t happen—but sometimes adults lied, especially to kids.

Bili stared at Fryx, who was enjoying his small, silvery fish. He wondered if Fryx could hear his thoughts or even see what was around him. He didn’t seem to have any eyes.

“Poor slimy bastard,” he muttered. He put his chin on the back of his folded hands and stared into the tank.

#

Fryx, despite all of humanity’s myths surrounding his species, was not a true telepath. When he had been inside a host creature for long enough to learn the language of its nervous system, he could read the alien thoughts that traveled through the host’s mind. But this was merely the effects of two nervous systems being conjoined. It was no stranger than the cerebellum communicating with the frontal lobes. It was through nerve impulses that he had communicated with Garth, his skald. They had talked in much the same manner that one part of a human’s mind might verbalize and speak to the rest of it, and thus carry on an internal conversation.

But, unless his spines were embedded into a host nervous system, he had a great deal of difficulty communicating in any useful fashion. To talk to others of his own kind, both creatures were usually immersed in a familiar host. By touching, these hosts could send electrical impulses, signals and nervous twitches, which could be felt by the other Tulk. Through this sort of Morse code methodology, two of his species could converse while they both rode host creatures.

When Bili came to the tank for the first time after a long, painful bout of acceleration, Fryx could not help but be cheered. He was used to long periods of self-introspection, but only while securely ensconced in a warm-blooded host’s skull. To be out of that element, to be exposed and imprisoned—oh, how the mighty Fryx had fallen! Now, he was no longer a proud rider, but an ignoble slave at the mercy of any grotesque creature who happened by. It was enough to make one contemplate self-termination, if such a thought could have been seriously considered by one of his kind.

But Fryx, despite his despondency, had plans of his own. And those thoughts did not include suicide. His species had always been weak by any physical measure. What they lacked in prowess, however, they made up for in natural cunning and patience.

And so Fryx ate his wriggle-fish, floated in his tank, and sensed what he could of the outside world. He had even come to understand the meaning of the vibrations spoken by the bipeds as the sonic waves touched the glass and were transmitted to his fantastically sensitive spines via the saline he floated in.

Each time Bili’s hand came and opened the tank’s lid, Fryx shivered with excitement. Here was the nearness of host. He could feel the heat of that hand, even through the bubbling waters.

But he did not make any kind of move to touch that small, soft hand. Instead, he digested his fish. And he plotted.

Four

The lifepod landed badly. The Savant was no expert at piloting, not being bred for it. She was a researcher, a genetic tinkerer, not a creature of quick reflex and spatial cognition. As it was, she was glad the moon’s gravity wasn’t harsh and that there was no atmosphere to contend with.

Less than a dozen klicks before impact, the lifepod began to rock, and then went into a slow spin. She didn’t dare use the attitude jets to correct. She must hold out until the last klick to fire her retros all in a burst. That way, even if the enemy had some kind of automated defensive grid, it would most likely not have time to track and blow her out of the airless sky.

By the time she was almost down, the lifepod was tumbling. She let the ship’s primary brain take over, automatically firing everything it had to save them.

They fell behind a spire of rock, hidden from enemy sensors. On the far side of that dark finger of glassy stone stood an alien base. From space, the enemy nest resembled a cluster of domes, each with a thousand facets like insectile eyes. She had been intrigued by the architecture, spying on it with instrumentation on the way down. These aliens were certainly a puzzle. They were capable of such organized structures, but then they behaved in a seemingly random fashion. Her species was quite the opposite. The nesting structures of the Skaintz Imperium were grown and randomly organic. It was their behavior patterns, rather than their architecture, that were highly organized and predictable.

She had no more time to think as crushing thrust was applied. The lifepod released alarm pheromones into the air supply, which seemed completely unnecessary to the Savant. She was already painfully aware of the situation. Her breathing became shallow and stressed.

She braced her tentacles for impact, but when it came, the violence of it still shocked her. The lifepod thumped, bounced, and then rolled. Inside, the Savant gurgled in dismay. Had she ended her mission so ignobly, by crashing her tiny ship as a result of her opening gambit?

The hull ruptured then, and cold vacuum stole into the interior. She frantically worked nubs and tips, stimulating the dying lifepod’s nervous system to seal the damage. After the craft rocked from side to side and finally came to a full halt, the ship managed to grow a rubbery membrane over the breach.

Shaken, the Savant allowed herself to indulge in stress-relieving chemicals. When she could cogitate again clearly, she ordered the lifepod to revive the second member of the crew. Her only subservient life form, a trach, had been left dormant until now. Not being a dexterous or especially intelligent creature, she had calculated that it would have been a waste her limited supplies if she had awakened it before now. The trach genus was of the worker class, but had one redeeming quality in her situation: its staunch functionality in vacuum. She needed that singular ability now that she was stuck on this cold, rocky moon.

She waited for the ship to respond to her instructions to revive the trach. She soon became alarmed when the lifepod did nothing. She tried various tips and nubs. She poked and prodded, even slipping a pseudo pod into the jelly that cushioned the hind-brain to give it a nudge. Except for a few quivering, autonomic responses to her stimuli, she got no answers from the lifepod.

With slow certainty, her horror grew. The ship had died. The crash and the split hull had killed it. Working hard not to panic, she set about reviving the trach manually. She could barely recall the procedures. She had been taught such emergency skills while in vitro, via bio-nervous transference. Without revival, and soon, the trach would die. Its bio-system was tied to the ship. All nutrients and waste were processed by the ship—or they had been.

The Savant’s single lung hitched and gasped. She had to keep control of herself. She could not fail. Tubes were pulled out. Liquids spurted and pooled between the ship’s flaccid veins. One of the Savant tentacles fluttered over the injectibles, feeling for the right nozzle. The trach had to be disconnected from the lifepod immediately, or the two would die together.

Then the Savant would be all alone, and as good as dead herself.

#

“Nicu?” called Boldo. His heavy boots clanged on the steel modular flooring. The man never removed his vacuum boots, and he seemed to like keeping the magnetics on just for the extra noise they made.

Nicu’s nose twitched, but he made no sound.

“Nicu, you rat-bastard. Where are you?”

Nicu and Boldo were stationed on one of the many moons that swung silently around Minerva, the sole gas giant in the Kale system. Gamma Base was the only base on the biggest moon. This by no means meant Gamma was an interesting or important place. It was an automated mining base and refinery, one of many in the far reaches of the Kale star system. They produced the metals the rest of the Vlax needed. Gamma’s population was less than fifty souls, and there was little to keep even such a small group busy. The silent, sterile world possessed a cold beauty, but it tended to dampen the human spirit over time.

Nicu and Boldo lived in the same system as the people of Neu Schweitz, but they were a very different breed from those who dwelt on that planet of lush green grasses and ice-blue spires. These men were Vlax Romani, a people apart from the rest who lived in this system. Where they loved wine, song and dancing, most of the people who lived by the light of the star Kale preferred orderliness, quiet and stability. Before the original colonists had fled the encroachment of the Cognitive Collectivists, history told of the Vlax and their nomadic lifestyle and mercurial personalities. When the time came to flee the Collectivist oppression, they had been among the brave few to sign up immediately for a one-way ticket into the unknown.

They were, however, a people at odds with their environment everywhere they went. That part of their nature had continued to trouble them on Neu Schweitz. Being naturally boisterous and moody, they did not fit well with the stern attitudes of most Swiss colonists. They were famously quick to laugh and equally quick to anger. The light in their dark eyes often changed from a sparkle of humor to a glitter of rage in a fraction of a second.

Nicu feared he was about to witness in Boldo an example of his people’s infamous temperament.

More clanking. Boldo was close. The clanking stopped, and Nicu knew Boldo was listening for him. Nicu opened his mouth and breathed through it. He didn’t want to take the chance that his nostrils might whistle and give him away.

Nicu desperately wanted to scratch his nose, which itched abominably, but that was out of the question. He was huddled into a ball inside a locker. Through the vents, he could see Boldo’s boots now, crusted with melting methane and grayish crater dust. Boldo had spent over an hour out there, no doubt looking for Nicu, who was supposed to be out circling the crest of the crater, hauling methane and cleaning the dust off the haulers afterward so they wouldn’t corrode.

The boots shifted. Boldo slammed his fist down upon the locker door. Nicu crouched inside, his heart pounding. How had Boldo figured it out? How had he been given away? Nicu seethed with curses. A beating would be the result of this, at the very least. If Boldo lost his temper completely—and that wasn’t an uncommon event for any Romani—he might space him. There was even an airlock at the end of the access tube, ready and waiting.

Underneath Nicu’s armpits, sweat tickled. The locker was locked from the outside, of course. He’d made sure of that. He had rigged the lock, however, so it could be opened from the inside as well.

“Damn,” muttered Boldo.

Nicu wanted to whoop with relief as the boots clanked away. Boldo had seen nothing. He had simply chosen Nicu’s cramped trick-locker to beat his fist upon in frustration. Inside the dark, cramped interior, Nicu smiled. He revealed a great many teeth, more than most of his people had left in their mouths by adulthood.

After Boldo had finally left to harass someone else, Nicu snicked open the lock and unfolded his wiry body, exiting the locker. He stood wearing his vacuum suit in a packed octagonal tunnel lined with lockers like his. Equipment hung in cargo nets from every conceivable point.

Boldo had almost caught him. That had been close. Too close.

He shook himself. He needed an excuse for being AWOL. He needed some of the emergency items he kept in the locker. He rummaged and dug out a bucket of black silicon grease and a freeze-gun of gas. He quickly coated his spacer gloves in the grease—not too much, he didn’t want to overdo. Then he put on his helmet and boots and frosted them with the gun. Boldo would be back soon, he knew. It had to at least look like he’d been working outside all along.

He quickly removed the senso-goggles he’d been using. The implanted data-bean contained stolen holos of every female he’d managed to vid over the years—which amounted to pretty much every female in the domes. The goggles doubled as a gaming set too, another item strictly forbidden anywhere in Minerva’s orbit. Storing all his saved files on the data-bean, including holo-vids of countless showering women and thousands of saved games, he was finally able to relax. Now, even if they found his senso-goggles, he would still have his files. The data-bean went into a tiny pouch he’d sewn into the interior of his suit, and the goggles—

The doors at the far end of the packed tunnel flashed open. Boldo stood there. Nicu did not jump. He did not even look up. With a surreptitious movement, he slapped the goggles up onto the roof of the locker’s interior. There, they stuck to a glue-pad he’d placed there for precisely that purpose.

Boldo watched him. Nicu could feel the other’s rage, but he kept up his act, pretending to be a hard-worker returning from craters loaded with frosty dust. He slammed the locker shut. It rattled with the impact. He leaned on it and stretched himself as if worn out. In truth, he was still feeling a few kinks from having hidden in there with his goggles for several hours.

Boldo began clanking closer now.

“There you are, Boldo. Right on time for your shift. I’ll have to tell you a few things, however. We have trouble outside—”

Nicu got that far with his banter before Boldo was upon him. He grabbed him up by his suit and lifted him. Nicu’s magnetics weren’t on, and the gravity of Minerva’s biggest moon was only two-thirds standard, so it wasn’t that amazing of a feat, but Nicu always felt impressed when someone lifted him into the air in a blind rage.

“You have cheated me AGAIN!” roared Boldo.

“Nonsense,” said Nicu. “Put me down, you ape.”

Boldo kept his grip. His eyes blazed. His helmet faceplate was open now, and his mustaches—long, dark and hooked at the ends—bristled with fury. His eyes however... They were the frightening thing. They were black marbles of madness. Nicu knew, looking into them, that he was in real trouble.

Boldo kept him held in the air like a baby. He took several clanking steps down the tube. Nicu didn’t have to look over his shoulder to know the airlock waited there.

Boldo’s helmet faceplate crashed closed. He must of have chinned it. At the same time, Nicu’s air line popped on his back. Boldo had torn it loose.

Nicu could still see the madness in Boldo’s eyes, right through his cloudy faceplate. Boldo’s coarse hair, greasy from years of rationed showers, flared into a wild nimbus around his face. His mouth split into a grin. He breathed hard with the effort of carrying Nicu, causing the faceplate to steam up further, but he showed no signs of letting go.

Boldo ignored the smaller man’s complaints. Nicu thought hard. He considered kicking, but that would have little effect, he knew. It would only make Boldo more determined.

They reached the airlock. Boldo would have to reach down to grab the latch and open it. That would be the moment, Nicu told himself.

Boldo threw open the latch and it hissed with escaping gas. Loose debris lifted into flight all over the tunnel.

Nicu made his move. With smooth speed, he produced a length of monofilament blade.

“Look down,” he told Boldo.

Boldo’s eyes flicked down, saw the screwdriver-shaped knife at his belly. The monofilament edge could cut through steel. His suit would be opened, as well as his guts. Boldo looked back up and grinned at Nicu.

“Then we both die, yes? That might be worth it.”

Nicu thought fast.

“I’ve got pictures of Kizzy. I’ll beam them to your unit.”

“Pictures?”

“From the showers.”

Boldo snorted. “You are a pig of a man.”

Nicu had never seen a pig. He had seen rats, but only a few of them. Ironically, he’d spent his entire life being compared to these animals that he knew next to nothing about.

Boldo dropped him and took a step back. Nicu landed lightly. Boldo’s rage had passed. Suddenly, he laughed.

“You do no work. You waste air. One day, I kill you. But not today, as you have made me laugh today.”

Still chuckling, Boldo turned around and clanked away. Nicu thought about snaking up behind him and severing his spinal cord with the monofilament, but the others would figure it out. He wasn’t as popular as Boldo, nowhere near. He would never be able to talk his way out of such an obvious murder. They would space him for sure.

Life simply wasn’t fair.

When Boldo was gone, Nicu heard something. Something beeping. One of the countless annoying alarms that the dome skirts constantly triggered. He searched panels, having to push aside festoons of cargo-netted gear. At last, he found the proper panel. Dark blue lights flashed. He found the shunt and slipped it to one side, then pressed the button firmly for five long seconds. All that time, the beeping continued, setting his teeth on edge. Finally, the computer’s little excitable mind was convinced he really did mean to override the warning and it shut up. Only then did he boredly check to see what the trouble was.

“Motion sensors?” muttered Nicu. That made no sense. There wasn’t much out there on the moon’s surface. Dust, scraps of frozen methane and boron. There wasn’t any atmosphere, so there wasn’t any wind to set off a sensor. Everyone’s vacuum suit had transponders that told the motion sensors to ignore spacers when they walked around, so it could not have been one of the base people. He looked toward the frosty triangular window of the airlock. What could have set it off? A falling rock from the crater rim?

He shrugged. Boldo could go out there and investigate. If Nicu hadn’t been so mistreated, he might have gone out there and had a look around himself. But now, he felt more than justified in shirking this duty. After all, he’d been abused. What sane commander threatened the life of his workers and then expected enthusiasm? They would never get that from Nicu. He was no one’s fool.

Nicu’s eyes drifted to his locker. He slipped inside and put his goggles back on.

Soon, he forgot about the blue flashing alarm and the fact he had overridden it. Kizzy washed her slim shapely legs and warm water splashed everywhere. He could almost feel the silver droplets that rolled over the pinhead camera lens, as if they ran over his own face.

Five

The Savant had never strained her processes so extensively. Somehow, despite the hard vacuum that crept in from the barely sealed crack in the lifepod, she managed to revive the trach and get it moving. The worst part of it was the levels of protoplasm she’d used up. She had been forced to burn her supplies of glucose prodigiously as well in order to generate enough chemical heat to keep herself alive and revive the trach. That had left her with dangerously low levels of supply.

She made a fateful decision then. She drained the arteries of the lifepod, adding them to the protoplasm supplies and feeding both the trach and herself. This meant the lifepod could never be revived and would die the final death. She could never use the vessel to escape this dead world. Her mission had been a matter of do-or-die from the start, of course, but she hadn’t thought it would get down to that level in the opening hours.

The trach itself was little help in the planning phase of the assault. It ran its orbs about the interior of the dead lifepod with a dull lack of ideas on how to proceed. A creature of spiny carapace, crab-like but with a single massive claw rather than the customary two, the trach was not a thinker. It was a working beast, heavily-built, slow, and tough. The single quality it had which the Savant hoped to exploit was its ability to survive, even in hard vacuum, for several hours. Radiation, cold, even a complete lack of pressure or oxygen, would not kill it for a prolonged period.

The Savant, however, knew that she was not so durable. If she allowed the trach to tear the membrane that covered the crack in the lifepod and exit in search of prey, she would be exposed to vacuum and soon die. Still, there was little choice. She decided to cocoon herself, using chemical polymers derived from the lifepod’s dead blood. She had to work fast before the blood froze solid.

And so she worked with what she had, preparing to send the dull trach out in search of more protoplasm. If the trach failed, then her entire mission failed with it. The concept was frustrating in the extreme, but she simply didn’t have any other options.

Just as she was squirting a second coat on the crusty interior of her hard resin cocoon, the trach sent her a tiny data blip. She felt a surge of anger. She had strictly ordered the fool to keep all traffic to a life-or-death minimum. Avoiding detection was critical. Better to perform the entire operation without communications of any kind than to risk discovery at this early, vulnerable stage.

She digested the message and her thoughts changed rapidly from anger to alarm. It was a visual message, a recording of what the trach had seen with its questing orbs. The creature had grown impatient, apparently, and torn a tiny hole in the membrane that sealed the crack in the lifepod. Naturally, this had caused a gust of all remaining gas to escape the pod. Life-killing vacuum now filled the interior of the pod with its nothingness.

The Savant despaired. Had the trach’s brain possibly been damaged in the rough landing? The creature had probably killed them both. She was inside her blister-like cocoon, a doubly-thick dome of crusty resin, but the gases and heat within would run out within hours. Even now, she urged her shuddering lung to stop gasping for oxygen. There was so little to be had now. The lifepod’s reprocessors were as dead as the rest of the ship.

Another data blip came in. Beside herself, she formed up a tiny blip of her own to send. The trach simply must shut up.

She paused, however, as she examined the contents of what the trach had sent. The creature had at least managed to dampen its communication to the weakest and fastest of signals. And this time the visual was much more interesting than the last.

The trach had extended its single stalk and opened the cusp to gaze around them at the exterior world. Despite her near panic, the Savant was intrigued by the novel environment. She had never been on any world before, and she suspected that her species had never explored this particular frozen rock.

As she reviewed the visuals, the trach’s orb rotated to take it all in. Spires of black rock pierced a sky filled with vivid stars. A massive planet provided virtually all the light in the scene. It was wide and blue, filling perhaps one sixth of the sky. That blue, she knew, was not the color of warm oceans. It was the atmosphere itself that was blue, a mix made up primarily of hydrogen, with a goodly amount of helium mixed in, along with a dash of methane. When Minerva rose fully over the horizon, she suspected the planet would fill nearly half the visible sky.

It was the more immediate surroundings that caught her attention, however. There, off to the right. What was that? A moving light? A group of them, in fact. A cluster.

The trach’s vision was occluding somewhat, growing dimmer. Probably this had to do with the extreme cold of the hard vacuum outside the lifepod. But there could be no doubt of it. Something was coming. Something approached the lifepod.

Heart pounding, lung quivering, the Savant sent a single tiny blip in return to the trach. The message was simple.

Hide, it said.

After that, the Savant went radio-silent. She tapped quietly into the sensory nerves she had drawn up through sheathes of the dead lifepod’s frost-covered flesh. This allowed her, by extending and connecting her own nervous system with the dead ship’s, to feel what the ship felt. She could not see anything, the lifepod’s orbs having long since died and frozen over. But she could still sense touches. It was all she had. Quiet, motionless, and filled with trepidation, she waited for the investigating alien to make its move.

She did not have long to wait. At first, she felt spiny prickling, the sensation of the heavy trach maneuvering its crab-like bulk around inside the ship, treading on membranes. She had some sympathy. How was the creature truly to manage following the only order she had given it? Hide? Hide where? They were trapped together inside a spheroid less than five meters in diameter. There was no time to be more specific with her command, however. Just sending it might have already alerted the approaching alien. Or aliens, she amended. Who knew how many there were? A battalion of them could be searching for her out there. She had no way of knowing.

Struggling to contain her racing mind, she focused on using the nervous sensory apparatus she had.

What was that? A touch? A fluttering sensation at the torn spot in the membrane. The crack that split the lifepod open was a wound to her now. A painful, dull ache that stretched along the seam. Now something had made contact with that sensitive injury. She shuddered inside her cocoon. She almost withdrew and broke the connection between her nervous system and that of the ship. She couldn’t abide that crawling, searching touch. Something was making rubbing, caressing motions along the torn membrane where the trach, undoubtedly, had poked out its stalk and used its orb to investigate this airless world.

The touch, suddenly, exploded into ripping pain. A pause, while she caught her breath, then another ripping. The thing, the human—it was tearing through the membrane. It was trying to get into the ship!

What would come next? A cleansing blast of liquid flame? A charge tossed in, left to explode and kill everything inside? How many of the beings were out there? She’d only seen one, through the trach’s eyes, but that might only have been their scout. Surely, he would call on backup and a dozen more might, at any moment, attempt to break inside or even lift up the lifepod and drag it back to their base. There, in their aseptic labs, she and her sole trach would be torn apart and examined with cruel precision.

Her breath now clutched with fear and came in ragged gasps. Of all her kind, she felt more emotional effects than most. It was part of her genetic makeup. As a scientist, savants did not make the best military specimens, she could see that clearly now. Such fine, high-brow sentiments served a thinker well, but cold, quick, fearless logic served the warrior better. She tried to grab hold of herself accordingly. She had no command experience, and by nature she was terrible at it. She had to think. What would a proper military mind do in this situation?

The feathery touches were back as she struggled to think clearly. The creature, she could feel the alien now as it pressed into the sore wound, pushed aside the membranes it had so rudely torn open. Compared to the cold vacuum, the creature felt burning hot to the touch.

Brilliant light splashed now into the lifepod. Nearly in a state of panic, she shot a command to the trach.

Report.

A visual flashed back to her. It was of the alien, reaching a long gray leg into the lifepod. This was simply too much. She could not allow it to enter, to squat upon her cocoon.

From the angle of the visual, she could tell the trach was on the ceiling of the lifepod, crouching there. She had told it to hide, and it had done the best it could, tightly gathering up its spiny legs and its single great claw onto the roof of the lifepod.

Watching with an exposed orb, the trach no doubt was wondering what was to be done with this invader, or rather its single, probing foot. Clearly, the human meant to violate her tiny craft, to profane it with its presence. It simply could not be allowed to do so. She had to act. If there were more aliens about, she was doomed in any case.

She activated an EMP-blast. The ship had the limited ability to fire a wave of magnetism around it. The system was designed to scramble smart weaponry such as incoming missiles. But in this case, it would serve to damage the enemy electronics. They would not be able to call for help.

Kill! she ordered the trach.

The visual feed continued. The single heavy claw unfolded itself and reached downward toward the invader. At the last moment, she wondered if she should have waited. If the creature was fully inside the lifepod, it would have been more effectively trapped.

The alien twisted itself, being too thick to easily slip inside the split-open lifepod. The booted foot tapped about on the uneven surface of the lifepod which was covered in flaccid, ropy veins. Following the Savant’s orders, the trach’s claw caught that boot now, and squeezed.

The boot paused for a split-second, then attempted to pull itself loose with great energy. The contest was an uneven one, however. The human tugged valiantly, but the trach had vastly more strength.

Soon, the boot came loose. It tore free of the rest of the alien. The leg was instantly retracted out of sight. A spray of crimson blood splattered to the floor of the ship and instantly froze there in smoky droplets.

Examining the boot, the trach brought it up to its confused orb. The Savant knew in an instant what had happened. The alien had been wearing some kind of covering. All the trach had managed to do was rip part of that covering off. It was good to know the enemy could not live in vacuum any more than she could, but essentially the trach had failed in its mission.

The trach had puzzled this out as well by now and dropped the boot. A moment later it unfolded its legs and dropped down to the floor of the lifepod. It trundled after the escaping creature. Outside, it was immediately clear that the alien was alone.

The Savant studied the visual signal, which the trach kept sending. The creature had clamped off the exposed foot with its vacuum suit and now managed to ignite some form of propulsion jet. A blast of light and misty vapor struck the trach in the face as it attempted to pursue the creature out onto the rocky surface of the moon.

The human flew away from them in a great, tumbling bound. As the backwash blew over it, the trach snapped its cusp shut over its orb and withdrew its stalk defensively.

Pursue! Kill! Retrieve! blipped the Savant. She needed that escaping source of protoplasm, now more than ever. And she meant to have it.

The trach scuttled obediently after the fleeing human.

#

Nicu had tired of Kizzy’s shower scenes. Even clips 33 and 179, his favorites, had grown stale. He’d moved on now to gaming. He was playing his second favorite tonight, one that allowed him to fly with realistic sensations transmitted throughout his spacer suit. He was playing a level that flew through a series of hot waterfalls full of nude, nymph-like beauties.

Vacuum suits, especially ones built for real professional spacers, had many special qualities that were designed to improve the survival rate of their wearers. They had the ability to change their rigidity, much like reactive armor, to prevent tears and damage from the many unfortunate accidents that tended to befall people in space. For example, if one was caught accidentally in the backwash of a jet or a sudden blast of radiation due to exposure to powerful starlight, a good vacc suit would change its composition and reform itself, due to a weave of nano-active fabric. It could harden to prevent penetration or soften into a cushion to prevent injury. It wasn’t armor and could not stop a bullet or a laser, but the engineering marvel often saved spacer lives.

Nicu and other bored spacers everywhere had discovered other, unintended uses for their nano-cloth suits. They had learned to hack the control module and introduce their own modified software. Linked to something like game program, or even the steamy vids Nicu preferred to watch, he was able to feel moving sensations on his own body surfaces. The flexible suit contracted, shifted, and even slid about in pleasurable patterns. The result was a spacesuit turned into a playground, where he could feel as well as see and hear a virtual environment in a game, greatly increasing the immersion level of the activity. Sexual encounters, sensations of flying or running—or even painful events such as bullet strikes in an action game—could all be simulated.

Naturally, hacking one’s spacesuit was strictly forbidden. It was considered highly dangerous, as the suit lost its innate ability to respond to the very real survival needs of its occupant. There wasn’t a company in the Nexus that didn’t periodically go through and do a remote sweep of every suit, reinstalling software and issuing automatic citations to discovered violators. But still, the hacking went on. Life in an airless void tended to be tedious and lonely. Spacers, being only human, continued to indulge themselves when they could get away with it.

In Nicu’s case, he had simply taken matters to their logical extreme. He now did little else other than sit in his suit and please himself.

When Boldo’s emergency summons came to his headphones, he was quite distracted. He knew, at least at some vague level, that Boldo had gone outside to investigate whatever broken wire or meteor strike had caused an alarm. The base’s central processor was overly paranoid, in Nicu’s estimation. It tended to flag the tiniest event as dangerous and recommended immediate action on everything. Barely a day would go by without the CPU imagining some apocalyptic scenario.

When today’s warning had come in, he had shirked and dodged, finally vanishing into his locker as usual. Boldo could take care of it, he’d been certain. In fact, he’d long since stopped worrying about it. It was a blessing in disguise, really. Boldo was guaranteed to wander around out there in the crater dust for an hour or two and find nothing, or next to nothing. That was a precious source of uninterrupted time for Nicu, and he made the very best vigorous use of every second.

But an emergency summons from Boldo, his nominal partner in sector maintenance, was another matter entirely. Now there was a recorded request for assistance—not from some machine, but from a very real person who tended to be bad-tempered.

The emergency summons had come at a very inopportune time. In fact, from Nicu’s point of view, there would probably never be a moment when he relished such a summons.

An emergency call. Damn the luck! It would be hard to ignore this one. It was recorded and would automatically be relayed up every priority queue all the way to Mala herself. His response would be recorded as well, and nothing he did could possibly be good enough to satisfy that crazy old witch.

The first call he could safely ignore, he knew. One could always pretend to have missed a single beeping, and thus escape wrath for being slow to respond. If there wasn’t a second call, the matter had obviously taken care of itself. On the other hand, if it turned out Boldo was dead before he transmitted a second distress call, then clearly Nicu couldn’t have helped anyway. The matter had been impossible, Boldo had been doomed.

If Boldo managed to solve his own problem after only one call and returned, he would be angry, but so what? Boldo was always angry with Nicu. If the man wanted a snappy response, perhaps he should consider being more kind to Nicu, who thought of himself as being misunderstood and grossly abused for pursuing the life of a free spirit. He was the sort individual that the Vlax Romani were famous for producing, a dreamer, a man with higher aspirations. Mere dull routines, such as spacer work, could not hold his attention for long. They were, in fact, traps designed for lesser men. Nicu simply couldn’t be bothered to fall into them. If he had one firm policy in life, it was this: he did not waste his time.

When the second alarm signal sounded, and the unwelcome beeping came less than a minute after the first, Nicu growled in frustration. He saved, disconnected, and reset his suit. A thousand gentle fingertips, which had been gliding over his body in a most pleasurable fashion, vanished. As far as Nicu was concerned, that was the true violation.

He slapped his handheld into life and stroked it roughly. The screen came to life with petulant slowness. He selected the blinking red e-message. Expectantly sighing, he brought up the visual.

But there was nothing. Nothing at all. He looked for audio next, then text, in case Boldo’s suit had malfunctioned so significantly that the pinprick pickups on the surface of it no longer operated.

Still nothing.

He frowned more deeply. Boldo had sent him a blank emergency message with no context, no message.

Nicu sniffed. He considered what might happen if a man were to press the emergency send button on his suit and not enter anything, not selected any feeds. Quite possibly, a blank message might result.

He stare for a moment at the blinking message. Then he selected the acknowledge option, and slammed his fist into the inside door of his locker hideaway. The door rattled. Now the entire affair was registered. Now, when the reports filtered through to Mala’s office, she would see who had gotten the message and who had acknowledged it. He was out of options.

Cursing in Romani, he reached up and flipped the trick catch. He climbed stiffly out of his locker. He was going to have to do some work today after all. Damn the luck.

Nicu reset his suit a second time to make sure, then headed toward the airlock. His helmet checked, and so did the rest of his survival gear. It was with some surprise he realized he was about to go out and walk the surface. He had logged a dozen reports—no, more like a hundred—since the last time he had actually gone outside and done anything. For months, all his activity reports had been one hundred percent bogus.

He double checked to see his seals were good and his oxygen levels and mixes were all in the green. They were. It had been so long, he didn’t want to make a rookie mistake. He hadn’t bothered to really inspect his equipment for—months? There had been no need up until this moment.

It was with a certain sense of foreboding that he clamped down his helmet, popped the inner airlock door and stepped inside. His hand hesitated over the air-cycling pump button, but finally he pressed it. The air hissed away and then, finally, the outer door opened.

Even for Nicu, the cold beauty of the place struck through. It had been quite awhile since he had looked outside, and he nodded in appreciation. As good as his suit graphics were, he had to admit reality had its advantages. Just as he imagined Kizzy’s real caresses would probably be better than the simulated ones he’d conjured up with his suit. He sighed. She despised him.

He trudged outside. Nothing was obviously amiss. He grunted. If Boldo thought he would trick him into searching the area by firing off a random e-message and vanishing, he could think again.

In fact, that thought caused Nicu some concern. What if... What if this was all a trick? Boldo had been on the verge of murder not long ago. That wasn’t so odd for him, but he had seemed more earnest in his rage than usual. Perhaps he had stopped, not because he had lost his anger, but because he’d had a better idea. Perhaps Boldo sought to lure him out to a spot with no witnesses, with no data pickups, and murder him there.

Nicu put his hands on his hips and looked around, waiting impatiently. He wasn’t about to search every crater on this forsaken rock. He took another reading and got a fix on the source of the e-message.

He turned and looked up at an imposing spire of rock. He took a dozen steps, then a dozen more. He halted.

There was something in front of him now. Something dark lay on the crater floor. Dust had pushed away from it in a circular pattern, as if it had fallen there and now lay still.

Nicu stopped, staring.

There had to be a way. There had to be a method by which he could extricate himself from this situation and get someone else to investigate. The trouble was, although he stood there and wracked his fertile, twisty mind, he could not think of anything. No escape, no slippery dodge.

If Boldo was dead, they would claim he murdered him. If Boldo was found dead by someone else, they would know he either murdered him, or shirked his duty as first responder to the emergency message.

There were only two ways out: if Boldo yet lived, he would save him, problem solved. If Boldo was indeed dead, and from the look of that dark puddle of broken material on the crater floor, the possibility was a strong one, then he had to hope the evidence would show he had not done it.

Chewing his lips and cursing in his helmet, Nicu stepped up to the thing in the dust. It was indeed Boldo. He lay face down, and his boot was missing. Had hard vacuum gotten in there and frozen him solid? Nicu gave a tiny shudder then moved to roll Boldo over. He was surprised the other was not yet stiff.

Boldo’s face looked up at his, through the misted faceplate. Agony was frozen on that face, but Nicu saw that the lips yet writhed, they were speaking, in fact. He was alive! His suit must have closed the wound, however it happened, and somehow he’d lost most of his electronics.

Nicu grabbed the big man’s hands and dragged him toward the airlock. Behind him, the ice-blue, dust-encrusted dead foot, exposed as it was to hard vacuum and absolute zero temperatures, thumped and flipped lifelessly. Nicu could tell they would have to cut that thing off right away.

Puffing hard in his suit, Nicu moved with surprising speed. The moon’s gravity was far less than standard, and Boldo’s resulting lightness with Nicu’s excitement combined to make him into something of a superman.

He had almost made it back to the airlock when he caught sight of the thing that chased them. It was a nightmare. A creature right out of the worst suit-games, the ones that gave you heart palpitations if you played them in full-contact mode.

Crab-like, but with a single huge claw, it was about the size of a human in mass—a very large human. At least eight scuttling legs pumped in perfect rhythm, bringing it silently closer in the vacuum world. A plume of raised dust fluttered up behind it. Its single claw opened as Nicu watched, yawning to a width easily enough to completely enclose his helmet. From the look of it, the thing could apply enough crushing pressure to pop his helmet and his skull like a boiled egg.

Nicu made a choking sound. He released Boldo’s hands, but found, to his unhappy shock, the man was holding on to him. He wasn’t letting go, either. Nicu danced backward, now dragging Boldo not by design, but by necessity.

Whimpering, he kicked at Boldo’s helmet, but that was worse than useless. Boldo hung on to him, clasping his hands with frantic, desperate strength. Nicu had no choice but to drag him the rest of the way to the airlock.

He never considered sending off a message. He had no time, and besides his hands were caught up in the horribly strong grip of Boldo. He did consider grabbing his knife and slashing himself free. But again, there wasn’t time to waste. The monster, whatever it was, drew closer with each passing second.

He backed into the airlock and slammed the button with his buttocks. The hatch fired down. Air pumped into the chamber. It seemed to take forever.

Nicu dared to step over the collapsed form of Boldo and look out the tiny, hexagonal portal at the dusty moon’s surface. Where was the monster? He saw nothing.

A moment later the inner door fired open. Nicu thought, finally, of his communicator. He chinned his com-link open and gulped, breath blowing hard over the mike.

“Emergency,” he puffed. “Mala?”

He was answered promptly. “Nicu? What are you talking about?”

“Emergency. I’ve got Boldo. He’s badly hurt.”

There was a hesitation. “If you stabbed him, Nicu, I’m going to space you.”

“No, nothing like that. He was outside. One of the sensors tripped. I went out to get him. He’s hurt.”

“We’re coming.”

“Mala?”

“What?”

“Something else—there was something else out there.”

Another pause.

“We’re coming.”

Six

Nicu lifted his lip in disgust. Boldo was a mess. His suit had closed around his ankle, reacting to the lost boot. Effectively, this had left his bare foot hanging out in minus 200 degrees Celsius. It had more than frozen, it had turned brittle as glass and shattered in places. Pieces were missing. Dust and frozen blood coated the rest. Had he tried to walk on it? How had he lost his boot in the first place? Could he have gotten stuck and been unable to get loose without yanking it off to free himself? The fabric was so tough, how had he managed it?

Nicu breathed hard, blowing steam onto his faceplate. Boldo’s chest still rose and fell. He was a big, tough bastard of a man. Boldo would survive this, Nicu felt certain. This could turn into a worst-case scenario. Boldo knew he had sent out his distress call, and Nicu had taken his sweet time coming out to investigate.

Nicu looked over his shoulder. Mala and the team were coming from central, but they had yet to arrive. His hand slipped down to the screwdriver-shaped monofilament knife. He carefully weighed his options. Perhaps it would be better if Boldo did not survive his dreadful accident. But how could he make a wound—an injury the others would not notice? They had to think he had died because of his ordeal. Because of that thing out there.

The thing. Just recalling the horror made it hard to think at all. His breath came in gasps. He felt stifled inside his helmet and flipped up the faceplate. He took a moment to step over Boldo and leaned to look out the fogged triangular window onto the surface again. He couldn’t make out anything. No sign of the monster. Was it hiding out there?

Nicu shook his head and eyed Boldo. The man was unconscious now. The last of his strength had given out when Nicu had dragged him into the airlock and sealed the outer door. He had expected, at that point, to hear the monster’s single great claw scratching at the door, but there had been nothing. No sound. It had vanished.

What could survive outside in hard vacuum? What did such a monster eat? There was no way something could be alive out there. Nicu blinked and shook his head. There was no possibility Mala and the others were going to believe any talk of monsters. The entire thing was an obvious lie, this monster business. If he told them some fantastic tale of a one-clawed crab chasing him into the airlock, they would be certain he was lying, making up an insane story to cover his obvious, disgusting incompetence.

He popped his knife from his belt. He thumbed it into life. It hummed inaudibly, making only a tiny vibration that tended to numb the fingers if you held the handle too long.

A single thrust. Then he would have to hide the knife. Boldo would have no tales to tell. All the tales would be those told by Nicu. The others would suspect nothing. The man should never have survived his injuries anyway. No one would be surprised if he died.

Nicu bent and took up the knife in two thin-fingered hands. He began his thrust.

He had hesitated only for a second, but that was too long. Boldo’s hands came up to grapple with his. The faceplate popped open.

Nicu’s teeth showed in a grimace. He tried, leaning with all his weight, but he could not drive the knife into the larger man’s chest.

Boldo’s face was full of madness. His black eyes rolled in the sockets. His lips had pulled back from his teeth. He was not enraged, however. It seemed to Nicu that Boldo barely saw him.

Nicu tried with renewed effort to force the knife downward. It whined. Boldo’s thick arms held him aloft, holding up the knife and Nicu’s entire weight as if he were nothing.

“Just die you devil,” hissed Nicu.

“Yes,” Boldo whispered.

“Yes—what?”

“Yes, that’s what it was. It was a devil. You are right. You have seen it?”

Panting, Nicu eased off and stood up. Boldo held his knife now, and it whirred in his hands, forgotten.

“Tell Mala,” said Boldo.

Nicu stared at him. “I will.”

Then, the light of madness went out of Boldo’s eyes. Life went with it. He died there, still holding onto Nicu’s whirring knife.

Nicu reached down, snapped off the knife, and put it back onto his belt. He barely had it secured when Mala and her team arrived.

They trotted close and encircled the two men.

Nicu looked down, heaved a sigh, and shook his head. He did not have to fake panting with exertion. His face was red and sweat stood out upon his forehead in shiny droplets. His lips were pressed together tightly. He wore an expression of sad regret.

“I’m sorry. I did everything. I just couldn’t save him.”

#

“It was some kind of... I don’t know. It didn’t seem to have a suit on. Maybe it was a mech. Or a robot. Maybe the Nexus sent something new out here to spy on us.”

Mala had listened to his story with interest. The rest of her team rolled their eyes, leaned against bulkheads and snorted softly with amusement.

They didn’t believe him. None of them. They laughed, they raged, they threatened him. They searched Boldo’s body, and asked how he had managed to kill such a fine man. How he had, through base treachery, caused the death of one of their best?

Only Mala watched him coldly. Her face didn’t betray what she was thinking. Only her lack of decision, as their leader, kept them from spacing him right then and there.

“Let Nicu’s robot eat him. Let it feast on his frosty corpse,” said Zindelo.

“Zindelo is right, mother,” said Kizzy seriously. “He should not be allowed to live if he caused this thing.”

Nicu stared at Kizzy, mildly hurt. He thought of all the hours he had spent dreaming about her. How could she repay his worship so unfairly? But mostly, he focused on Mala. Her decision would stand. The others would follow her.

The others focused on the evidence. They complained about the frozen foot, which had obviously occurred outside. They puzzled over Boldo’s electronics, which were apparently fried. It was a wonder, they said, that he had managed to get off even a weak distress call. Only his manual overrides had kept his suit functioning as he hobbled on one hard-frozen foot back toward the base.

“How could the suit have reconfigured and stopped the pressure from leaking if the electronics were damaged?” asked Zindelo.

Kizzy explained the two events must have happened sequentially. The boot must have been ripped off, and then the electronics were damaged.

“But that makes no sense. If his electronics were working until some point after he ripped off his boot, then he should have called us directly with his com-link.”

Everyone looked thoughtful at that. No one had an answer. Except for Zindelo. He jumped to his feet and accused Nicu of some horrible crime. It wasn’t clear what he thought Nicu had done, but he believed Nicu had caused all of this, somehow.

Mala watched them all, frowning. When she finally spoke, everyone fell quiet. It was said she had wisdom, a way of seeing things that others did not possess. As was ancient tradition with the Vlax Romani, all the way back to their roots on Old Earth, they believed and respected such insight.

“Something is very wrong here,” she said. “Look at me, Nicu. What did you see outside?”

Nicu opened his mouth with a lie on his tongue. He fully meant to tell her about a robot. That was the most believable thing. Whether to save himself or to save everyone, they had to believe there was something out there. Something unknown and dangerous.

But when he finally did speak, he did not lie. It was a strange experience for Nicu. “I—I don’t really know what it was. It wasn’t human. It was a thing. A creature with one huge claw.”

Zindelo roared and shoved his face into Nicu’s. His neck was dark with pounding blood and spittle flew as he shouted. “You lying rat! You are low. There is nothing lower than you. Boldo is dead because of you. He is dead because he did not kill you fast enough. I will find out how you did this, and then you will die. You will have no boots on when I kick your arse out of this lock!”

Zindelo kneed him then, by surprise. Nicu gasped like a fish. Why hadn’t his nanocloth suit hardened to protect his groin? Zindelo or Mala must have overridden his suit and turned off the reactive software. It was a dirty trick, but Zindelo was not yet done. He grabbed Nicu and popped his faceplate open. Nicu threw his hands up, but as he was still stunned from the sudden explosion of sick pain in his crotch, he didn’t move fast enough. He knew what was coming next, but it was too late. A gloved fist hammered into his open helmet. A crunching noise followed and a white flash went off in his head. His nose had been broken. He was familiar with the process, this was not the first time he had endured it.

Mala put up her hand. Her gray hair floated around her head as she pulled her helmet off and eyed the two men. She did not seem perturbed by Zindelo’s outburst.

“Nicu, if you lie, it will be as Zindelo has described.”

“Ha!” shouted Zindelo with an unpleasant yellow light in his eyes. He let Nicu slump down into a panting, bleeding heap.

“How do we find this...this monster, Nicu?” said Mala.

There, thought Nicu, someone had finally used the word. The right word. For it truly had been a monster. But no one, least of all him, had had the guts to call it that.

He pointed out the tiny triangular window into the cold darkness.

“How do we find it?” she asked him again, calmly.

“It was close by,” Nicu said. His ruined nose made his voice sound odd. He fought to think past the pain. It should be simple enough. “Just follow my tracks out, less than one hundred meters.”

They gazed out uncertainly for a moment.

“There are many tracks out there,” said Zindelo doubtfully. “They will all stay for a thousand years. There is no wind, no rain to wash them away. How can we tell one from another?”

“I dragged Boldo. Just look for the long line in the dust.”

“And if we can’t find the spot?”

“Then you can get lost and die for all I care.”

Zindelo kicked him. Mala lifted her hand again. “Just tell us, Nicu.”

“You will find the tracks of the thing,” said Nicu. “It could not make tracks like a man. It had many feet like spikes.”

Zindelo gave a bark of laughter. “He just wants us to wander out there,” he said. “Then he will seal all the doors somehow. Perhaps he has set some trap to crush our feet, as he did to poor Boldo.”

“We will not all go,” said Mala. “You will go, Zindelo.”

Zindelo looked startled.

“Why me?”

“You do not believe in this monster,” said Mala. “There cannot be anything to fear. Right?”

Zindelo nodded. “Very well. You are right. I will not be afraid of some story.”

They pulled Boldo’s corpse into the passageway.

“Kizzy, go with Zindelo. Two people are safer than one.”

“No!” said Nicu reaching up with his arm. Everyone looked startled.

“Why not?”

“I—I don’t want you hurt,” said Nicu.

“She is my woman, so she comes with me,” said Zindelo, growing angry again.

In the end, both Kizzy and Zindelo went out. Nicu was sick with worry. He gazed out the window nervously.

Mala watched him closely. “You really do fear. This is not an act.”

“I wish that it were,” said Nicu.

Nicu heard a hiss and a click. It was Mala’s helmet. He looked at her. She tightened her suit, making professional adjustments.

“Don’t go out,” he said.

“I will stand just outside the door. I will simply help them back... if there is trouble. If this thing is as you say, I must see it for myself. Will you come?”

Nicu shook his head with fast, small shakes.

“Do not think you can lock us out,” she told him. “I have all the codes. I will get back in.”

She left him then. The heavy door closed behind her. He watched, standing inside the airlock. For a long time, he could see figures moving about in the darkness. He even came to relax a bit. Perhaps, he thought to himself, whatever it had been, it had gone away.

Then there was a sound. He heard it clearly. It was on top of the airlock module. Directly above his head.

He gave a tiny scream and looked up, but saw only interior of the tube. The segmented metal ceiling was hung with endless equipment. Lights flashed quietly.

He looked out the window again. A huge claw descended into view. Mala, who stood just in front of the airlock, was snatched upward. This time the monster didn’t go for a foot. It took her by the head. It snipped off the helmet and the head altogether. The body slumped back down, blood smoking and turning to frozen vapor. Dust puffed up in a gray cloud.

The others ran back toward the airlock, he saw them coming. Perhaps they thought they could help Mala. They had their hand-cannons out. They fired, the recoil in the light gravity jolting their bodies backward. The guns were spacer’s weapons, built with metals that could withstand the bitter cold and not turn brittle and explode under the stress of firing. The sealed cartridges full of cordite had enough oxidizer to fire in vacuum. In response, the monster charged them, claw upraised. Nicu didn’t think the spray of pellets from the hand-cannons had affected it much. Maybe when they got into close range....

It was horrible. Nicu backed away from the airlock module. His feet carried him without a conscious command. He kept backing away from that triangular window and the horrors that were going on outside. He could hear panting and gasping and cries for help over the intercom in his helmet. They could not get back inside. The thing was between them and the airlock.

He went to his locker. He climbed in. He shut the door and turned off his headset. He overrode his suit’s programming so he couldn’t hear anything else. No more distress calls. No more shrieks.

A long while later he removed his goggles and opened his eyes. He watched the light that came through the vents into the locker. Something moved by him, casting its shadow over his locker vent. Something that was bigger than a man. Something squat and oddly-shaped. Had it found Mala’s codekeys and used them to get inside? He had not thought of the thing as intelligent up until that moment. His suspicion that it was a thinking monster made it even more terrifying.

Nicu clutched his knife with one hand and dialed up Kizzy’s shower, clip 41, with the other. A pair of tears ran down his face, one from each eye. They felt warm on his cheeks, like the shower’s endless, silver spray.

Seven

The Gladius braked hard in interstellar space, slowing the giant ship enough to allow entry into the Kale system without shooting past the orange star and out into the void again. Weeks from now it would begin its final approach to Neu Schweitz, the small, emerald-green world that was its final destination. Only then would it awaken Lucas Droad and a thousand other passengers. They were in cyro-sleep, safely shielded from the grim gee-forces required to decelerate the ship and allow it to slide into the Kale system.

Events upon Neu Schweitz proceeded at a natural pace while the Gladius approached. The planet was the third in line from the star Kale, the same position as was held by Old Earth in the Sol system. It was, however, a smaller world than Old Earth and heavily-cratered. Due to natural biomass growth and heavy erosion from frequent storms, these craters took the form of thousands of sharp, striking mountains intermixed with vibrantly green, circularly-shaped valleys. There were many cold, black lakes between the towering peaks, often as deep and dark as they were wide.

The equator of the planet was decorated by a narrow belt of oceans. Since less than twenty percent of the planetary surface was covered in water, oceans were occasional rather than common on Neu Schweitz. The relatively few expanses of sea water were small, stormy affairs. The tidal forces caused by the seventeen moons that circled the planet caused unpredictable surges of fifty meters or more in the depth of the equatorial belt of oceans. The many moons ripped at the frothing stripe of oceans, creating regular tsunamis and whipping hurricanes. As a result, few dared to travel the seas in surface vessels. Air transport, submarines as big as tankers and tunnels beneath the sea floor were the preferred methods of moving freight.

Far south of the central seas existed a town known as Visp in one of the southern-hemisphere cantons. Outside of Visp, in a crescent-shaped valley between six looming mountains, a group of people had gathered. Hushed and serious, the group stood solemnly in a vibrantly green meadow at the foot of a cliff of salt-and-pepper granite.

A flock of giant rooks, an indigenous species, stared at the gathered humans seriously from their perches in the whip-pines that surrounded the meadow. Although the natives of the cantons called them rooks—and they were black-feathered birds—they were not the same species that flew upon Old Earth. They were far larger, being nearly a meter tall in some cases. They were quiet birds, as well. They did not twitter and squawk. Instead—they stared.

The rooks of Neu Schweitz often gathered where blood was about to be spilled. Somehow, natives maintained, they knew. They were nut-eaters, not predators or carrion-eaters—but in some instinctual fashion, the birds were drawn to watch the struggles of other creatures while safely roosting on their high perches. With lidless, reptilian eyes, the birds quietly encircled the group of humans like black-feathered snakes. They sat in the swaying, whip-pine branches... and they stared.

Aldo Moreno stepped forward into the center of the circle of humans. He raised his sword and slid it down the length of his opponent’s blade. It was a ceremonial motion, the customary salute that two combatants provided one another before dueling with plasma-rapiers. Both swords loosed a spray of lavender sparks in response to the contact. The sparks showered the hard-eyed contestants. They barely blinked.

“Step back two paces,” said the arbiter.

Both Aldo and his opponent, Commander Werner Goll, obeyed the arbiter. Their eyes stayed locked as they performed the maneuver, each stepping backward two strides. Werner Goll’s expression was grim. Aldo was serious, but there was no rage in his face. Instead, his prominent nose rode high and his attitude was that of a professional performing at the top of his deadly game.

Both swords were fine steel and deadly in their own right. In addition to a precise mono-molecular point which could pierce hard metal, the rapiers ran with shimmering emanations of kinetic force. The slightest touch would deliver a serious jolt in addition to laying open the flesh.

“Check settings. Both parties have agreed to level four, crippling force.”

Each man flicked his eyes to the studs at the pommel of their respective weapons. Neither had to make an adjustment.

“Being a matter of honor concerning a disputed debt, schlag rules shall apply,” continued the arbiter. “Honor shall be served by death, incapacitation, or the agreement of both parties.”

Both men gave imperceptible nods.

Aldo Moreno could trace his ancestry to the original families of colonists on every side. He was from the southern cantons, the Swiss who had been of Italian descent many generations earlier. He, like practically every citizen, felt a fierce pride in his heritage. The people of Neu Schweitz, unlike most colonists who had journeyed out to new worlds, had come here to save their own culture rather than to escape it. Therefore, they clung to old values in any manner they could. They had romanticized the past and rejected what elements of the present they found dispensable.

After nearly two centuries of hard work, the Swiss had built up a thriving colony on this chilly, beautiful planet. They had also developed some unique customs, such as the bearing of public arms. In most cantons, publicly displayed guns had been eventually outlawed due to an overabundance of young deaths in duels. Local governments however, particularly of the southern cantons, had left out specifics concerning other forms of weaponry. And dueling, while still frowned upon, was understood by the law. People must have a way to blow off steam, it was commonly argued. And so the guns were left at home, but many men wore swords and were considered fashionable. Over time, the simple metal weapons of the past had been improved upon. An industry had sprung up, serving the needs of the prideful gentleman and the swaggering rogue alike. Their rapiers had grown steadily more deadly, more technically proficient.

Aldo Moreno was a traditionalist who had embraced this element of his native culture. He was, in fact, a professional duelist.

The customary silver flute warbled. Both men raised their guards, saluted one another and advanced. Commander Goll attacked first, his lunge aiming high. Aldo parried in quinte, then smoothly riposted, and was parried in turn.

Goll did not retreat. He beat at Aldo’s blade. Sparks showered the ground at their feet. Black spots appeared where the plasma burnt the wet grasses.

Aldo fell back before the assault, which was competent and quick, but not inspired. Almost immediately, Aldo took measure of his opponent. He was good, but Aldo knew he was better. His confident smile grew fractionally.

Aldo let Commander Goll come in, attempting lunges, blade-beating attacks and circular disengages followed by sudden darting thrusts. He parried every attack, and when there was an opening, he threw himself into a counterattack. His onslaught wasn’t a wild series of random moves, but rather a deceptively simply set of un-deux attacks. Commander Goll gave ground steadily in turn, parrying and riposting enough to keep Aldo honest. Goll was in shape, Aldo could say that for the man. His breathing was even, and he looked as if he wouldn’t tire for a long time.

Aldo feinted low then, just as the other was beginning to feel safe. Goll made his first serious mistake, lowering his own blade to parry the thrust rather than retreating. Aldo could tell he was a man who hated to retreat. That was a dangerous attitude to have as a fencer. Aldo used all his speed and precision to bring the tip of his own weapon up and managed to score a grazing blow on the Commander’s left arm.

There was a lavender flash, and spurt of blood spilled down upon Goll’s whites. The blood flow quickly ceased. One benefit of using powered swords was their tendency to instantly cauterize the wounds they created. Goll’s left arm hung now, almost useless.

Aldo withdrew a step. After all, he wasn’t here to kill the fool.

“I’ve struck the first touch, sir.”

“Indeed you have.”

Obviously in pain, but still keeping his guard up, Goll stared at him. If anything, he seemed more enraged than before. Aldo’s smile, for the very first time, faltered. Would the fool not see reason? He could not hope to win. He’d met many angry, prideful men on the field of honor. Most quickly grew contrite when seriously injured.

“Defend yourself!” shouted Commander Goll. He came on then, and amazingly, his attacks were more accurate, his skill greater. Rather than being paralyzed by fear and pain, he was wild with the desire for revenge.

Aldo flicked his eyes to his elderly master: Brigadier Klaus Druzman. His master widened his blue-marble eyes and made a small fluttering movement with his hands, indicating his bafflement. Aldo flicked his eyes back to his opponent then, lest he be run through by this madman.

Aldo’s master, like Aldo himself, was a gentleman who bordered upon the world of the rogue. Klaus Druzman’s vice, however, was that of gambling rather than dueling. There was nothing inherently wrong with gambling in the southern cantons, but Druzman was a man who almost never lost a hand of cards. He achieved his startling series of victories, naturally, by cheating. Often his victims suspected him, and occasionally they demanded satisfaction on the field of honor. Druzman was prepared for this eventuality, and would immediately claim fatigue due to his great age. He was, in fact, over a century old. If the abused debtor insisted upon dueling, he would ask to be allowed to use a stand-in. Aldo Moreno, a gifted swordsman, was always on call to fight as Druzman’s appointed champion in such cases. The system had been admirably effective. No one had ever gotten away without paying their debts to Brigadier Klaus Druzman.

Blades flashed and sparked. The clashing weapons rang with violence and strength of arms. Both men were soon breathing hard. Blood trickled anew from Commander Goll’s arm, but he paid the wound no heed. Aldo, who had been giving ground steadily before the other’s onslaught, stopped his retreat and performed a shockingly fast riposte. He struck suddenly, for the heart, knowing he would be parried, but wanting to scare his opponent and shake him off this suicidal path. Goll parried the chest attack in quarte. But the scare did not slow his furious assault. The two men had come too close for effective swordplay. Instead of withdrawing, Goll pushed their swords and bodies together.

The two crackling rapiers flowed ozone in a hot gush up into Aldo’s face. They struggled for a moment, shoving.

“Hold!” said the arbiter. “Step back.”

The two men pushed apart and stepped back, returning to en garde. But suddenly, something unexpected was done. Something foul—something against the rules of honor. As they parted to stand en garde again, Commander Goll’s blade flashed out low and slapped against Aldo’s thigh.

The pain was excruciating. The cut itself wasn’t bad, but jolt from the power-blade, laid firmly against a spot with little grounding or protection, numbed Aldo’s leg so that he was almost unable to use it.

In automatic answer, Aldo flicked his sword out and carved a new chunk from Commander Goll’s left shoulder, which he had thrown up to take the riposte.

Commander Goll danced back now, arm flapping grotesquely. Blood ran everywhere. The crowd of gentle-folk that had come to watch a Sunday duel on a fine spring day gasped in horror.

“Foul!” roared the arbiter. “Foul, Commander Goll. You have dishonored yourself!”

“This contest is at an end,” said Brigadier Druzman, stepping forward.

“Nonsense!” Goll shouted back, clearly pleased with himself. “My weapon slipped. It was no more a foul than was the presence of no less than seven aces in the deck of cards we played with last night. It was all merely an oversight Druzman, just as you assured me.”

Aldo, for his part, watched the interplay. Sweat beaded upon his brow. He didn’t want to lose to this angry fop. His leg, however, was all but useless. When dueling, a quick retreat before a charge was often the only thing that kept one alive.

“The rules were stated,” said the arbiter, having regained his composure. “Neither has died. Both do not agree to resolve the argument.”

“But he fouled my man!” shouted Brigadier Druzman, his face flushing red. “And both are incapacitated.”

“Not I!” shouted Commander Goll. He flopped his left arm about in a disgusting parody of control. “I will not yield.”

“Very well, the contest continues.”

“Unless,” said Commander Goll, grinning at Aldo. “You sir! Do you wish to yield?”

Aldo flicked his eyes to his master. Brigadier Druzman heaved a sigh and gave him a tiny nod of approval. He was given permission to quit.

“What do you say, lapdog?” Commander Goll demanded of Aldo. He grinned, showing a mouthful of tightly clenched teeth.

Aldo gritted his own teeth in anger and pain. He took a half-step forward. His right leg dragged, stiff and throbbing.

“Let us finish the matter,” Aldo said.

The small crowd gasped. Even Commander Goll looked surprised. He too, gave a nod. Some of his anger had faded now. He looked at Aldo with new respect. “Very well. As you wish.”

Goll came on in a steady advance. Aldo knew that he would lunge suddenly, when he closed within range. Aldo was not able to lunge himself, nor was he capable of effective retreat. All he could do was parry and counter.

The worst of it was watching the approach. His opponent took his sweet time. Aldo wasn’t sure if Commander Goll was enjoying the tension, or if he was simply being cautious, wanting make sure the kill didn’t cost him further injury.

The final passage of arms was brief, and too fast for the crowd to follow. Aldo parried his opponent’s lunge, disengaged, and thrust high without compunction. The tip flashed electrically again, this time as it contacted Commander Werner Goll’s right eyeball. The point, being a monofilament of aligned molecules, glided through the skull and popped out of the back of the man’s head. The tip sizzled and sparked.

The commander slumped down dead. Many gasped, some wept. Most of them shook their heads and frowned. Honor had not truly been served this day. The entire thing was a travesty. A grim farce. Even Aldo felt no elation, looking down upon his fallen opponent.

Aldo looked up at the rooks that lined the whip-pines. Many of them lifted off and flapped with slow, lazy strokes of their wings. The show was over. They had sensed blood coming today, and they had been right again.

As the crowd dispersed, Aldo’s master approached. He held out his hand. Aldo took it, as if shaking hands. The two men exchanged a data-bean. Aldo suspected it would be his final payment in the brigadier’s service.

“I must ask, Brigadier Druzman,” Aldo said formally, “to be released from your service.”

Druzman nodded. His pink skull and jowls were frosted with white hair. Every last lock of it that hadn’t fallen out due to his great age had been carefully groomed into an individual, spiraling curl. His hair resembled lamb’s wool upon a badly shaven lamb.

“You’ll have to leave the canton,” said Druzman. His piercing blue eyes met Aldo’s.

Aldo nodded. He could not believe his poor luck.

Commander Goll’s seconds came close and cast many glaring looks toward Aldo. They hauled away Goll’s corpse with ill grace. Goll had been a professional Fleet officer. His death would be missed. Dueling wasn’t exactly illegal, but killing another man in a duel could result in a murder charge. At the very least, he would be arrested and harassed by the local militia.

“I’ll go north,” said Aldo, but he didn’t like the sound of it.

Druzman nodded. “We had a good partnership.”

Aldo didn’t respond.

“Aldo?”

Aldo looked up.

“Did you have to kill him?”

“No. But I did it, just the same.”

Druzman shook his head. “That’s your problem. You pretend to be a professional rogue. But really, at the heart of it, you’re a killer.”

Aldo set to work tending his injured leg. He didn’t argue with Druzman. There was no need.

Eight

The Savant had been hard at work for days. First, the trach had subdued the small population of local humans. Somehow, it had almost died in the process, however. Before expiring, it had managed to drag back on its broad, flat back a number of the humans to the lifepod.

Huddling inside, freezing, she had suspected the worst when the trach had returned with the first one. The membrane was suddenly tingling with its passage. Was this another human intruder, coming to investigate, or worse to cleanse all life that festered still in the lifepod?

A datablip calmed her nerves. It was the trach, carrying a stiff body inside and throwing it upon the snarl of flaccid veins that made up the floor of the lifepod. She waited impatiently as it carried each one back, four in all. The interior of the tiny ship was stacked with stiff corpses. Their tangled limbs and frosty body fluids were everywhere.

When the entire harvest was secure, she realized how badly injured the trach was. It had served its duty well, but now must be put down and recycled. As its last duty, the trach resealed the crack in the lifepod, spraying its own life-giving juices out to coat the membranes. A new crusty resin shell was formed. Burning what supplies she had to provide chemical heat, she let the trach fold up its legs and die amongst the collected crop of humans.

The Savant’s purpose was unlike most other Imperium forms. She was a scientist, and experimenter. She built specialized forms, growing them from genetic seeds. Unlike the Parents, who gave birth to whatever form they needed from a prescribed list of available genetic designs, the savants were able to design their own. She was, in her way, more of a craftsman than a queen-mother.

She thawed her five corpses by wrapping her body around each in turn and exuding chemical heat. She took stock of them once they were unfrozen. One trach and four humans. She probed each of them, deciding what to make of the group. She had bio-seeds available for spawning the basic forms of her race. But she needed an incubator. And without the trach, she was presently defenseless. She had to assume that the humans were not yet wiped out and would come looking for her. She had to rebuild this pile of dead flesh into efficient servants.

She found among the aliens that the Boldo-creature was probably the best combat specimen. Unfortunately, he was also the most damaged. Still, she felt it was worth the effort. The Mala form and the Zindelo-creature were both badly mangled, and inferior. She decided to use them along with the exhausted trach as raw materials. She turned last to the Kizzy-creature, which was a puzzle.

This one was barely damaged at all. Only frost and the bubbling lung damage that vacuum seemed to cause to all these creatures was evident. Curious, the Savant investigated further. It was too bad she couldn’t ask the trach about it, as it had already expired. How had this Kizzy-creature died? If she could figure out a way to kill the humans without doing any damage, the entire invasion effort would be advanced.

After a thorough examination, she determined the cause of death to be exposure to vacuum. The subject’s faceplate had indeed been open upon capture. Was it possible that the human had determined it was about to die, and simply opened its own faceplate to allow itself to expire without violence? A puzzling concept. The Savant knew that she had briefly contemplated her own suicide while stuck in the lifepod, but of course her species was too powerfully controlled by genetic compulsions to carry through with such a thought. Perhaps, the humans were able to act upon such impulses. Interesting.

In any case, she decided to make the Kizzy-creature her platform for biological construction. With radical modifications, the Kizzy-creature’s reproductive system could be restructured into a birthing model. The Boldo-creature, with a few extra limbs and sensory equipment upgrades, would serve as the combat model.

Now that her plan was clearly outlined, the Savant went to work. She wrapped the Kizzy and Boldo creatures into individual cocoons and impregnated them with bio-seeds using invasive nerve-needles. She had formed the bio-seeds inside her own body, organically creating the genetic structures she needed. Given time, carefully maintained conditions and enough raw materials, the bio-seeds would quickly sprout and grow into the required organs. Very soon, the two humans would be almost unrecognizable.

If the Savant had been capable of a smile, she would have worn one then. She felt truly happy for the first time since she had awakened in her lifepod floating in the cold void. It would be hard work, but she had finally begun to believe this invasion had a chance, slim though it might be.

#

The Savant set to work with dedication and energy. First, the Boldo-creature walked the entire base, expunging any encountered resistance. He found only a few terrified humans. They tried to stop the Boldo-creature with gunfire, using their preferred close-range ballistic weaponry. Firing sprays of high-velocity pellets, the Savant found the enemy hand-cannons to be primitive but effective weapons. The modified Boldo’s carapace had withstood the blasts relatively intact. He had, as was his designed purpose, closed with the enemy, marching into the blaze of a half-dozen hand-cannons.

Once in close quarters, the Boldo-creature’s orbs snaked out on stalks that had been withdrawn for protection. The cusps popped open, exposing the orbs but also allowing for much greater speed and accuracy. What must have seemed like a slow-moving, unstoppable tank of flesh to the humans now turned into a threshing machine once he was in their midst. The Boldo-creature’s horn-blades, long and curved, swept heads from bodies with each stroke. It had been determined this was the most efficient approach to disposing of humans. They were easily destroyed by the removal of their single brain, which was inexplicably grown inside the top head-appendage. Like harvesting seed-pods from a field of starch-producing plants, the Boldo-creature slaughtered them most efficiently.

A few managed to get off shots at close range, blowing off portions of the Boldo-creature’s anatomy. It would take a few days to regrow stalks and orbs, in particular. The central mass had been penetrated, despite the thickness of the carapace. The Savant felt fortunate that the enemy didn’t have any bigger guns available, or the struggle might have gone less smoothly.

As it was, the corridors were soon silent. The walls dripped with crimson protoplasm. Twitching bodies were stacked and brought to a large central area that seemed to have served as a feeding center for the humans. Benches and tables were pushed aside and the bodies were stacked up for the Savant to work with at her leisure. She ordered the Boldo-creature with an openly transmitted datablip to rest and feed on the human foodstuffs until she could get there.

The Savant built a bubble of resin to keep warm for transport to the human nest. The vacuum would kill her delicate bio-system with any lengthy exposure. She attached the bubble onto the Kizzy-creature’s back and slipped inside. Looking like a giant hump-back, the Kizzy creature staggered with the weight, but held. The knees in particular, the Savant noted, were weak points. She had found many such flaws in their physiology. Who had designed these ungainly humans? She was annoyed with the level of modifications they needed to become effective.

The trip from the lifepod to the base was harrowing, but successful. When she was finally deposited in the midst of a mass of workable protoplasm, she felt better. Deciding to err on the side of caution, she immediately built a fresh combat creature from the best of the males. Then she had the Kizzy-creature base herself and impregnated her growth sacks with bio-seeds. She needed some standard types, such as arls to pilot ships, hests to work the equipment and shrades to scout every centimeter of the base. She grew no culus creatures to fly with the shrades. In this environment there was no room to fly, and no air on the moon’s surface to allow it outside. The shrades would have to hump about on their own.

There had been, to the best of the Savant’s knowledge, very few transmissions from this base. Some incoming transmissions had been detected, but nothing yet that indicated a counterattack was imminent. She had a little time, she figured. The beachhead she’d managed to form here was very vulnerable right now. She still had the element of surprise and confusion, but that couldn’t last forever. One good bomb dropped upon this nest would extinguish all hope for the Imperium in the Kale system. She could not afford any mistakes.

Accordingly, she ordered all her creatures to give her only the shortest, dampened transmissions. Their datablips were to be compressed and transmitted with minimal power and directionally focused. The aliens would only know that one of their bases had gone silent. They could not be allowed to suspect the truth.

Overall, the Savant was very pleased with herself. She had managed to take the human nest, and now reigned supreme within. The pathetic aliens had put up little resistance. The only thought that kept her outlook from turning jubilant was the memory of the nife’s transmitted records from Garm. At first, the aliens had been easily defeated on every front. They had been taken utterly by surprise and seemed all but helpless. After those early victories, however, the aliens had pulled together and gathered their strength. They had turned out to be formidable fighters when organized and comprehending of the danger they faced.

Surprise, therefore, was critical. She must maintain that advantage for as long as possible. She reminded herself that she had only the tiniest of strongholds in the furthest reaches of the Kale system. Many more battles would have to be won.

The biggest decision she had to make was the creation of a Parent. She would dearly love to seed one, but in the end she decided the time was not yet right. She had to have more available sources of food first. Parents were far more useful on planets, where the food supplies were much greater. They could produce more creatures, with a greater variety, but they were less efficient in producing them. The Savant was able, using modification techniques, to take a human form and construct a useful creature. The Parent had to consume vast quantities of flesh to produce larvae, which in turn had to grow and feed.

After considering the situation, she realized she simply didn’t have the bio-mass yet to support a Parent. She would probably have to reach the planet before they would be viable if the other remote human bases resembled this one.

Having made her decisions, she worked without rest. She had rested long enough in that lifepod. She had had centuries of rest.

She planted seeds in churning wombs. She designed new genetic modules and attached them to critical nerve junctions. Her army grew by the day and by the hour.

#

Nicu had come to hate his locker. Not long ago he had been willing to do anything he could to spend as much time as possible hiding inside, but now he dreaded each cramped, trapped day. His suit’s waste unit had long since backed up and failed. His legs were burned by overflows of urine, but as yet he had not dared to try for the showers.

Taking a deep breath, he finally made a crucial decision. He would have to get a new suit. This one was his favorite, his baby, with its hacked systems. But he couldn’t take the itching and the stench anymore. He was going to miss the suit, like a baby who loses his favorite, comforting blanket. The suit had gotten him through some very hard times. The aliens were terrifying and they were everywhere, and he thought they were even building ships now. After various claws and tentacles came by to scrape and jimmy the locker door, he’d jammed the locking mechanism. His fears had been palpable. By playing quiet games and allowing his suit to give him soothing touches, he’d managed to keep from screaming, from losing his mind completely.

Now, however, he just couldn’t take it anymore. He had to get out of his locker, permanently. He had to get to a ship and get off this rock. He had to risk his life.

Nicu waited a full hour after making this decision before taking action. His locker wasn’t in a heavily-trafficked area. He’d chosen it as his hiding place long ago for precisely that reason. For a full hour he listened intensely. He heard nothing.

With fantastic care he popped open the lock. The hinges squeaked ever so slightly as he swung open the door, making him cringe. Painfully, he unfolded himself from the locker. He had to stretch and work out the cramps in his muscles and joints, standing exposed in the hallway. This was terrifying and took several minutes, but he had to do it. He wouldn’t be able to walk properly otherwise. He hated every moment of this exposure.

The first order of business was to replace his failing suit. He crept into the base, taking every precaution. He urged himself to greater speed, feeling that he was risking everything with each second he spent slinking about. All logic dictated that he was going for luck anyway, so the best policy would be to race to his destination and trust his luck would hold for one more precious minute. These thoughts were overridden by his naturally cautious, slinking instincts. He simply couldn’t force himself to run through the base and trust to luck. He’d spent a lifetime hiding and slipping into spots others didn’t think were even possibilities. He couldn’t change his nature now.

With quiet, padding steps he crept from corner to corner, peering into each new corridor with a tiny cracked mirror he kept in his pocket for just such situations. Careful to keep it tilted low, so it would not flash a reflection toward any waiting guardian, he examined each new space around each new corner.

It was in the eighth corridor that he met his first obstacle. At first, Nicu didn’t even know what he was looking at. A less paranoid person would have disregarded the impossibility of what they were seeing and continued, but Nicu wasn’t like most people. His senses of self-preservation had been tuned to a very high pitch indeed.

There was something, a spider-like being, working on the wiring in this corridor. The light was bluish here, and flickered occasionally, as if the lighting-strips needed replacing. The spider-thing had a panel open, and two brownish, mottled limbs worked inside the walls. Six other limbs, with feet like spikes, held its bulbous body aloft.

Nicu tilted the cracked mirror in his hand downward, so it would not reflect a chance ray of light. Then he withdrew his hand with fantastic slowness. His heart pounded, but his breathing was controlled, as silent as he could make it. He hoped the monster didn’t have super-hearing of some kind, or worse, an enhanced sense of smell. Because he was giving off quite a stench by now. A very human one.

Backing away three, padding steps—he’d left his noisy boots behind in the locker, of course—he turned when he thought he was clear and trotted lightly the way he had come.

He paused at another junction. Here, he had already disconnected the lights and cast it into pitch-blackness. Hiding in these deep shadows, he felt relatively safe.

His eyes drifted down to the sewer tubes at his feet. He’d considered them before, but not with relish. He blinked unhappily, but couldn’t think of a better path to his destination. He had to get a new suit, and he had to get out of here.

Nicu opened the entry port into the sewer tubes. The port wasn’t really meant to be entered by a human being. Only thirty centimeters around, the hole led down into the bubbling tubes that pumped and recycled wastes throughout the base. He’d only used these tubes on very special occasions. In fact, he’d used them last to plant his pinhead cameras in the women’s shower cubicles. He smiled at that happy memory.

Sliding down into the muck, he flipped his faceplate down. He wasn’t sure if the tubes were any worse than the inside of his suit, but at least he didn’t have to risk getting a mouthful.

He shimmied, sloshing through the water like a snake. He could not bend his knees more than a fraction. He could not extend his arms. Instead, he wriggled his body, worming with his shoulders and his hips, giving tiny pushes with the tips of his toes.

He engaged some of his special hacking software and caused his suit to grow barbs at his elbows, shoulders, kneecaps and toe-tips. This program he’d devised himself, and it gave him much more traction to scrape his way through the pipes than would otherwise be possible.

The tight turns were the worst. Those he had to negotiate with a lot of grunting and wriggling. Sometimes he gave up, panting and gasping in exhaustion. But always he managed to get himself going again. He kept telling himself he’d done this before, and he could do it now.

He reached the women’s showers and paused. There was a fairly large portal here that led up into the center of it, a main drain for all four of the cubicles. He thought about that. A shower. The concept was like magic to him. He’d erase half his vids of Kizzy-showers in trade if he could have a shower himself right now.

He chewed his lips in indecision, eyeing the drain port. With any luck, the room would have a vacc suit he could fit to his form. With nano-cloth, the overall size was the issue, not the configuration. He could wear a woman’s suit. Most of the men’s suits were too big for his lithe body anyway.

He balled up underneath the drain and listened for several minutes. He turned up the external pickup on his helmet to maximum, and waited.

Nothing. No sounds reached him other than the plinking of a dripping faucet.

Finally, his paranoia was as satisfied as it was ever going to be and he pushed open the drain grate. It clanked when it slid away, and he cursed with clenched teeth. Then he  froze, listening for monsters.

Nothing came. It took him thirty precious seconds to wriggle out of the drain in the midst of the shower cubicles. He popped open his helmet and looked around, panting. He snorted to himself. The place looked very familiar.

He eyed the showers, and finally gave in. He turned on the spray in one shower cubicle, and then went a stood behind the door in the darkest corner he could wedge himself into. His monofilament knife hummed in his fist. He waited for something to come. Wouldn’t the monsters investigate why the water had turned itself on in the shower room?

Nothing came. After a minute or two he couldn’t stand it anymore. He set up a small warning system, however. He put his helmet at the very spot a foot might go when it first stepped into the room. He placed the helmet upside down on its rounded crown and balanced it carefully, so it would roll away if touched, like a bowling ball.

Then he stripped off his suit as fast as he could and jumped into the warm spray. Nothing had felt so good for weeks. Filth, scabs and nervous sweat were all washed away. He ran soap everywhere, even though it burned in places. When finished, he didn’t turn off the spray. If the sound of it hadn’t brought any attention, why change things and give the aliens another chance to notice? Running water in the pipes was the most noticeable when it started or stopped.

Finished with glorious shower, he headed over to the row of fresh, hanging suits. There were only three to choose from. He took the largest of the women’s suits and checked the circuitry. The battery was a little low, so he exchanged the power pack with the best charged one of the three. He had no idea how long it might be before he would be given an opportunity to recharge. He switched over his data-beans next, making the suit his. Nicu was about to put the suit on when he heard something. A rolling, rattling sound.

His helmet, which he had placed so precisely, had moved.

His eyes snapped up. Reflexively, he snatched his screwdriver-shaped knife from the shelf he’d placed it upon. Naked, he wedged himself into a dark corner behind one of the dry, silent shower cubicles.

Something slapped its way into the showering module. A long creature, like a sea worm. Although much more terrifying, it reminded Nicu of a two-meter long slug, but with sucker-feet along its belly that resembled the bottom of a squid’s tentacle.

The creature, known to others as a shrade, lifted its head section up and regarded the operating shower with curiosity.

It had clearly come to investigate the sound of flowing water, but Nicu didn’t care what had attracted it. He could see no way out of this situation. Should the monster turn and take a good look around, there was no way it could miss Nicu.

His first thought was of escape. But the drain was practically under the creature’s tubular body. In fact, as Nicu looked at the drain, his heart almost stopped. He had left it open, uncovered, with the grate lying beside it. Anything with any kind of intelligence could see that something had opened it. And, as if to confirm his fears, the shrade moved to investigate the drain next. The monster looked excited. The suckers near its head-section worked the air, making little popping sounds, as it humped over to the open drain. Nicu got the impression that it liked open sewers.

There was no way he was going to sprint out of here naked, Nicu thought to himself. Maybe the corridor was full of these things. Maybe not. But in any case, even if he could outrun this worm-thing, it was certain to sound the alarm and the entire base of aliens would know they had a human running around freely in the base. Still, he might have chanced it if he had been in a vacc suit. But naked... No way.

So, hesitating only long enough to take in a deep breath, Nicu lifted his knife and padded forward in a crouch. His plan was simple, he would creep up behind it and slash off its head in a stroke, flicking on his knife only at the last instant.

He had not counted on the shrade’s excellent senses. When he came within a foot of it, the head turned and reared up. With wild speed the tail section of the monster whipped around his feet and swept them out from under him.

It was strong! He couldn’t believe the pulsing, steel-like strength of this fleshy nightmare. He managed to flick on the knife, but dropped it as he fell.

Suckers burned into his legs and chest. The thing wrapped around him. A rib popped free of his sternum and he howled.

But he had the knife again now and he slashed with it in wild strokes. Gouts of thick, yellow-green slime poured out. He didn’t know if it was the monster’s blood or its bile. Finally, the head was off, but incredibly, the shrade kept squeezing him.

Nicu blacked out for a moment, unable to breath. He came back to life moments later, gasping and vomiting. Finally, the creature had relaxed in death. He had to shave off some of the suckers one by one to be free of its grip. Spots of his own skin came off where his knife got too close.

Staggering to the vacc suits, he struggled into the one he had chosen, secured his knife and clicked the new helmet into place. He looked at the shrade, dead and twisted in a disgusting pile on the floor. He wondered, right then, if the rest of the Vlax bases knew what had happened here. Were the Vlax ships coming? Had they even been warned?

He felt a pang of worry. Concern for anyone other than himself wasn’t a normal thought for Nicu, but he felt it now. How could they fight an army of such things? Did these aliens have ships? Perhaps a battlefleet? Even those arrogant bastards on Neu Schweitz should be warned about this invasion. Humans must unite against these horrors.

Shuddering, gasping, his mind turned to a more normal path as he thought about his own escape. He had to get out of here. He had to get to a ship.

Nine

The Savant only got a single datablip from the shrade who investigated the running showers. The Savant was hard at work at that moment, planting bio-seeds into the Kizzy-creature, who sprawled upon the cafeteria with almost every bloated birthing-sac full to bursting.

The Savant continued her delicate work, probing for a spot to plant more bio-seeds in the Kizzy-creature. She wasn’t overly concerned by the shrade’s discovery. Her shrades had long since swept the base and declared it clear of enemy resistance. An intrusion from outside was unlikely as well as they now had the base’s primitive detection gear analyzed and operating. Any approaching ship would be noticed, and there had been none.

The shrades were always discovering something they thought was very interesting. It was in their nature. The big empty base had been full of reported hazards, most of which turned out to be one automated system or another. In this case, the Savant suspected the cleansing equipment had gone on by itself for an automated self-cleaning process. Perhaps it did that if not activated for a long period.

But then the shrade switched on its vid feed and the Savant stiffened in alarm. The Kizzy-creature likewise lurched in discomfort. The Savant had its tentacles deep within sensitive regions as it tried to plant the bio-seeds manually.

The vid feed showed a crazed, skinny human with some kind of weaponry in its hand. A fight ensued. The human, incredibly, managed to defeat the shrade.

The Savant, fearful of its own safety, withdrew its tentacles with great speed. The Kizzy-creature shuddered and gargled in protest. The Savant ignored the complaints and transmitted an emergency datablip to the Boldo-creature.

Seek. Kill. Protect!

The Boldo-creature reacted as if stung. It sprang erect and shambled rapidly out of the cafeteria.

#

Nicu ran lightly through the base. He paused, hugging each corner. Trying not to pant, he slipped his mirror around one corner, then two, then three. It was the fourth peek around a corner that nearly killed him.

At first, he saw nothing. He withdrew the mirror just in time to hear something. Some kind of thumping sound. The sound was very familiar. He knew it and had run from it a dozen times. It was the heavy tread of space boots. The sound was unmistakable to someone like Nicu, who lived listening for approaching footsteps.

These footsteps were heavy. Not even Boldo made such a racket. Whoever it was, they weighed a lot.

Nicu’s hopes rose wildly. The Vlax from the central stronghold had come! Someone had gotten off a distress signal, and they’d sent out a ship. Nicu felt plans bubbling up inside his mind. Excuses. How had he survived? How had everyone else died? What part had he played in this mystery? Suddenly, he was glad he’d fought to the death with that worm-thing. Nicu had just become a hero. When this was all over, he’d be decorated and promoted. His clan would be proud and very, very surprised.

He lifted one foot. All he had to do was step forward and greet the approaching, heavy-footed trooper. But as a man who lived by wits and intense depths of caution, he hesitated. What if things were not as he imagined—not as he hoped? What if this invader shot first? Should he shout out a greeting?

Then, once set upon a path of doubts, more sprang up unbidden. What if this approaching person wasn’t a Vlax rescuer? What if those bastards from Neu Schweitz had released these horrors upon them, testing some new secret weaponry? What if this trooper wasn’t Vlax at all, and instead blasted him down on sight?

He hadn’t heard any sounds, he realized now, of a ship landing. One could not usually hear the jets, of course. But there was a lot of docking equipment. Klaxons should have sounded, heralding the arrival. Yellow, spinning lights always signaled when such an event occurred.

That foot, which had been raised and ready to move forward, now placed itself behind Nicu. He took a step back, then four more, in rapid succession. It could be this was a rescue. But if not, caution was warranted. Nicu retreated at a run to his darkened passages. There, in the dark, he waited, peeping out.

What he saw come around the corner surprised him greatly. It was none other than Boldo himself. Just in case he wasn’t sure, the man’s name was still stenciled on the front of his grossly-inflated, half-shredded vacc suit.

This wasn’t the Boldo Nicu had saw die, however. The mustache was still there, but little else was recognizable. There were—stalks coming out of him, sprouting from the neck and shoulders. Things that looked like fleshy clamshells floated at the end of these moving stalks. Inside the clamshells rolled what looked like smooth balls of pink flesh. Could those be—eyes?

Somehow, this was worse than the wormy shrade. It was a person he knew, someone who had died in front of him, who had obviously been hideously altered. And what was that dark, bulging material underneath the spacesuit? It looked hard, like a shell. Finally, who had blown all those holes in the suit to reveal the shell?

Nicu panicked. He turned and ran off down his dark corridor. He managed not to scream, but that’s all the self-control he was able to exert. In his mind, he was screaming. In his mind, he yearned for the sweet oblivion of madness to take him.

He didn’t even know exactly where he was going. He made random twists and turns. He did not even think about his mirror and peeking around corners. He wanted to escape this new Boldo, this nightmare from his past who had returned from the dead. The new Boldo was more terrifying by far than the old Boldo had ever been.

He found himself in a wider corridor. He slowed down, panting hard. He knew where he was now. The public section. He was in the very heart of the base. He smelled something then, something strange and vaguely organic. Was someone boiling soup? He tried to step lightly, to control his panicked run. He didn’t think Boldo had managed to follow him. With luck, he’d lost him.

He stepped up to an open set of doors and saw he’d reached the cafeteria. He stood there at the entrance, mouth agape. What he saw inside... his mind could not process it for several moments.

The tables and benches had been pushed to the sides. The kitchen doors had been flung wide and pinned open. From inside, a yellow steam emanated. The stoves and ovens, what he could see of them, worked hard to heat bubbling glass cauldrons of unknown substances.

The floor was painted with dried blood. Bits of flesh were everywhere, mixed with scraps of hair, individual teeth and shredded clothing. Lying in the middle of it all was a swollen figure. It looked vaguely human, but a human who had been blown up like an over-inflated, multi-segmented balloon of stretched skin. Hunched over the balloon-human on the floor was a mottled-brown octopus-thing.

It was at that point Nicu made the discovery that drove him temporarily mad. He saw the balloon-human’s face. It was Kizzy’s face. Slack, emotionless, absent. But still alive, with the eyes open. Staring.

Nicu gave no warning shout. He was not a man prone to battle-cries and showy displays of rage. Instead, he trotted forward lightly, decisively. His knife appeared in his hand and he held it low. Seemingly of its own accord, it began whirring. His eyes glittered with madness. He was not himself.

A hest saw him and moved to intercept, hissing. The octopus thing noticed him next and began humping away, seemingly in fear. Nicu charged after it, but the spider caught up to him and tripped him. He turned on it and vented his rage. He slashed off its limbs one after another.

When he climbed back to his feet, the octopus thing had vanished. He stepped toward Kizzy, who made grotesque attempts to rise, but could not. She was too inflated, too full of shivering things that moved under her stretched skin.

Nicu cut her head off. He wept as he did it, but he knew it was an act of mercy. He fled the cafeteria then, and ran for the blastpans. With luck, there would be a fueled ship there. The Vlax always kept their ships ready, in case an emergency required evacuation.

As Nicu ran, he might have been screaming. He wasn’t sure.

#

The Savant was horrified. She cautiously slipped out of her hiding spot to find the wild human had left, but who knew when the creature might return? How had it evaded detection? Her team of three shrades had sought humans for days in this base, and turned up nothing. She had already recalled all her forces to the cafeteria, her last hest and the remaining two shrades. The Boldo-creature arrived before any of the others. Agitated, it stomped from foot to foot in an annoying fashion. The Savant supposed it was anxious to continue hunting for the elusive human. But she was too fearful the human might return and attack her again to allow the pursuit. The human had already done tremendous damage and would have to wait.

She worked on the Kizzy-creature frantically. Blood-loss was her biggest concern. The creature no longer really required the head, fortunately. There, at least, the human enemy had made a miscalculation. Due to intensive modifications, the Kizzy-creature had two spare brains. In fact, the obsolete one in her skull had only been doing routine work such as autonomic breathing and digestive operations. The primary brain, now located much more safely in the central thorax, could take over critical functions. Blood-loss, however, was a problem. She began working on the Kizzy-creature, ministering emergency medical help.

The last surviving hest tried to send her an enquiry datablip as she worked. As it was not categorized as an emergency, she ignored it. With the Boldo-creature there, agitated and stomping in place or not, she felt safe enough.

The Savant slathered sealant over the Kizzy-creature’s neck stump and monitored all the metabolic processes until they stabilized. She looked up, feeling like matters were under control again, only to get another datablip from the hest. This time, she examined it.

The dome over blastpan six had opened, the hest reported. Stunned, the Savant demanded vid feed. Organic bridges, attached to the electronic base surveillance system, fed her the data fed her data from the human cameras. As she watched in horror, a small ship lifted on twin cones of blue exhaust and rumbled into the moon’s dark sky.

Over the preceding days, the Savant had spent her spare time (of which there had been precious little) studying human spacecraft. The Vlax had one primary type of ship they used for all operations. Called a rook, this single workhorse design had been adopted long ago. It allowed the isolated Vlax flexibility in recovering from breakdowns. Every ship could fight, carry cargo, transport colonists and even operate as a mining vessel. There were better specialized designs for all these functions, but by sticking to a single utilitarian design, they were able to keep their fleet in repair and could always field a vehicle that could perform any required mission. As a result of this strategy, every ship in the Vlax fleet was a rook.

She watched the human escape with her mind racing. What should she do? She almost ordered the Boldo-creature to follow, but realized it was too late. It had to be the wild human who had assaulted her and the Kizzy-creature.

She fought against a wave of despair. She had failed to contain the enemy. The human had escaped and would immediately warn his comrades. Too soon! She was just not prepared for this at such an early stage. The many bio-seeds in the Kizzy-creature had yet to hatch, although they ripened quickly. If she had only been allowed a few more days...

But she had not.

Emergency evacuation! she beamed the order to her tiny collection of creatures. They immediately set about picking things up and heading for the blastpans. They moved with frantic energy, as did she. They would load the remaining rooks and launch within minutes. They would follow the human. They would jam his communications as best they could. He did not have much of a head start. With luck, they could blow him out of space, or follow him to his base and catch another unwary hive of humans.

It was a faint hope, but it was all the Savant had. She had to try. It was embedded in her genetic compulsions to do so.

Ten

When ex-governor Lucas Droad arrived on Neu Schweitz, he was surprised to find that no one was there to greet him. There were no government officials smiling and reaching for his hand. No military personnel wanted to whisk him away to debrief him. No hover-limo sat humming, waiting to glide away to a command bunker. Nothing.

He put his prominent nose up higher than before and sniffed loudly. During his long trip from Garm to Neu Schweitz, he’d never cut his hair. Now he fit in better with the locals, sporting rich curly locks of dark hair that fell to his shoulders. Personally, he preferred a short-cropped style, but with every world he journeyed to, he endeavored to fit in with the locals. It solved many problems before they even came up.

He had messaged the Nexus government everything concerning the invasion and his successful, if costly, repelling of the invaders. He had no information concerning the events since his departure, but he’d thought the Nexus would at least be interested in his report, seeing as they’d lost half a world over it.

As he ran his diplomatic credentials over the scanners and was emitted from the spaceport without inspection or question, he considered his position. Could political events have progressed in an unfortunate direction since his departure from this same building ten years ago?

He stopped in the lobby, eyeing his surroundings with growing suspicion. He lifted his phone and tapped codes he was not supposed to possess.

Not far off, in the cargo and quarantine area, Rem-9’s optics switched on.

“Is this an emergency, governor?” asked Rem-9 with a short data-blip. The signal penetrated many layers of packing foam, in addition to a dozen yards of bubble-crete.

“No, not yet. But I want you awake, and alert. Things are not as I expected them to be.”

“Message received.”

Droad let his hand drop. He thought perhaps he was being overly-cautious. He missed Jarmo at that moment. It had always been good to have his bodyguard at his side. Perhaps he’d made a mistake to leave the giant on Garm to watch over the new governor. He heaved a quiet sigh as he headed for the luggage turret. He’d come too far for such regrets now.

As a precaution, he had left Sarah and Bili with Fryx back on the ship. They would come down when he gave them the signal. There was no point in allowing anyone the chance to use them as political chips in whatever game was afoot in the Nexus halls these days. He had been out of touch for a decade, and quite probably out of favor. Perhaps those that ruled here considered him a failed governor, one who’d done nothing more than manage to lose half a world within the span of a month.

It was as he reached for his bags that he received his first shock. A steel gripper reached past his shoulder and grabbed the handle he’d been about to take hold of.

“Excuse me, are you Lucas Droad?” the mech who owned the gripper said politely.

Droad eyed it appraisingly. The feminine voice, emanating from such a monstrosity of metal and flesh, was disconcerting. Droad nodded in response to the query and watched as the swiveling optics bobbed up and down, perfectly tracking his head movement. Was the thing staring at his chin?

The mech lifted his bag without the slightest effort. She, thought Droad, reminding himself that the thing would probably think of itself as female. She was clearly a domestic model. She wasn’t as large or formidable as combat models like Rem-9 and his platoon members, but being over two meters tall, she was scary enough to a normal human.

“Who sent you?” asked Droad.

The mech made a concerned sound. Was that the clucking of a tongue? He didn’t think mechs had tongues, which left him wondering if the sound could have been a recorded digital file, or worse yet some simulation of a human non-verbal utterance. What exactly, he asked himself, was this thing clucking?

“Did no one tell you of my assignment? I’m so sorry, governor. An oversight, I’m sure. I humbly ask for your forgiveness.”

“Not a problem,” said Droad, pasting on a smile. This action came very naturally to him, as he was after all, a politician. “And who might I thank for sending you along?”

“Why, Senator Fouty, of course.”

Droad nodded, understanding more now. Senator Yannick Fouty. He was still in office. How old was the man? A hundred and fifty? No, closer to one-sixty now. After all, Droad reminded himself, he had been gone for about a decade.

“I asked to meet with the Nexus Militia Chief of Staff.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, sir. I’m sorry.”

“You were sent to greet me?”

“Yes sir.”

“Just you?”

“Yes sir,” repeated the mech. She said it with exactly the same inflection she had used to answer the previous question. Mechs were like that. Sometimes, Droad thought, it seemed like they saved bio-ram space by storing up answers and playing them back at appropriate moments.

“Right this way,” said the mech, ushering him with a gripper.

Droad didn’t move. He was thinking hard. He was certain that his experiences on Garm had made him paranoid, but he didn’t like this at all. What was the Senator’s game? Why had no Nexus military personnel come? He decided, before the mech could say right this way again, with exactly the same cadence and rhythm, that he wasn’t going to play the Senator’s game, whatever it was. At least, not without changing the rules somewhat.

“I’m sorry, but I need to wait for my friend, first.”

“Your friend?”

Droad tapped at his phone. A voice said, “I’ll be right there, Governor.”

“I’m sorry to pry, Governor,” said the mech, voice still soft and polite, “but was that the voice of another of my kind?”

“A mech, yes. It’s Captain Rem-9.”

“Captain? As I recall, he was a lieutenant.”

“Yes, well, he received a field promotion.”

“From Nexus?”

“From me,” said Droad. He eyed the mech, but sensed no hostility from her. He decided to relax somewhat. Perhaps sending a mech out to the spaceport as a greeter was standard practice for the Nexus now. He had been missing for quite a while. “Excuse me, but what’s your name?” he asked the mech. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask sooner. I’m distracted.”

“Zuna, sir. And there is absolutely no need to apologize.”

She had no sooner said this than she snapped alert and swiveled her optics toward a bay door near the spacer’s lounge. She stepped forward in front of Droad.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s a disturbance of some kind,” she replied.

Droad stared past her quite unwomanly hips toward the bay doors she indicated. He felt vaguely like a child with a mechanical mother, looking out from behind her.

The bottom of the rolling steel door rattled and shook. Something punched up through it, like a can opener popping through thin aluminum. With an irritating screech of metal, the door was forced upward, rolling itself into the ceiling. Rem-9 stepped through the damaged entrance and swept the area with his optics. Silver eyes slid over the scene with cold calculus. Rem-9 spotted Droad and strode toward him. Behind him, the steel doors quivered and hung at a broken angle.

“There you are,” said Droad, stepping out from behind Zuna. “You shouldn’t keep me waiting like that.”

Rem-9 paused for a second before answering. First, he sized up Zuna. Then he swung one optic to Droad, still directing the first at Zuna. “You are joking,” he stated.

Droad smiled. “Yes. Yes I am.”

“What is the situation?” asked Rem-9.

“This is your friend Rem-9 then?” asked Zuna.

Droad introduced them. Zuna was careful to use Rem-9’s new rank of Captain. Soon, the three of them exited the spaceport. Droad had to show his credentials to get past various officials who seemed upset about their bay door and the state of the cargo area behind it. Droad explained that they could talk to Senator Fouty about restitution. This got them to let him go, but didn’t please them. The Senator was notoriously stingy when it came to paying for such things.

As they walked out, people stared, but less than Droad expected. Apparently, seeing mechs walking about wasn’t as unusual as it had been the year he’d left Neu Schweitz.

Zuna had a flitter waiting outside. Together, Droad and the two mechs climbed aboard. Droad noticed the distinct shift in weight distribution as the mechs took their positions. Zuna sat in the driver’s seat, donning an absurd octagonal cap as she took up the role. Droad smirked at that. Fouty would make her wear a chauffeur’s cap. The senator liked formalities. At least, that hadn’t changed.

Droad’s smirk changed into a frown, however, when she didn’t take hold of the two steering sticks with her grippers. Instead, she strapped in and addressed the flitter.

“Take us home, Bruno, if you please.”

“I’ve been waiting for an hour,” complained Bruno. The voice emanated from a hidden speaker.

Droad leaned forward, eyeing the sloping exterior of the flitter. “Am I sitting in a mech? Or did someone give this vehicle a computer personality?”

“Both,” said Bruno. There was the distinct hint of amusement in the voice.

“Governor Droad,” said Rem-9, sounding worried. “There is a slight probability—”

“Yes, yes,” said Droad, cutting him off. “We have to take risks somewhere along the line.”

Droad heard the whine and snap of servos and artificial muscles behind him as Rem-9 tried to keep an eye on everything at once. He understood Rem-9’s concern. A good bodyguard never liked surprises of any kind. And this situation was indeed a surprise. He had been greeted by a mech and now flew inside another mech. A decade ago, mechs had been limited to human forms on Neu Schweitz. Now it seemed they were not only more common, but also took the form of various conveyances.

Droad looked over the flitter’s dashboard, which was covered in reactive instrumentation. He was looking for an optic, and he found it. Bruno was a mech all right. The thing had a silvery eye looking right at him.

The flitter was up and cruising now, increasing speed and banking as it turned toward a nearby cluster of peaks. Like all people of means, Senator Fouty lived up on the higher ground above the city.

“Is there a problem?” asked Zuna, watching him.

“No, none at all,” said Droad, forcing himself to relax.

In truth, he felt considerably more relaxed around Zuna now that Rem-9 had taken a seat directly behind her. Droad knew that every millisecond, Rem-9 was watching her movements for something suspicious with his lidless, roving optics. There would be no surprises.

There was another possibility, of course. The senator might want him dead. He might see Droad as an embarrassment. Senator Fouty had been instrumental in giving Droad the governor’s post in Garm. It had been quite a promotion, as he had previously been an official from Ignis Glace, his frontier homeworld. Partly, he’d been given the job because he had made a name for himself as a no-nonsense politician on his rough-and-tumble planet. But also because—and Droad was under no illusions here—no one else had wanted the job. Being sent out as the surprise new Governor of Garm had likely been a death sentence. Droad reflected that it had very nearly been just that.

Here he was, in the company of three mechs. What could be easier than a malfunction that resulted in a spectacular death? It seemed unlikely that Bruno was about to dash them all into a mountain peak. But one never knew.

As Droad had told Rem-9, he felt he had to trust people and take risks at some point to get anything done. He couldn’t think of any obvious reason this might be a setup. But his new sense of paranoia, forged on Garm, kept tapping at his mind.

Droad listened to Zuna as she conversationally tried to bring him up to speed on local events. Largely, except for more mechs running around and an increased incidence of piracy in the outskirts of the Kale system, things seemed to have changed little over the years. That was comforting to Droad. He allowed himself to relax. He’d been overly concerned. Senator Fouty wasn’t out to assassinate him. Annoy him, pressure him, threaten him with favors withheld—all that yes, but not kill him. That’s what he liked about Neu Schweitz, he reflected, things were predictable and orderly here. It was quite unlike the wild frontier planet Garm had been.

As Zuna went on, for all-the-world like a talkative press-secretary, Droad began to marvel at her humanity. He’d only met a few mechs, but this one wasn’t anything like the others. He wondered if it was due to her constant proximity to humans. Most, like Rem-9, were treated like guardian robots and only switched on when their particular abilities were required. He got the feeling Zuna lived amongst humans on a fairly equal basis.

Droad didn’t know that much about mechs. People shunned them, of course. Their basic bio-material came from humans at some point, making them rather like zombies that had been given mechanical prosthetics. They weren’t robots, however. They had living minds, mixed with a lot of circuitry. The question few liked to consider was the source of their raw bio-materials. It was said donors were used. In many cases, it was said these donors were ex-prisoners.

Droad had never given the matter much thought. Mechs had always been rare and expensive. Like sausages, perhaps their origins were best left a mystery. They were extremely useful tools, nothing more. But, he thought, if there were a lot more of them around now, he would have to learn more about them. He made a mental note to pursue the matter.

As they soared up a mountainside toward the Senator’s manse, Droad smiled to himself. Perhaps Fouty had been planning on intimidating him with this mech greeting party. If so, Droad planned on impressing his host with an even greater surprise. He glanced over his shoulder at Rem-9.

The mech flicked one optic over to Droad, no doubt studying him for any hint of communication. The second optic stayed firmly locked on Zuna, who seemed oblivious and now talked about Fouty’s various pets, which it seemed she was responsible for feeding.

Rem-9 decided Droad wasn’t trying to signal him, and soon swung back his second optic to cover Zuna with both. Listening to her prattle, Droad suspected she had no idea her every movement was being scanned and evaluated for hostile intent.

Droad took the time to refamiliarize himself with the environment of Neu Schweitz as they sailed upward and spiraled around the largest of the three looming peaks. The thin air was bitingly cool up here, refreshing. The planet had a distinctive natural smell, he could detect it now that they were out of the city. It was a pleasant mix of pepper and sawdust. The whip-pines that carpeted so much of the land in a thick green forest emitted the odor, he knew. He breathed deeply. It was good to be on a real planet again. He felt light as a feather too, as if a great weight had been lifted. At approximately 86% of standard gravity, he almost felt like he was floating after having experienced nothing less than 1.5 gees for months.

“Is that it? The Senator’s manse?” asked Droad, leaning over the dash.

“You have excellent optics, governor,” said Zuna. “We’ll be there shortly.”

“ETA 125 seconds,” said Bruno, chiming in.

Droad nodded, glancing at the dashboard optic. It was still staring right at him, disconcertingly. How did the mech associate this extra eye with the two it must have out on the front of the flitter? He tried not to think about how three inputs from various angles would look inside his own mind. The thought was disturbing. Then he had another, more disturbing thought. What if Bruno had more optics? Perhaps one to the rear and one on the belly? He tried to put the thought out of his mind. Like most people, he didn’t really want to think about mechs too much. The core problem with mechs in polite society concerned their origins. The lobes of their biological brains had once been implanted in a human body. This invariably left one wondering if someday, somehow, one’s own mind might not end up in such a device. After all, it had to happen to somebody. And in fact, it had happened to three people, who were even now surrounding him.

Landing and getting out onto a rocky pad outlined in orange blinking lights was a relief. Here was proof positive that the Senator didn’t want to conveniently dispose of him. Beside Droad crunched Rem-9, his tread pressing the stony pad down to dust. Zuna moved ahead of him. He knew the mechs were both moving slowly on purpose, pacing themselves at his rate of motion, as two adults might almost shuffle so as to not upset a toddler on a neighborhood walk.

The Senator didn’t greet them at the door, but then Droad hadn’t expected him to. Instead, a young woman—a very young woman, who wore little more than what looked like a few towels connected with straps, let them inside. Droad tried not to stare at her with obvious disapproval. The Senator had his own life to live. But unfortunately, Droad was reminded of the life style of Zimmerman, the foppish ex-governor of Garm.

He gave his head a tiny shake. Senator Yannick Fouty, he reminded himself, was no fool. He wasn’t like Zimmerman, even if he sometimes sounded and behaved like him. He was a shrewd individual, whether lecherous or not.

He allowed himself to be ushered by the girl and Zuna into the visitor’s sauna. Tendrils of steam swirled around the group. On Neu Schweitz, saunas were as common as living rooms on other worlds. Being a cold, mountainous world, the colonists had developed a custom of putting saunas into every home to take the chill off and relax. Large homes, such as Senator Fouty’s, often had multiple saunas. They were as common as bathrooms, but usually larger and more socially arranged.

This sauna was sumptuous indeed. There was full bar and a half-dozen curvaceous couches. The young woman immediately set about concocting drinks from the bar. Droad blinked at her indistinct form through the steamy environment.

Droad had a momentary concern for Rem-9, who was quite unused to this human oddity called a sauna. He could not possibly be enjoying it. He turned to eye Rem-9 and snorted in amusement. His wipers were going. A tiny squeaking noise emanated from his optics as they tried futilely to keep themselves clear.

“Maybe you should wait outside, Captain,” he suggested gently. “You might be more comfortable. I don’t want you to rust.”

“Titanium doesn’t rust, Governor.”

“Of course not, I just meant—”

“We have a full range of mech-support facilities,” said Zuna, interrupting brightly. “We have light-oil baths. And an automated injection-lubrication system.”

“I will remain with the Governor,” said Rem-9 as politely as possible.

Droad considered ordering him away, but instead nodded. Rem-9 looked uncomfortable, but he would be even more so if he was out of range to perform his duty. Droad could hardly fault a being who so diligently worked to guard his person. “All right.”

Lena, which he soon learned was the name of the girl wearing towels and straps, brought him a beverage and took one herself.

“And where is the Senator? Is he engaged at the moment?” asked Droad. He was becoming annoyed. He hated to be kept waiting.

“Right here, Droad!”

Droad craned his neck. Rem-9 stood as if under attack. His grippers opened, only about a centimeter, but Droad noticed it. He hoped the Senator did, too.

“Senator Fouty, good to see you again, sir,” said Droad, standing and extending his hand.

Fouty shook it heartily. He was a big man who unfortunately wore towels and straps in a similar arrangement to Lena. Except, in his case, they were even more revealing.

“Ah, a drink, said Fouty, gesturing toward Lena, who hurried to bring another. “What are you having, Droad? That looks frosty.”

“It’s a chocolate lace,” said Lena, handing a drink to him, “just as you told me—”

A slapping sound surprised them all. Lena whooped and pouted.

Droad’s eyebrows rode high on his forehead. Had Fouty really just popped her on the behind? Droad was glad he hadn’t brought Sarah along. He’d never have heard the end of it.

“Don’t tell all my secrets at once, dear,” said Fouty, laughing until his gelatinous stomach moved apart from the rest of him. He was a big man, with big arms, a big head and a thick neck. His stomach dwarfed the rest of his body, however. He wasn’t all flab, but he was by no means lean. His skin, which Droad could see far too much of, was hairless, a common side effect of continual extended-life treatments. He had plenty of tiny scars on that expanse of pink skin, however. He’d obviously kept the government surgeons busy editing away the growths and discolorations that came with the years.

Lena slipped away to tend to the hot stones and the dripping faucet over it. Droad hoped she wasn’t going to turn the heat up.

“I’ve just noticed, man!” said Fouty with renewed enthusiasm. “You’re wearing a coat. Didn’t you bring your towels? Or must we strip you down to your skivvies?”

Before Droad could answer, Fouty had stepped closer to examine Rem-9. “Who’s this then? Your driver? He’s a big one.”

“Meet Captain Rem-9, Senator.”

The Senator blinked and took a step back. For the first time, he seemed mildly alarmed. “He’s a combat model, is he? Rather rude of you to bring him into my house, Droad.”

“Not meant to be, Senator. But I suppose it was rather paranoid of me. You have to understand, I’ve just left Garm.”

“Ah yes. As I recall from your report, the moment you got off the ship they tried to assassinate you. Animals! Have no worries here, Droad. We are far more subtle at the Nexus. We have our snakes, but at least they are civilized.”

Droad nodded. “You are right. Would you be so good as to wait outside, Captain?”

The mech hesitated.

“You too, Zuna,” said Fouty, sensing the source of the mech’s hesitation. The two marched out together. Zuna was excitedly babbling about the quality of their light-oil baths. Droad felt a twinge of amusement. He’d never met a mech who was ‘bubbly’ before.

The Senator fluttered his thick fingers at Lena, who brought over a set of strappy towels for Droad. Droad took them with a grimace. He sighed quietly. The Senator was already cranking up the dripping faucet and the temperature of the black stones below. Steam hissed, filling the room with a thicker coat of mist.

Droad tossed back half his drink, ripped off his clothing and put on his adhesive towels. Lena watched approvingly, and Droad tried to pretend he didn’t notice. Then he made himself comfortable on the curving couches. The senator fluttered his fingers at Lena again, and she left the two of them.

This was how serious talk proceeded on Neu Schweitz. Two individuals drank frosty, intoxicating drinks while half-naked in a sauna. Droad had to wonder how many political deals had been done over the decades in this very room under just such circumstances.

Once they were alone, the Senator’s attitude became more business-like. Droad liked him better that way. Whenever there was more than one witness, the man tended to switch into glad-handing, campaign mode. After a century in politics it was only natural, Droad supposed.

“We have a lot to talk about, Lucas,” said Fouty, suddenly using his first name.

“Indeed we do.”

“I’ll start then. What the hell are you doing back here?”

“You mean why did I leave Garm and the governorship behind?”

Fouty just stared at him, not bothering to even nod encouragement.

“I have disturbing information, Senator.”

“Worse than losing half the population of your planet?”

“Possibly, yes.”

Fouty frowned at that. “All right, we will get to that in a moment. First a few details. You brought back just the commander of your mech platoon? Where are the rest?”

“They were lost in battle, sir. As my report clearly stated.”

“So you gave this one a field promotion—”

“Which I expect the Nexus to honor. I had the authority in time of war as the Colonial Governor.”

The Senator blinked at him, then nodded. “An undeclared war.”

“Millions died, Senator. There wasn’t time to mull over the matter in the Senate Chambers back here. The aliens declared the war.”

“Aliens? All indigenous life on these worlds we inhabit could be called that, you know. It’s an unnecessarily inflammatory word.”

Droad looked at him in disbelief. “Are people here under some misconception? We fought a highly advanced, technological race and barely saved the planet, sir.”

Fouty shrugged. “That’s one view. I can assure you, many here don’t share it.”

Droad was glaring now. This was exactly the sort of thing he had feared. The people at Nexus had never had much respect for Garm or her people. Granted, the natives of Garm had done little to deserve respect. But Nexus Command should not underestimate the alien threat. He had to convince them of the danger.

“What then, is the prevailing view of what happened on Garm?”

“Well, you have to understand Lucas, that we first received all this information about a year ago. Early on, when the story broke, the news was all over the net. Nightly reports spoke of your progress and there were very sketchy images and eyewitness data packets. Then, the feed stopped almost entirely. That was the point at which you had the population here riveted. Did humanity win or lose? Finally, the feed came back on, and all the talk was of the final extermination of the creatures from the Gladius with a single orbital gun. At that point, there was a collective sigh of relief. Over the months, as reports of the devastation and loss of life came in, the people moved from horrified to angry. How had such a thing been allowed to happen? How had the governmental forces been so easily routed by a random collection of monsters?”

Droad eyed him, understanding more now. “So, after that, the politicians turned around and blamed me. And my staff. I wasn’t even here to defend myself, so that made it all the easier.”

Fouty made an apologetic gesture with his big hands. “Something along those lines.”

“I went out there,” continued Droad, struggling to keep the anger out of his voice, “and somehow I caused the planet to explode into a plague of monsters. And really, they should have been easily defeated, if my head hadn’t been so obviously planted up my own arse.”

“As you say, you weren’t here to defend yourself. No one else wanted to, either. They wanted a good scapegoat. Worse still, more recently, they reported you resigned your position and headed back to the Nexus.”

Droad nodded. “Resigned being the code word for fired. Even though logically no one could have sent the message out that fast to order my retrieval.”

The Senator shrugged. “People tend to forget about the timing involved when communicating over such distances.”

“Did you defend me, Senator? In the press?”

“At first, of course,” said Fouty, looking uncomfortable. He took a big drink of his chocolate-lace and clunked the empty glass on a table. “But in time, I just stopped mentioning you entirely.”

Droad nodded, understanding. Politics was politics. Now he understood why no one of importance had been there to greet him at the airport. Not a single net-newsie had been alerted, but that might have been for the better. Even the Senator who had sponsored him as governor had stayed clear of the arrival. He had sent his mech servant instead. The mech who fed the cat.

“So,” said Droad slowly. “I’m a pariah here. I’m a walking taint. No one wants to be seen with me, lest I shed poison on their own careers.”

Fouty cleared his vast throat. “Let’s move on to another matter. I understand that you have a traveling dignitary with you.”

Droad blinked. “I’m not aware of any—”

“By the name of Fryx,” said the Senator.

Droad stared at him. He snorted and sloshed down the rest of his drink. It was indeed tasty, and deceptively full of relaxing chemicals. “Fryx? He’s an evil little jellyfish, not a dignitary.”

The Senator put up his hand, frowning fiercely. He looked around as if worried someone might overhear Droad’s words. “Please, for everyone’s sake, you must keep such offensive remarks inside your own head. I can’t be associated with a bigot, Droad.”

“You’re serious? Have you ever seen one of the Tulk?”

“I’ve seen net graphics. They are quite—different. I’ll grant you that. But you must try to be more sensitive. It’s exactly that kind of remark that got you assigned to Garm, you know.”

“You told me I got the post as a reward, as the highest of honors. A sign of how valuable the Nexus considered my contribution to government to be.”

“Did I? Well, it’s been a number of years now. Perhaps my memory fails me. I apologize profusely—”

“Forget about that. I’m not offended. Just tell me who wants Fryx so badly.”

“Why, the skalds, of course.”

“The skalds? They’re here on Neu Schweitz?”

“They’ve always been here. And they seem agitated lately. They know you are holding Fryx, and they want him. They consider him to be some sort of political prisoner.”

“Nonsense. I brought him back for the research labs to study.”

The senator gasped. “A sentient being?”

“I didn’t say they were going to dissect him. I said I wanted them to take a look at him.”

“He’s not an animal, Droad,” said the Senator with severity.

“But the aliens that nearly wiped us out on Garm are, eh?”

“Perceptions are everything. Will you give up Fryx? I had hoped, in fact, that you would have brought him with you.”

Droad blinked at him for a moment. He understood suddenly why the Senator was talking to him when everyone else at the Nexus considered him to be a plague-carrier. He wanted Fryx. Droad thought about that carefully. That little monster was possibly the only chip he had.

“I have him, and I’m willing to hand him over to you, so you can make as big a ceremony as you wish about ‘freeing’ him and giving him to the skalds.”

The Senator smiled for the first time since their private talk had begun. Droad smiled back. He had guessed correctly.

“But I’ll want your help first, of course.”

The Senator’s smile vanished.

“First, I want you to listen to things I’ve learned. Things that might not have been utterly clear from my reports.”

Droad went on at length, explaining the signals the Skaintz had broadcast on tight, directional beams to the nearby stars.

“And you have the proof of all this?” asked the Senator, in a tone that suggested he hoped Droad did not have any proof.

“Yes, aboard ship.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

Droad snorted. “Why, I want you to warn everyone, of course. You don’t have to make a public matter of it. Summon Nexus Command. I’ll brief them.”

Fouty shook his head. “I can’t do that. It’s an election year. You and I will be connected. People are in an anti-incumbent mood this time around, Droad. Before my opponent is finished it will appear that you and I are joined at the hip. So far, he’s not even brought up the fact that I helped appoint you. I don’t need that point made to the people now.”

“You have three votes in the Senate, man. This the time to use them for the benefit of everyone in the cluster. In fact, I think you should warn Old Earth itself.”

Droad thought hard. He had to get them to listen. It had been years since he had operated in this planet’s unique political system. Neu Schweitz maintained an unusual political structure—a complex parliamentary system that was oddly arcane even for a colony world on the fringe of human space. It was related to the original Swiss model, a Federation of provinces known as cantons. Each canton operated as an independent state for internal affairs, but also bowed to the central Federal government for issues of worldwide importance. In the case of Neu Schweitz, that central government had grown to have loose governmental control of the neighboring worlds such as Garm. The expansion to multiple worlds had changed the central government name from Federation to Nexus.

In a variation of the Swiss system, Neu Schweitz and the entire Nexus were governed by a Senate made up of representatives from every canton and each frontier colony world, such as Garm. Being from the most populous canton on the planet, Senator Fouty had three votes.

Staying in office so long had been a serious trick for the distinguished Senator, however. He rarely wielded his true power. When a contentious vote came up, in fact, he was known to vote once for, once against, and then abstain with his third vote.

At length, the Senator refused to entertain using his political clout to alert the Nexus directly.

Droad stood up suddenly. “Then I’m on my own. I’ll tell the Militia myself.”

“Hold on, man!” said the Senator, hopping up and getting another drink for them both.

The Senator was capable of moving his considerable bulk with surprising speed, Droad noted. It must have been the gentle gravity.

“There’s no need for rash talk,” said Fouty. “Here, have another drink. Two fine minds like ours should be able to come to some kind of accommodation.”

Reluctantly, Droad sat and took the proffered drink. He let it melt in the glass this time, however, drinking none of it.

They talked at length. At times the discussion became heated.

“Droad, I’m willing to give you some kind of official standing, but really it’s an unwarranted imposition.”

“If the aliens do come to the Kale system, people will think it is more than warranted, Senator.”

Fouty waved his words away. “Please, not another speech about your aliens.”

“I’ll require a commission, an appointment with the proper documentation.”

“I’ll make you an Inspector. There is a vacancy... a certain Commander Werner Goll was killed in an illegal duel two weeks ago. You will be able to come and go as part of our civilian oversight. I can’t guarantee anyone will listen to you, however.”

“Fair enough.”

“Good! We are in agreement at last! Simply deliver this Fryx creature to me and I’ll code the directives into the net.”

“No sir,” said Droad. “I’ll give you Fryx after I’ve gotten the appointment.”

“Unacceptable.”

Droad stood up and began dressing himself. He had to struggle to get his clothes on over his sweaty flesh.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving, Senator.”

“Nonsense! Let’s talk it over further.”

“There’s nothing to discuss. Give me the appointment. I’ll bring you Fryx. I’ll do it just before the election, if you like. You can make a show of it, looking like the peace-maker right before the polls open.”

“Hmm,” said Fouty. “Okay, I’ll do it. But don’t press me further, Droad. I—”

“There is one more thing, sir. I need orders in case my worst fears are realized. The letter shall give me the power to represent the Senate if aliens invade.”

The Senator snorted. “I can’t do—”

“But you can, sir. As Chairman of the Planetary Defense committee—”

“Oh, I suppose that technically I could.”

“It will only be used in the gravest emergency, and we can write it to that effect.”

Droad had to stage another walk-out and was in fact fully dressed and sweating before he managed to wrest a blue, nano-cloth envelope from the Senator’s hand. With these credentials, he could come and go as he pleased amongst the bases and Nexus Command. The position would allow him to quietly alert the Militia brass, and to inspect their overall defensive posture. He was expected to make a full report on their state of readiness to face any alien threat.

The Senator, for his part, insisted that Droad take Zuna with him. Droad knew she would obviously spy for the Senator, but didn’t know how to say no. Instead, he asked that he be permanently assigned Rem-9 as his aide. The Senator agreed to pull the right strings to arrange it with Nexus Command.

“I’ll be going then, sir,” Droad said at last.

“Bruno will take you back to the spaceport. Oh, and Inspector Droad?”

“Yes sir?”

“Make time to check out our little base on Crom. You’ll find it interesting, I’m certain.”

“Crom sir?”

“Yes. Zuna will guide you.”

When Droad finally left the stifling sauna, he thought the Senator looked glad to see him go.

Eleven

The original wave of colonists had been reactionaries evading the grasp of the Cognitive Collectivists of Old Earth, like so many others. In the case of this world, they’d come from a small nation known as Switzerland, or Der Schweitz in their own tongue. Attracted by the planet’s similar geography to their homeland, fifty thousand Swiss colonists had thrived on their new world.

In ancient Switzerland, a land remembered for staunch neutrality and self-determination, the Collectivists had found an indigestible article. Like a great maw, the Collectivists had consumed most of the independent governments of Old Earth within a century, but Switzerland had held out. Like a stone in the monster’s mouth, they had refused to be eaten. At the end of the third century after humanity first left Earth’s surface, however, it was clear that even Switzerland’s independence was in very real question. Before the end, their colony ships had begun something of an exodus. The people of Switzerland reached out to seed several worlds within a cluster of star systems, but the favorite had always been Neu Schweitz, with its skyscraping mountains, icy lakes, green valleys and small stormy oceans.

Just as their Swiss ancestors had done before them, the colonists believed in a strong, personal defense. Every able-bodied person was required to perform two years of service in their youth, giving their time to the militia or other Nexus organizations. Every male was required to maintain personal weaponry in his home, and must be ready to report to a Nexus summons within thirty hours, the length of one local day.

As a consequence to their defensive focus, they had built a variety of military bases, including a major one on Crom, the largest of Neu Schweitz’s seventeen moons. The heavily cratered surface and deep caverns that riddled the moon made Crom unsuitable as a beam platform. Structures built on its surface weren’t given a broad enough field of fire. In simulations there was always some spire of rock sticking up, preventing a laser from sighting on an approaching enemy that carefully chose its angle of attack. But for quiet, ship-construction efforts, the moon excelled. A ship built there wouldn’t require much thrust to escape the minimal gravity. As a bonus, without an atmosphere, ship design required no considerations for aerodynamic niceties.

By Earth standards, Crom was rather small, being a spheroid roughly two hundred kilometers in diameter. But it was large enough for appreciable gravity, which made construction tasks easier to perform. Ships were often built in orbital shipyards, but this wasn’t the ideal arrangement. Working without gravity to push against, men and robots alike had a difficult time of it.

Another advantage Crom possessed as a construction base was its large nickel-iron content, providing significant mining opportunities. Once the automated drilling pits and fusion-powered smelters were operating, basic raw materials for construction were inexhaustible and didn’t require costly transportation to the site. With all these matters carefully weighed, when the decision had been made by the Nexus Senate six years earlier to build a secret shipyard, Crom had been the logical choice.

And so a large group of determined individuals worked in secret in a tremendous cavern beneath Crom’s deepest crater. Many were professional members of the Nexus Fleet. The ship they constructed was a modified copy of the battleships built by the Cognitive Collectivists back on Old Earth. None of them had actually seen such a vessel, but they had digital files describing them in detail.

Commodore Gaston Beauchamp of Starforce oversaw the construction of the battleship, which had been christened the Zürich. If all went well, he would be her captain when she tore open the flat bottom of the crater she grew beneath and rose up on her maiden voyage.

“Lieutenant,” said Beauchamp, “provide your report.”

“We have difficulties, sir,” said young Lieutenant Karin Minard, who was his executive officer. A curled lock of her hair had slipped out of her cap. She looked flushed, despite the carefully modulated temperature in the command bunker.

“Specify.”

The Lieutenant tapped at her computer-scroll. The thin plastic film shifted, its surface filling with print. “It’s the Orion propulsion system. The bomb chutes aren’t safe—not even to work on. The radiation has damaged our synthetic workers. They can only operate for a day or two without failure.”

“Then repair them.”

“We are out of spare parts. The downtime on the robotic systems is increasing every day. In short Commodore, we are delayed, just as when you asked yesterday.”

Beauchamp drew in a breath. “There will be no delays, Lieutenant.”

“But sir—”

“Lieutenant,” said Beauchamp, softly, dangerously. “Let me be perfectly clear. There will be no delays. Work will continue. The oblation shield is perfectly safe. No radiation penetrates it. The bomb chutes are the only path down below it, and they must be completed and operational. How else can this monstrous vessel lift off? Can you answer me that, Lieutenant?”

“I cannot, sir. But we are simply out of synthetics. They have all broken down.”

Beauchamp tapped at his steel table with a stylus. Almost everything on Crom was built of steel or molded bubble-crete. The automated smelters provided an endless supply of both. One could become quite bored with stark, unpainted surfaces, but military life wasn’t about aesthetics.

Beauchamp stopped tapping idly with his stylus and moved it instead with purpose over his desk. He indicated one wall, which was formed of molded bubble-crete like all the others. It resembled gray Swiss cheese. Some of the bubbles were big enough to stick a finger into them. That wall vanished and in its place appeared a vid screen. He pointed to it.

“I’m going to show you something, Minard. Even though technically, I shouldn’t.”

Lieutenant Minard obediently looked at the screen. Her computer-scroll rattled in her hands.

A scene from the asteroid belt flashed up on the screen. In the foreground was a mining operation made of white shining metal. Dust puffed up from the drilling operations in a continuous plume. In the background were crags of black stone and a startlingly brilliant field of stars. The sound wasn’t turned off, but as the scene was shot in vacuum, there wasn’t anything to carry a vibration to the camera.

“This was shot last night,” said Beauchamp.

As they watched, at first nothing seemed amiss. But then one of the stars in the beautiful sky grew brighter.

The Lieutenant fidgeted. Beauchamp glanced at her and smiled grimly. There could be little doubt to any observer that unpleasantness was about to erupt on that screen.

Soon, a dozen of the stars grew, morphing from stars into silvery specs. These specs moved and expanded with startling rapidity.

“They aren’t using their lasers,” said Minard.

“Just watch.”

The mining base now had warning lights on, flashing yellows all over the complex. A few vacc-suited individuals tottered about, struggling to move quickly in the low gravity environment. One man miscalculated and shot up more than a hundred meters into the air. In a panic, he must have used the full strength of his leg muscles. He wouldn’t be coming down for a minute or two. If his luck was bad enough, he might have achieved escape-velocity.

The Lieutenant fidgeted uncomfortably. Her eyes were slits, as if she wanted to shut out the visions that were soon to come.

“They aren’t slowing down,” said the Lieutenant. “How will they steal anything without landing?” She gasped suddenly, as if coming to a conclusion. “Are those incoming missiles?”

“Just watch,” repeated Beauchamp.

The silvery shapes grew and finally, with almost greater speed than any eye could catch, slipped over the base with blinding velocity. Two green lasers stabbed up at the ships, but no obvious damage was done to the streaking attackers. They watched as flaring blue plumes of gas still vented from every ship.

“They are accelerating as they pass over?” asked the Lieutenant aloud. “What kind of a raid is this?”

A blinding flash filled the vid screen then, making both officers squint.

“What the—” said Minard, but she got no farther as another blinding flash erupted and the video ended a fraction of a second later.

“They bombed the mine?” she asked. Her eyes were wide. The lock of hair that had been threatening to slip out of her cap had now emerged fully. Beauchamp thought she looked better that way. She always dressed too severely, in his opinion. Even if she was Fleet, she could try to look like a woman.

“Exactly,” said Beauchamp, “and I want you to know that vid feed was from a mine in asteroid belt Alpha.”

Lieutenant Minard blinked at him.

Beauchamp knew what she was thinking. Of the Kale star system’s two asteroid belts, the inner was called Alpha, and the outer Beta. The Vlax Romani had never attacked the inner belt. There was no point. If you wanted to steal something, why go twice as far to get it? The outer belt was far closer to their gas giant stronghold, Minerva. But in this case, the Vlax had not been on a mission to steal. They had been out to destroy.

“No lasers. No looting,” she said, in a slow, puzzled voice. “They just blew the place up. Why not simply send missiles, if that was the mission? Why fly all the way out there with ships?”

The Commodore nodded. Inwardly, he smiled. He finally had the Lieutenant’s full attention. He needed this woman on his side. That mining base had been owned by his family. A great deal of Beauchamp wealth had been obliterated last night. He was unsure if the Vlax knew that, but it hardly mattered. The war had become personal now. It had affected him directly. And the Vlax Romani weren’t going to get away with it.

“I couldn’t figure that one out myself, for awhile,” said Beauchamp. “But after careful thought, I’ve come to two conclusions. One of which is obvious: the enemy are no longer content to raid us for spare parts and supplies. They have decided to step up the assaults. They are trying to really hurt us.”

“And the second conclusion?”

“They are short on electronics,” said Beauchamp.

Lieutenant Minard looked at him expectantly.

“You see, the evidence is all right there in the scenario. They didn’t fire missiles, because missiles require computer guidance. They came all the way in and dropped dumb bombs on us. Nukes, of course. Each strike was a dumb weapon, dropped directly. Again, no electronics. No chips were wasted.”

“But they have no shortage of bombs.”

Beauchamp shrugged. “Radioactives and metals are plentiful. Many moons and asteroids have a ready supply, easily mined. Hydrogen for their engines can be drawn in an infinite quantity from their gas giant. But not computer chips. They don’t have a factory that can make them.”

The Lieutenant’s hand was up to her chin now. She had gotten over the initial shock and was thinking hard. Beauchamp nodded in approval. The girl was a problem-solver, but not a deep-thinker. She was just the sort that he needed.

“Now, you see our problem,” Beauchamp continued. “We can’t spread the patrols so thinly as to cover every mine. If we did, they would simply come out of the dark with ten times our number and overwhelm each location.”

“How did they achieve stealth for such a deep mission?”

Beauchamp shrugged. “Perhaps they swung around Minerva a few times and came out coasting all the way.”

“What about our optics? We search every centimeter of the sky.”

Beauchamp laughed rudely. “That’s what we tell the civilians, Lieutenant. No one on Neu Schweitz wants to think the enemy can reach them. They are led to believe the entire Minerva rebellion is some kind of labor squabble. The truth is they’ve been hunting down our spy satellites for the last year or so. We put up new ones, naturally, but they track them down. As soon as we transmit a sighting of one of their raiders, they locate and destroy the source. Space combat is won by offense, not defense. You know that.”

The Lieutenant drew herself up then, almost at attention. “I’ve forgotten myself, sir. I must apologize. I’m sure I’ve drawn you into discussing classified matters. I feel that my rejection of your orders was premature, and I now see that—”

Beauchamp stopped her with a wave of the hand. “No, no. Perfectly natural. These things I’ve shown you are indeed classified. They are not exactly a state secret, but they aren’t public knowledge, either. I must ask that you don’t reveal them.”

“Of course not, Commodore. But may I ask why you showed me these materials?”

Here was the moment Beauchamp had been waiting for. He leaned forward over his featureless steel desk. “Sit down.”

Lieutenant Minard complied, sitting across from him. She did so slowly, almost painfully. She was clearly a woman who didn’t like to break with protocol in any way.

“Lieutenant... I need you to be broad-minded now. You can see why this mission must not be delayed. If the Vlax are blasting our mines, why not our cities? We must end this war as quickly as possible. The only thing in the system that can win this conflict is the Zürich.”

Lieutenant Minard nodded, frowning. “And what exactly do you mean by broad-minded, sir?”

“Just this: we will continue work. If the synthetics break down, we will use conscripts. Or prisoners. Or even Fleet personnel.”

The Lieutenant’s jaw sagged. “You mean...?”

“Precisely. You will issue what shielding we can provide. Each man will spend no more than an hour in the pits. But the bomb-chutes will be completed. The Orion system will work flawlessly. This ship will fly.”

“An hour,” said Lieutenant Minard. She had her scroll out and was tapping at it again. The surface shimmered with numbers and she frowned at them. “Nearly three hundred rems, sir.”

Beauchamp made another off-handed gesture. “Those charts are always overly cautious. A few nose-bleeds. A bit of fatigue and dizziness. They’ll be right as rain soon after.”

“But they’ll be getting double any kind of safe dose. And an hour per man? It would take many thousands of men to complete the project. We’ll have to run them up from Neu Schweitz and back night and day. The transport costs alone—”

“No, no,” said Beauchamp, shaking his head and smiling. “They will be working an hour per day, Lieutenant. At least, until serious health issues show up.”

The Lieutenant looked aghast. She cleared her throat. “How am I to record these—workers?”

“As robots, of course. Human robots.... I said we were going to have to be broad-minded, didn’t I?”

The Lieutenant nodded slowly, sadly. “I believe you did mention it, sir.”

#

Nicu traveled through Minerva orbit with little skill. Every adult among the Vlax knew something about piloting a rook, it was part of daily life. But he had never navigated solo to another base. He was particularly poor at handling the attitude jets. The rook was rolling around, very slowly, in a permanent spin. After the initial blast-off he could have flipped on the automatic stabilizers and allowed the computer to correct his spin, but he had not done so. He feared the aliens might follow him. Any flare of jets would only help give him away. If his ship looked cold, dead and abandoned, so much the better. He would give them no reason to come after him and no trail to follow.

So, once he had launched his rook in the direction of the Vlax stronghold Tyrolia, the massive gas-mining rig that formed the economic core of the Minerva system, he let it fly. He shut down everything except the emergency heaters and passive oxygen recyclers. He wore his spacer suit and put a ceramic-fiber blanket on over that. To any casual observer, his ship was just another chunk of debris in a very dirty system. Naturally, it was a chunk with a higher than average metal content, but hopefully that would go unnoticed. He kept all radar systems and identification systems switched off. He never seriously considered contacting Minerva with any news of aliens. First of all, that might be the signal the aliens needed to find him. Second, Minerva control would probably laugh at him.

Silently, his rook rolled through space. The trip took two days. He could have made it faster, by applying more thrust, but he’d not dared. He spent his time eating and drinking freely—he’d all but starved in that locker. He watched the passive sensors for the first day or so, staring out into the blackness of space with great paranoia. But he didn’t see any signs of pursuit. He relaxed finally, he had gotten away from them. With great relish, he immersed himself in gaming. He played happily, without interruption for once, luxuriating in a dozen levels of his favorite virtual environments.

When a harsh beeping intruded on his fun the second day, he was filled instantly with annoyance. What was it now? The beeping persisted. He finally roused himself from a particularly good session of Rockrat, a game that simulated heroic vacuum-suited combat, and searched for the source of the interruption. It was the proximity alarm. He looked up and out the broad front viewports in surprise.

There, rolling slowly due to his own rook’s spin, was the moon-sized gas-miner, Tyrolia. Anchored in geo-synchronous orbit over Minerva, the mining rig resembled a huge, silent, steel-colored jellyfish. Beneath it, hanging thousands of kilometers down, were the tubes that fed off the various levels of Minerva’s stormy atmosphere. The tubes were ultra-strong, hollow monofilaments. They continuously sipped at the methane and hydrogen, providing fuel and sustenance for everyone orbiting Minerva.

The Tyrolia was alarmingly close. Nicu untangled himself from his game equipment and scrambled into the pilot’s seat. He pushed a button, engaging the autopilot. Jets flared all around the rook, and the ship shuddered. Soon, the spinning image of Tyrolia slowed, steadied, finally stopped. Next, wincing, Nicu flipped on the communications systems.

He opened a hailing channel to Tyrolia, who must have been watching his approach. “Um, Tyrolia control?”

The speakers spit static.

He keyed the transmitter again. “Requesting permission to land?”

“Identify yourself,” a voice snapped.

“This is Nicu, from Gamma Base on—”

“Nicu? This is Commander Loiza. Why haven’t you responded to our signals? Why are your ships coming down silently in an obvious attack formation?”

Ships?

“Um,” said Nicu, trying to think. “There’s been some kind of mistake. My apologies. I’m having difficulties. There were problems back on Gamma.”

“Our defensive batteries are seconds from taking out the lot of you. We’ve assumed you were captured by the Nexus Fleet somehow and this is a sneak-attack. Explain yourself now. Why are their four ships coming in from Gamma without signaling us?”

Nicu’s heart and breath rates increased dramatically. He knew, without having to look, who was on those other three silent ships. If he told Loiza the truth, if he even hinted about alien intruders, they might well decide to fire now and ask questions later. He licked his lips. His eyes were wide and dark.

“Control, we request permission to land and explain.”

“Put Mala on, you idiot.”

“She’s been injured. There was an accident.”

“An accident?” said Loiza. For the first time, there was a softening in the base commander’s tone.

Nicu felt emboldened. Like all masterful liars, he knew when his opponent was taking the bait. His lies were working. He would go with it. “Yes, an accident,” he said in a strong, no-nonsense voice. “Knocked out a lot of our equipment. I didn’t know I was in charge of the landing until I realized the others weren’t answering your summons. I can only hope they aren’t incapacitated.”

“What kind of accident? Specify.”

“It’s complicated. It was all we could do to get away from Gamma. We’ll need medical attention upon landing. I’m sure the others will explain when I get there. Do we have permission to land?”

Silence. Then a sigh. “Get your collective tails down here and report. I’ll have emergency personnel waiting.”

Nicu opened his mouth one more time. He thought about telling Loiza to bring troops as well. But if he did that, more questions would pop up. Ones he could not answer yet. Not until he was safely past Tyrolia’s point-defense railguns and on the ground. He comforted himself with the knowledge that among the Vlax the terms ‘emergency personnel’ and ‘spacers with guns’ were pretty much meant the same thing.

Nicu’s ship was beamed landing coordinates. Smoothly, the rook turned itself so the main engines faced Tyrolia and braked hard. Nicu was crushed with nearly three gees of force as the deceleration sank his body into the padded pilot’s chair.

As he came down, he watched the vid feed from beneath the rook. The great clam-shell opened like a baby-bird receiving a worm. It yawned wide and swallowed his ship whole. When he was down, the shell rolled closed overhead and blocked out the brilliant stars and hanging moons. The blastpan wisped up hot vapor as soon as air was pumped into the chamber.

Loiza herself, the Base Commander of Tyrolia, stood at the bottom of the ramp as it came down. For several seconds, Nicu hesitated inside the ship, just out of sight at the top of the ramp.

“Are you coming out of there or not?” roared Loiza with her hands on her hips.

Nicu appeared at the top of the ramp. He walked with an imaginary limp. He had, after all, told them there were injuries. He didn’t want to disappoint.

“Nicu? Who else is aboard?”

“Just me.”

With a hiss of vexation, she turned to take her team to the next blastpan.

“Wait!” Nicu said.

“What?”

“Quickly, you must close the other blastpans! Close the clamshell domes, get out every armed man you can. The ships following me are full of—rebels.”

“What are you babbling about?”

“Just do it. Just to be safe. Close the domes.”

“But they’ve already landed.”

“They have?”

“The pilots were very skilled. They came in under heavy gee forces. In fact, yours was the last of the ships to dock.”

Nicu opened his mouth, then closed it. He blinked at Loiza, while she eyed him with growing suspicion.

A klaxon went off, somewhere deeper in the base. Another one answered it, like birds calling to each other in the forest. Loiza’s eyes flicked to the yellow flashers that were lighting up everywhere. Then she looked at Nicu. She took two steps forward and grabbed up the nano-cloth of his spacesuit.

“What did you do?” she hissed, staring at him with black eyes.

Nicu saw murder there, in her eyes. He had seen it many times before. She had her other hand on the butt of her hand-cannon.

Nicu shook his head. “We’ve got to go help,” he said, and took several steps toward the corridor that led to the next blastpan.

Nicu staggered aside as she pushed past him. “Get out of my way. If you lied, if you caused this—whatever this is, I’m going to light candles in your skull, Nicu.”

Nicu cringed. A rush of people headed into the corridor. Nicu went with them. But his limp became more pronounced, and he went more slowly than the rest. Very soon, he was in the rear of the group. When the sounds of their boots echoed ahead of him, he stopped entirely and slipped off down a side passage.

Emergency messages blared. From somewhere up ahead, a scream rose up, warbled, and then cut off suddenly. There were booming shots.

Nicu swallowed hard and headed in the opposite direction, deeper into the base. Each time he met a confused, alarmed spacer, he directed them toward the fighting.

“I’ve got orders from Loiza, let me through,” he repeated to anyone who questioned him.

His limp had vanished. In Tyrolia’s light gravity—which was entirely generated by its spinning motion via centrifugal force—he bounded as he ran, with a sprinter’s graceful stride. He ran down stairway after stairway, finding passages that curved up in either direction under his feet, until he reached the outer ring of the base.

Nicu paused when he could no longer hear the klaxons. Yellow lights still flashed warnings, here and there. But he had left the blastpans far behind now. The alarms had not yet radiated out to this section of the base. He put his hands on his knees and his sides heaved, taking in gulps of plastic-tasting air. He had to be nearly half-way around the Tyrolia’s outer ring. If he kept running, he realized he might actually get closer to the landing bays.

He looked back along the curving passages. Then he looked the other way. He didn’t have a map-vid handy, but after fifteen minutes of running, he suspected that he was about as far as he could get from—from the things in those ships.

Nicu felt a pang of guilt over leading the things down to the Tyrolia. It was a small pang, but it was there. Quite certainly, people would die today because he had talked control into letting him land. But, he argued with himself, they would have blown him out of space otherwise and how could anyone expect a person to choose such an option? They could have said, ‘Please land, Nicu. We know you are one of us. But leave those other ships behind.’ But they had not said that. They had not offered him any way out.

He didn’t blame them. No, that was not his way. He could see their point of view. But they should be able to see his as well. Many people had called him a rat during his life. He knew a rat was a small running thing with a long tail, but these monsters were worse than any rat. The Vlax on this station would soon learn. They had never seen these monsters. When they did, they would no longer laugh at Nicu! He had fought the aliens personally. They could call him cowardly names after they faced sucker-covered snakes and men with eyes on waving stalks—if they survived.

He looked over his shoulder and straightened his bent form. His breathing was even now. He felt better. There had to be thousands of Vlax on the Tyrolia. Surely, these monsters would be stopped.

Nicu relaxed. He leaned his narrow shoulders against the outer wall of the corridor. He opened his spacer suit, allowing it to exchange air and freshen up the sweaty interior. That was better. He almost felt human again. His first order of business would be to find a shower station. Then he would head to the central kitchens—after the aliens were exterminated, naturally—and see if he could find some young Vlax ladies to talk to. He had been through quite a lot. He had spacer stories to tell that would fascinate them. He could almost see their smiles, their dark curls and bright eyes.

As he daydreamed, a rumbling came to him. He felt it, through the wall of the corridor he leaned against, more than he heard it. Something had made the wall tremble behind him. The lights in the hallway flickered, died. A puff of vapor gushed out of the overhead vents. Then the rolling sound of an explosion came and roared past him, like a wind on a planet.

Nicu crouched. Had the damned aliens blown something up? Why didn’t they have the decency to simply die? Frantically, he resealed his suit, suspecting decompression. His eyes flicked each way up and down the corridor. He didn’t know which way to run. His eyes rose upward, to the vents that puffed down vapors.

He popped open the largest of them. He wriggled and grunted, managing to climb inside. He closed the vent and lay there in the darkness.

The corridor below him was empty, except for flashing yellow lights and hazy, mist-like vapors.

Twelve

The Savant had expected resistance. With only a few days to work, and not a lot of materials, she had been forced to think in unfamiliar tactical terms. Oh, how she wished she had seeded a nife to take over these decisions from her! But that wasn’t her lot in life, she had no luxuries, not yet. She needed every ounce of protoplasm to create fighters, not more command creatures. She would have to earn herself enough materials and time to make a skilled command team. She would have to do it the hard way, by fighting for every meter of space and every kilo of bio-mass.

The first ship of the three that put down was filled, not with her own young broodlings, but rather with explosives. In addition to the explosives, a large amount of chemicals had been added. This chemistry mix would react with the oxygen these humans depended on to form a narcotic gas.

And so the Savant watched, using datablips of vid feed from her pilots, as humans thronged the landing bay around each ship. They were clearly agitated, and many were armed. Most, however, didn’t have their faceplates locked down. This last fact brought her a soothing wave of neuro-chemicals. She was happy. She had maintained the critical element of surprise. These fools had no idea what she had in store for them.

She watched the affair with the explosives-laden ship through a datablip from the hest that was piloting the first rook. The pilot was her only hest, the one that had been severely injured by the elusive human from Gamma Base. Damaged or not, the hest would prove useful for this single, final duty.

She ignored the humans gathering around her own cooling ship. Only the one with the bomb aboard opened. The other two sat silently. For all intents and purposes they seemed locked and dead. It was the first ship, the one piloted by the lone hest, that held her full attention. When a dozen or so humans were in range, she ordered the hest to open the rook’s hatch and let the ramp slide down and lock into place.

Milling uncertainly, the humans gathered. A few placed boots upon the ramp. That was good enough.

Now! she transmitted.

The hest’s ship exploded. The humans clustered nearby were killed immediately by the blast. Those farther away were gassed by the escaping noxious vapors that rolled away from the wreckage. The fumes had been bio-chemically formulated with great care by the Savant. The gas was harmless to her kind.

The power of the blast had been similarly modulated. It was powerful enough to destroy the airlocks that led into the landing bay. But it was not forceful enough to rupture the clamshell dome over the blastpan. She did not need to leak the base’s atmosphere out into the vacuum of space. She needed an incapacitated population of humans as raw materials, not frozen corpses orbiting Minerva.

Most of the humans who encircled her ship turned in alarm and ran toward the source of the explosion. Had she been capable of a smile, the Savant would have formed one now. As it was, her single lung breathed deeply and exhaled slowly. Things were moving smoothly, following her best-case scenarios.

When only a pair of humans remained at the foot of the second ship, she ordered the pilot to lower the ramp. The humans had withdrawn to a safe distance in case another explosion occurred. She had studied reports on human behavior from Garm, however. She waited, leaving the ramp down and silent. Curious creatures by nature, the humans simply had to investigate. They came near before a single minute had passed on the chronometer.

She satisfied their curiosity by ordering the pilot, who was the Boldo-creature, to appear at the top of the ramp. He still looked human, if somewhat oddly-shaped and unusually bulky. She had ordered the creature to keep his fronds and stalks retracted or hidden, floating behind his body.

With swinging strides, the Boldo-creature thumped down the ramp. At first, the greeting humans lowered their weapons in recognition and seemed relieved. But as he drew closer, his strangeness became increasingly self-evident. Their weapons rose again. When he lifted his own weapons, a hand-cannon in each gloved fist, they tried to fire. One got off a single, booming shot that staggered the Boldo-creature, but then he returned fire, blasting repeatedly at close range. Both humans soon fell to writhe on the bubble-crete. The Boldo-creature methodically popped the override on their faceplates as he went by. This ship, too, leaked gas. They gasped in the drifting narcotic vapors that now filled the landing bay. The gas had the added effect of preserving dying tissues for later consumption.

A team of seven shrades followed the Boldo-creature into the corridors beyond the airlocks. Their missions varied, but in most cases the tasks involved the release of more gas canisters at critical ventilation points in the station. With luck, many of the humans would be overcome without destructive combat. The Savant needed their bio-mass badly.

The last ship carried the Savant herself and the core of the Savant’s forces. She had managed to field a fire-team of three newborn killbeasts. She had seeded them back on Gamma Base, but they had not yet been viable when the single, wily human had made his attack and escaped. Gestated and birthed by the Kizzy-creature from the Savant’s bio-seeds, these three carried the best weapons available from Gamma Base. Each was armed with a laser carbine or a rattler and their own horn-bladed feet.

The killbeasts charged down the ramp of the last ship. They made very quick work of the knot of people left in the landing bay. The shocked humans barely had time to shout in surprise much less get off a volley before they were cut down.

So far, so good, thought the Savant. But her element of surprise would be wearing off quickly now, and unless she kept the initiative, the humans would soon regroup and counterattack. History had shown her they were much more dangerous when organized and comprehending of what they faced.

Something happened then. Something she should have foreseen, but her tactical inexperience hampered her. The clamshell dome over the second ship, the one the Boldo-creature had piloted, cracked open. Gases escaped into the hard vacuum of space. Two shrades were asphyxiated and frozen. Going stiff and losing the suction-grips of their lower pods, they were drawn up with the escaping atmosphere and drifted into space. The rest of the shrades, fortunately, had escaped into the corridors and waste-tubes of the Tyrolia. The Boldo-creature stumped back onto the scene. Having kept his magnetic boots on, he was firmly planted upon the flooring. He flipped the emergency override. The clamshell rolled slowly shut again and the landing bay repressurized.

Frantically, the Savant ordered her killbeasts to disable all controls to the landing bay her personal ship was in. They could not survive in vacuum for any length of time. Before the humans could play that trick twice, they must avoid further disaster.

She nodded to herself. The enemy had made their first move. She suspected there would be more setbacks. She went to check on the Kizzy-creature. Fantastically bloated now, her headless body was at least as wide and tall as it was long, even though she lay flat on her back. Inside the ballooning, gurgling, gestational tracts the next generation of offspring were almost ready to be born.

The Savant adjusted the Kizzy-creature’s feeding apparatus, which had become simplified by the removal of her head. An arrangement of tubes pumped nutrients directly into her digesters, while new lungs had been grown externally. These purple-pink organs shivered, inflating and contracting rhythmically. The Kizzy-creature’s own lungs had long since been collapsed by the tremendous weight of the offspring that squirmed in her swollen tracts.

The marvelously efficient arrangement brought pleasure and calm to the Savant. She had done an excellent job with this creature. Who would have thought the human females could be utilized so effectively as biological factories, as stand-ins for a Parent? Looking at the marvelous Kizzy-creature, she wanted more of them. Many more.

She felt confident that somehow the cold idiocies of fate would favor her species this time. The Imperium would triumph in the Kale system. She knew it.

#

About ten hours after the initial assault, Nicu rejoined the Vlax forces. He had crawled near the front lines and had determined the humans had a strong defensive position. Strong enough, he felt, that he was probably safer with them than wandering the tubes solo and perhaps running into an alien.

Everyone who had not been laid low by the gas or killed outright had a laser carbine now. They had emptied the armory. A few carried rattlers loaded with low-velocity encapsulated-mercury rounds that wouldn’t puncture the metal skin of the base.

Nicu popped up beside Loiza at the secondary barricade. This one was constructed of flipped over tables from the distribution centers. Its protection value was largely psychological. Out in the hallways beyond the public mall were forward groups of armed Vlax. Those forward squads were the bait, as far as Nicu could tell.

“Form a half-circle facing each main entrance,” said Loiza, whispering in her suit microphone. “If they get past the pickets and come for the mall, they will be bunched up at those entrances. When they come in from one of the corridors, we can hit them all at once.”

“Good plan,” said Nicu with an encouraging smile.

Loiza stared at him. Recognition flared. “You!” she said, reaching for him. Somehow, Nicu eluded her grasp. She made several attempts, but each time her gloves closed on nothing. Nicu was not an easy man to lay hands upon. She pulled out her hand-cannon and aimed it at him.

“I’ve got important information about the enemy, Commander!” said Nicu. His words were confident, but his voice nearly squeaked in everyone’s helmet intercoms.

“What did you bring down here? What are these things, Nicu?”

Nicu saw a familiar light in her eyes. Why did everyone he met, at some point, want to kill him?

“I told you, back on Gamma—we had problems. We left, but I guess the others, the ones on the others ships—were infected.”

This time, when she stepped close enough to grab him, Nicu’s escape was blocked. Another, larger Vlax had loomed up behind Nicu and when he dodged away he bounced into the man’s thick chest.

Loiza’s hand-cannon was in his faceplate. Everyone kept their helmets down and their faceplates locked now, as the air had gone bad.

“So, you knew. You brought these things here, and you knew they would kill us.”

“No! No, no, no!” said Nicu, shaking his head within the helmet so rapidly that his individual flying hairs were pulled out when they caught at the seams. “We were fine. We were the survivors. We got to the ships and fled. I thought everyone else was normal. Like me. I didn’t know there was anything bad on those other ships.”

She stared at him. The black hole of oblivion, nearly two centimeters in diameter, eyed him from the business end of her hand-cannon. He was not sure which of these dark eyes he faced was more merciless.

The big man behind Nicu put heavy gloves on him, one on each shoulder. Another man now joined the first.

“Then why didn’t you tell us?” asked Loiza.

Nicu’s hands flipped up in a shrugging gesture. “You would have said I was crazy. I thought we were fine. I thought we could land and explain it all.”

Loiza shook her head. “No. No, you lie. When you came down, you told me not to let the others out of their ships. You knew what was on board those rooks.”

“I only figured it out as I was coming down. I saw the things at the controls. I looked at the vid feeds. There wasn’t time to warn you, we were in the middle of the landing sequence.”

Loiza nodded. For a fraction of a second, Nicu dared think he was in the clear.

“I have decided,” said Loiza. “You must die. For the good of all Vlax. We have lost too many souls today. You cannot survive this day to perform more treacheries. Perhaps, even you are infected somehow.”

The heavy hands on his shoulders became crushing weights. More hands pulled the gun from his holster. “No, wait! You are making a mistake, Loiza!”

“Space him,” she said to the men who held him.

Nicu was lifted from his feet and dragged backwards. Several men had him now. “Wait. I know all about them. I can tell you how to kill them.”

Loiza lifted her hand indicating the others should stop. They brought him back to her.

“Half my people are dead or gassed already, Nicu. The Tyrolia is dying. The Vlax are dying. Tell me what you know, to save your people.”

Shivering, Nicu felt the men ease their grips, but only a fraction. He told Loiza then. He told her about the shrades. He told her about Boldo, or what he had become. He told her about the things the squid-like creature had done to Kizzy. He told her how he had killed a shrade and Kizzy.

Loiza listened at length, nodding occasionally. “I had suspected to hear a story like yours. It is insane, but I believe most of it. And I know, I think, where these things are from.”

“Where?”

“The Nexus.”

Nicu looked at her, baffled. “The Nexus?”

“You perhaps have not been examining Nexus Net News. It’s mostly propaganda, of course, but there are useful tidbits. Some years ago, Garm was in a rebellious state. They killed their Nexus appointed Governor and elected their own. After a time, they were mysteriously attacked by creatures like these. They came out of nowhere, out of space. They moved very quickly, and looked like a strange variety of animals, but they were intelligent. Half the population of Garm was killed. Now the people of Garm are quiet, peaceful. Obedient.”

“Years ago?”

“It takes time, even for alien monsters, to travel between the stars.”

“Oh, I see,” said Nicu. And he did see. Anyone traveling to Garm would take years to arrive. Also due to the distance, people in the Kale system only heard of events on Garm and the other outlying worlds of the cluster years after they had occurred.

“So, you think the Nexus released these monsters to stop a rebellion on Garm? And now they have done the same to us?” Nicu asked.

“Yes. They are angry because we destroyed one of their bases in the Alpha asteroid belt. They seek revenge.”

Nicu understood clearly. The plan was diabolical. “And the Nexus can pretend it was all a disaster. Not their doing.”

Loiza nodded and stared at Nicu. Her rage was gone, but her gaze was still dangerous. “Your brain works better than most. But your heart is dark, Nicu. It is rotten.”

“I know it, Loiza. It is my greatest sorrow.”

“Today, it is my sorrow. My only regret is that I dare not blow your brains out right here.”

“Ah,” said Nicu, uncertain as to where this statement left him. “I have killed two of these monsters. I have fought the greatest Nexus weapons. I want to stand with you.”

Loiza stared at him for a long second. She shook her head. “You would run. Somehow, you would run,” she said.

“I would like to volunteer for the worst duty,” said Nicu proudly. “I will stand on the front lines with the men in the hallways.”

She finally nodded. “I will take you with me instead.”

“With you?”

“We are about to attack the aliens in their landing bays. We will drive them from the Tyrolia and back into space. You will lead. You will be our scout.”

Nicu swallowed. He nodded his head, but could not bring himself to speak audibly.

#

Both sides became defensive and the struggle went on for days. Loiza had made forays, trying to engage the aliens. They proved elusive and appeared weak. She decided to push them back to the area of the blastpans. She gathered her troops for a big attack. She figured they were not as all-powerful as she had believed at first. After all, how many of them could have fit aboard just three rooks? No more than thirty or so if they didn’t have troop pods attached, and one of them had exploded upon landing. She could overwhelm twenty to thirty aliens, fast or not, with her hundreds.

So on the third day, when all had been quiet along the corridors that had become a no-man’s land, a place where nothing moved without being fired upon, she made her push. She ordered sixty troops forward on three lines of attack, moving through three corridors at once. She needed to spread out her attack so that her superior numbers could overwhelm the enemy. She could not let them bottle her up in a narrow line.

She took another force of twenty troops behind the second group. They would press ahead, force their way in if the others were stopped.

At first, they met no resistance. A few shadows moved, and her men lifted their carbines to fire splatting laser-bolts after them. But nothing stood and fought. Her people’s spirits rose. They should have done this earlier! They had been cowed by these monsters who were now going to be taught a lesson about the ferocity of the Vlax Romani!

They reached the final corridor that led to the ring of blastpans and landing bays. When their corridor teed off into two others, each of which led into one of the landing bays, fire erupted from both sides. Men were cut down in seconds. First three, then five dropped. They scrambled back into the corridor they had come from. They returned fire, but found no targets. Whatever had hit them, the enemy had vanished.

They proceeded with greater caution after that. Nothing happened until they approached the nearest airlock that led into a landing bay. The ceiling bulged then, right in their midst, as did the floor. Strange creatures, things like the ones Nicu had described, sprang up among them. Like snakes, these monsters wrapped themselves around legs and worked up to abdomens and finally heaving chests. Screams were cut off, turning into choked, gasping cries. Ribs popped in rippling sounds like the tearing seams of fabric. Everyone was screaming and struggling. Hand-cannons boomed, but as often as not hit human flesh.

Into the midst of this chaos, at either end of the corridor they were in, more of the elusive snipers appeared and peppered them with laser fire. This time, however, some of the Vlax were ready for such a move. They returned fire. One rattler splattered two killbeasts with mercury rounds. They were torn apart and the rest of the aliens retreated. But the damage had been done. By the time they had destroyed all the shrades in their midst, fully half the Vlax group had been killed.

Loiza withdrew with her forces to the public mall. Of the original forty she had led, only twenty remained standing. The second returning group had fared no better. The third group never returned at all, save for one man. Some argued with her they should go out and search for the third team, but she refused. The Vlax would fight here until relief arrived from the outer bases, then they would abandon the Tyrolia.

She ordered the one survivor from the vanished group brought to her.

#

Nicu reluctantly answered Loiza’s summons. He tried to strike a martial pose. He was, after all, a heroic survivor.

“You?” demanded Loiza, realizing whose narrow-shouldered frame filled out that spacer suit.

“Yes, I made it back. Things went—poorly.”

“Report in full, Nicu. Weren’t you on point with that team? Weren’t you supposed to be guiding them?”

Nicu made an easy gesture. “There was some, ah, confusion in that regard.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not all the troops saw fit to follow my lead. We became separated.”

Loiza was pacing now. He could see the anger in each of her stalking steps. He had to choose his words with care.

She nodded. “What is that slime on your suit?”

Nicu shrugged. “As I said, I took a different route in order to scout the enemy.”

“What route?”

“An unexpected one.”

“That’s sludge, isn’t it? You went down into the sewers. Like a rat. Didn’t you?”

“I have video,” he said.

“Show me.”

Nicu played several seconds of fuzzy video he’d shot with a hair-thin vid pickup. From within a drain in the floor, he had shoved the wire up into the corridor outside the blasted airlock. Inside the landing bay, a rook rested. It was blackened and showed bright points of twisted metal. The rook had been completely destroyed.

“That’s the one they blew up,” said Loiza. “You weren’t even at the right landing bay.”

“As I said, there was some confusion—”

“So,” Loiza interrupted, “you slipped away from your team and into the sewers, then took pictures of abandoned wreckage.”

“Do you have something against me, Commander Loiza? I’m sensing personal vindictiveness here.”

Loiza closed her eyes and shook her head. She pointed out toward the front picket lines. “They may counterattack tonight. Stay in that corridor with the lookout teams. And stay out of the damned sewers!”

#

When the attack finally did come, it was brutal. In the middle of the sleep-period, Nicu was awakened by a rude hand upon his shoulder. He lurched into a sitting position.

“There’s something coming,” said young Drina, another of the sentries in the outer corridors.

Nicu was awake in an instant. He had his laser carbine unslung. “I’ll spread the word,” he told Drina. “Keep a close eye out.”

She nodded, and he trotted lightly away toward the public mall. At the entrance, he was challenged. He told them he had important information for command.

He was waved inside. He had no sooner reached this area than a most horrible wailing cry erupted in his headset. More sounds came, gasps and whimpers. He suspected the sounds were made by Drina. He shivered in his suit.

The dimmed lights overhead flickered out. Emergency reds came on. In places, strobing yellows lights flashed. Nicu headed for the barricades. His pace increased.

The firing began before he could dive over the barrier. Laser bolts snapped in both directions. Spacers from the outer corridors fell back in full retreat, firing into the darkness. Answering fire from the corridors tore into them. A few of the sentries staggered back into the public mall, trying to reach the barricades.

A dozen killbeasts bounded amongst them. They smashed down the spacers, slashing off their helmeted heads with horn-bladed feet. The men behind the barriers watched in horror, then unleashed a lashing fusillade. Several of the killbeasts were cut down before they beat a hasty retreat.

After the battle was over, Nicu panted, looking over the top of the barricades. That had been close. He wished he could open his faceplate to wipe away the itching sweat from his brow, but he dared not because of the lingering gas.

A hand fell on his shoulder. Another hand followed. He was hauled to his feet.

It was Loiza and her guards. Her eyes were blazing.

“You will not talk your way out of this one, Nicu.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” said Nicu indignantly.

She took his laser carbine and examined it. “This weapon has not even been fired. The magazine is full.”

“I never got a clear shot. I didn’t want to hit one of our own.”

“You left your post. You ran at the first sign of trouble. This time, I have witnessed it.” While Nicu sputtered denials, Loiza turned to the men who still held him loosely. “Take him down to the service airlocks. Remove his helmet in the airlock. Space him. Then space the helmet as well and everything he’s touched. He’s contaminated.”

Nicu writhed and whined, but his external transmissions were cut off. They overrode his reactive suit and began a thorough, faceless beating. He thought at first, as he balled up on the deck plates and the kicks and hammering fists rained down, that they had been kind not to open his faceplate and let in the gas. But then, as his mind numbed and his body began to soften like pounded meat, he realized the gas would have been a relief. He would have felt nothing. He tried to reach up and open his faceplate, to suck in the tainted air and pass out, but his hands were pinned down. They stood on his hands and kicked and punched. He knew from past experience his urine would be dark with blood after this, if he ever got the chance to use a urinal again.

When the beating finally ended, they dragged him away. His muffled cries could only vaguely be heard by the men as they hauled him deeper into the station. They took him to the lower vents, the places where the heavy machinery thumped and groaned. Down here, in the pump rooms, the gas was drawn up the tubes from Minerva and processed. The living area was far above in the cleaner parts of the Tyrolia.

As they dragged him, Nicu planned. He made no overt attempts to escape. He struggled lightly, but not too much. He was glad there were only two men holding him. He would have preferred just one, of course, but two was much better than three. They had not removed his knife, which still lay against his side, hidden beneath a flap of fabric. Perhaps they had not seen it. Or perhaps they thought so little of his fighting skills they had not bothered.

He believed that with surprise on his side, he should be able to draw the knife and kill one man. One thrust would do it. But not two men. He did not know what he could do against two. He was too injured. He didn’t think he had any broken bones, at least nothing more than a rib or two. But stiff and groggy from the beating, he would not be able to move fast enough. Even if he killed one, by the time he’d done it the other would draw his weapon and it would be all over.

So he let them take him. While he pleaded and dragged his feet, they marched him down the long catwalks to the lower airlocks that were used for tube maintenance. Below the Tyrolia, nothing existed except the tubes and the endless blue, glowing expanse that was the atmosphere of Minerva. As they went deeper, windows appeared under the catwalks. The churning blue planet, thousands of kilometers below, filled every window. Outside in space, long dark tubes of snake-like metal hung down into the stormy gases of Minerva’s atmosphere, resembling vines hanging from a great jungle tree.

Nicu heard the sound of pursuit first. The others had their headsets turned on. No doubt, they listened to the command chatter from above. Inside his silent helmet, all Nicu heard was their clanking steps upon the catwalks and the slapping, rippling sounds of stealthy pursuit from behind. The sounds of something plopping along after them.

When the pursuer drew close, Nicu heaved himself forward. The men leaned back in response, holding onto his arms. The worm-like thing that followed them struck the struggling knot of humans from behind. It attached itself to the man on Nicu’s left. Nicu knew great relief then. If the shrade had wrapped itself around Nicu, he would have had no chance. His guards would have had no compunction about blasting his body apart along with the shrade.

The second guard hesitated. His grip on Nicu slackened. He backed away from the horror that squeezed the life from the first guard. Nicu took the opportunity to reach up with his freed arms and turn his suit intercom back on.

“Fire!” shouted Nicu. “Fire or we’re all dead. It’s already too late for him.”

The third man had his gun out, but still hesitated. Nicu made a sound of rage as the first man slumped, overcome by the shrade. It would come for them next. He got out his knife and flashed it down. The man who hesitated had blown his chance. Now, Nicu slashed at the wrist. Nicu reached down and plucked the hand-cannon from dead fingers.

Nicu fired repeatedly, destroying the shrade and the first guard. Then he ran into the darkness. Behind him, the surviving guard picked up his own severed hand in shock. His nano-suit squeezed to cut off the flow of blood.

Nicu did not even look back. He had learned his lesson. These people had no idea how to survive. They did not appreciate Nicu. He was in this alone. He was an island unto himself. He would not trust himself to the mercy of humans or aliens again.

#

Some days later, Loiza made her final move. She ordered a full scale evacuation. The enemy held most of the landing bays and the rooks, but not all of them. Additionally, a new force of rooks, those from the other outlying bases like Gamma Base, had gathered to offer what aid they could.

Perhaps this was what they wanted. Perhaps the aliens just wanted to run her off into space. Maybe they had an armada waiting out there—waiting to blow her to pieces. She did not know, but she had to try to escape these creatures.

Had these things been created by the Nexus and unleashed upon the Vlax? She believed they had been. She had ordered the Vlax to maintain radio silence with the Nexus. They had not sent any warnings or distress calls. Even if the Nexus hadn’t sent these monsters, she would not pass on the news. Why let one of your enemies know that the other had you on your knees?

Things had progressed in the worst possible direction. Each day, the humans aboard the Tyrolia grew weaker. Their power and oxygen had been cut off in many cases. Just providing food and sanitary facilities for her people grew more difficult with each passing day. Many lay about, sick or comatose from the strange, invasive gas that filled the Tyrolia. They could not live in their suits forever. Children were already falling sick.

Worse, each day there seemed to be more of the aliens. When they had first landed, if she had truly understood the rate at which they bred new replacements, she would have ordered a full scale assault immediately. They would have taken grievous losses, but they would probably have saved the base. But it was too late for that. They would have to abandon the Tyrolia and destroy her from orbit.

They had to run, or be wiped out. She ordered everyone to the remaining operational rooks. More rooks from other bases would take people in transfer. They would take every ship they had, less than one hundred in all, and fly to the inner asteroid belt. They could find massive bases there, scarcely manned. With luck, they could hole up amongst the huge, rolling rocks and wait out the storm. Her greatest hope was the aliens were not fully under Nexus control. Perhaps they were a wildfire that could turn back and burn the ones who lit it. The aliens might even serve as cover for her fleeing people. She would let Nexus Command deal with the menace. Perhaps they would fare better than she.

The Vlax Romani lifted off en masse and headed into the dark, licking their wounds. Behind them, when they had reached a safe distance, Loiza activated Tyrolia’s self-destruct rig. She watched, knowing the fusion cores would spin out of alignment. In thirty seconds, the whole thing would implode and sag down in a decaying orbit, sucked down by the crushing gravity of Minerva.

She watched, sadly. Thirty seconds went by. She blinked, and waited. Her lower lip trembled. Everything she had worked for over the years was about to be destroyed.

A full minute went by, then another. Nothing happened. She talked heatedly to her engineering staff. Could something have gone wrong?

#

Nicu, the last human in control of his own mind aboard the Tyrolia, climbed down from the self-destruct system attached to the fusion core. He had disabled it, but had barely managed to do it in time. Sweat dribbled inside his helmet. That had been close. Too close.

Even now, he could hear the servos clicking, trying to bring together the remotely controlled contacts that would cause the explosive device to detonate. If he hadn’t driven his knife into the circuitry that sat on top of the charge, he would be atomized by now. He shook his head.

Loiza had chosen her side, and he had chosen his. He was on his own side now. Perhaps, he reflected, he always had been. Maybe that was why everyone else always called him names. Nicu, they knew instinctively, was not on their team.

He stood at the bottom of the catwalk, looking at the bomb as it whirred and clicked helplessly, trying to set itself off. He smiled. He had made a difference in his life and the lives of others. Everyone said he never did anything but waste his time, but they were wrong. He was important today.

Nicu’s smile faded as he heard stealthy sounds behind him. He knew what they were. He knew what they had to be. He flicked his knife on and turned to face—whatever snuck up behind him. He had fought his way past these creatures before. His heart sank when he saw them, however. A dozen monsters stood there. He had not even noticed their approach before, he had been trapped in a helmet, making it hard to look over one’s shoulder. He had been focused on stopping the bomb. Now, he thought, maybe he should have let it go off.

He reached up to his helmet. His next thought was to open his faceplate. The gas would come in and quickly end his suffering. But if he did that, he would only be anesthetized. Then the aliens would have their way with him. They would make him into a Boldo or a Kizzy—or something worse.

Nicu considered scrambling up the ladder and setting off the bomb. They were too close, however, he knew. They would never let him get up that high and kill them all.

Loosing a single sob, he turned his knife and held the whirring thing over his chest. A quick jab. It would be easy, he told himself. Like sinking the blade into boiled spaghetti. Oblivion would be his reward for a hard life.

In the end, he could not do it. He could not kill himself. Instead, he went down snarling. The aliens lost limbs coming for him. The killbeasts, strangely subdued, silent, did not kick off his head. They didn’t fire laser bolts at a safe distance and burn gaping holes in his flesh. Instead, they closed and grappled. Nicu hissed and fought. Clearly, they wanted to take him down whole, intact, and make a monster of him. He made them pay dearly. Three killbeasts were injured and a shrade was cut in half before they took the knife from his flashing hand.

Then they lifted him like a child and ran with him. He felt helpless. His face was wet with tears and sweat.

Jostling on the hard carapace backs of killbeasts, Nicu despaired. He activated his vid collection with his chin. He selected a Kizzy shower sequence. Clip 187.

Thirteen

Droad did not head immediately up to inspect the base on Crom, as Senator Fouty had suggested. Although the Senator’s hints about it were intriguing, he had his own stops to make. He wasn’t completely happy with his position. He’d hoped to meet with the military chiefs as an authority, not as an appointed liaison. He had envisioned seminars full of generals taking careful notes, working up strategies to defeat the aliens should they ever arrive on this planet.

Instead, he’d spent his time touring various installations around Nexus Command, several of which were fortunately in the immediate vicinity of Bern. He did not get a warm reception. The military people, especially those who were political appointees, saw no advantage to themselves in being caught dead with ‘the butcher of Garm’ an unfortunate name some press people had given Droad. Only people professionally dedicated to defense, rather than self-advancement, were ready to listen to his story.

Droad told those who would listen of the beamed messages. They assured him no alien activity had been reported, and that they had ordered a generally higher level of alert since hearing of Garm’s misfortune. Still, they seemed to think of it as some sort of plague or insect infestation. The sort of thing they’d heard of from colonies wiped out in their infancy centuries ago when they discovered a mutating virus that could not be stopped, or a strain of indigenous fauna that crept in and devoured new colonists.

Straining to maintain his composure, Droad tried to impress upon them the danger they faced. He emphasized the suddenness of the enemy attack. Continually, he was met with skepticism. Everyone knew that Garm was a disorganized backwater. Neu Schweitz was a paragon of organizational excellence in comparison. He could not get them to grasp the magnitude of the threat.

The most compelling elements in his bag of presentation materials were the security vids he had gathered carefully. They demonstrated the orchestrated nature of the enemy assaults. These vids showed clearly, to anyone with a military mind, that the enemy was intelligent and very capable.

Each time he made his presentation, he backed it up with a dramatic finish. He called for Rem-9, who brought in the pressurized encasement they had carried all the way from Garm. Rem-9 carried it in grimly, clanking with each stride, his grippers whining as they lowered the heavy steel burden. Solemnly, Droad opened the many clasps and seals. Inside were the desiccated remains of the aliens themselves, including the strange, specially-grown creatures that had beamed messages out into space to unknown recipients. Each time he concluded his talk with the disgusted staff by pointing out that the Kale system had received such a call from the aliens and it had reached here only months earlier.

The presentations had won him few friends and little support. He was given free run of the place as an “Inspector”, but little else. Those who most sincerely wanted to help him always voiced the same complaint: They could order alerts and drills, but any budget or policy decisions would have to come from the Senate. There would be no new units raised, no militia musters, no ships built, not even any satellites sent up and tuned to the proper frequencies. In regards to these aliens from distant Garm, little of real consequence would be done.

After a few weeks, Droad had grown frustrated. He had taken to hanging around Nexus Command Central, eyeing the big displays and reading incoming reports. This was one of the few true nerve centers in the Kale system. Both Fleet and Militia, the two halves of Nexus Command, were here with all their pooled intel.

His presence in the NCC was barely tolerated. To keep him under control, he was assigned an assistant named Joelle Tolbert, a skeptical young Ensign from Fleet Command. At least, thought Droad, she was easy on the eyes.

“With all due respect, Inspector,” the Ensign told him, “our space defenses are far beyond the primitive systems of Garm.”

“And what’s to stop an enemy from cruising in from outside the system, as happened to the last world I stood upon?”

“Why, we would detect them, sir.”

“They excel at stealth, let me assure you.”

“Stealth in space is very difficult to achieve with a non-passive system,” said Ensign Tolbert, beginning a lecture. She was unfortunately prone to do so. “Put simply, any ship capable of independent movement at a respectable rate of speed must do so by blasting hot gas out the aft end. Such a device is by definition highly visible in the cold, dark emptiness that is space. Without any haze or clouds or much of anything else to get in the way, visibility within a star system is essentially infinite. Even a small ship will emit enough light and energy to be detected within a hundred million kilometers or more.”

“Excellent to hear confidence from our officers, however—”

“Let me first tell you why we are so much more proficient here as opposed to Garm.”

Droad drew himself up, pursing his lips. He expected a long diatribe on the efficiencies of the famous militia system of Neu Schweitz, something that every school child had had relentlessly drummed into them.

“It’s not what you’re thinking, sir,” said Tolbert. She leaned closer, although no one else was in earshot within the command bunker. “It’s because of the raiders.”

“What raiders?” asked Droad loudly. He had become annoyed with the woman’s entire manner.

Tolbert waived his words downward, signaling for quiet as if Droad were shouting. “It’s not a popular subject. But I feel I should tell you, some things have changed drastically since you left. You do realize you’ve been gone for nearly a decade?”

“I believe my ward room was issued a chronometer, yes.”

“My point is that certain realities have changed. We’ve had a political upheaval.”

Droad was surprised. Neu Schweitz was usually a very orderly place. “And the source of the trouble?”

“The raiders, as I’ve said. Separatists from the Minerva colonies.”

Minerva was the only gas giant planet in the system. Truly a monster, half-again as large as Jupiter, Minerva had a rich ring of moons and asteroids all its own. The planet had long been the primary source for gases and mineral wealth in the system. It was far easier and more ecological to gather your minerals from floating, lifeless rocks than it was to drill them out of the green mountains that covered much of Neu Schweitz.

“Separatists?” asked Droad. “Oh, you must mean the Vlax.”

Tolbert reacted as if stung. Several conversations stopped and eyes swung toward them. Droad noted the disturbance with interest. He felt hostility at the mere mention of the Vlax Romani. He was somewhat taken aback. The Vlax Romani had been a troublesome element on the planet for a long time, never seeming to quite fit in with the rest of the population. What Droad didn’t understand was how their status had changed. They had always been a somewhat wild element of the population who preferred living in ships and domes rather than solid homes. But that had been a source of success for them, as they had gravitated naturally to the outlying domes and habitats around the system. Miners were always in demand in any new colony system, and they excelled at the occupation.

“What’s happened? Did they rebel?”

The officer nodded, still flicking her eyes toward the command staff as if fearful of reprisal for even discussing the matter. “It is something of an embarrassment. They have effectively established independence in the outer regions of the system. Thus, you see, we have been forced to build up our patrol ships and detection equipment.”

Droad nodded slowly, beginning to understand. If they required patrol ships to deal with them, they were a serious threat, not just rioters. For the first time, he decided to honor the woman’s obvious desire for quiet and to lower his voice.

“They harass the mining lanes?”

“With growing frequency. They have been cut off from trade with us, which hurts both sides. Our mineral and gas mining has been reduced. They struggle to produce enough food and replacement parts for their ships.”

“Have there been—confrontations?”

The other nodded. “They are turning into a race of pirates. At first, they took only wealth and supplies. Now, they take prisoners as slaves, or space them all.”

Droad nodded again. He weighed the pros and cons of the situation in the case the aliens came here. On the negative side, the humans were disorganized. On the positive side, paranoia and a ‘shoot-first’ attitude might save a large number of lives.

He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial level. “Are there any plans to eradicate them soon?”

The officer stiffened and avoided his gaze. “Such information is outside the bounds of this briefing, sir.”

“Of course. Now, tell me why a small ship can’t sneak past your detection systems. The original alien invasion craft was quite small. It was organic, not metallic. A small ship can coast in at speed and is thus invisible.”

“We have passive scanning equipment on satellites parked around the system now, which gives us excellent detection capabilities. Upon approach, yes, they would be hard to see, but not upon deceleration. The sort of invasion ship you describe would necessarily need to reduce its speed, or it would smack into the planet it was attacking and be destroyed. The faster it’s going the longer it would have vent visible gases to decelerate. Interstellar vessels accelerate for the first half of their journey and decelerate for the later half. On the other hand, if it’s coming in slowly, we have longer to notice its approach.”

At length, Droad became mildly impressed. Neu Schweitz was indeed well-prepared for an invasion attempt. It was a much better situation here than it had been on Garm. In part, this was due to their long-standing need to stop space debris from smashing into their world. In the past, Neu Schweitz had been heavily-cratered on a regular basis. Their defenses had put a stop to that.

But still he felt uneasy. Garm had faced only a single enemy ship. No more than a scout, really, and they had almost lost an entire world. Where had those signals gone and what had they summoned? What if this time, the enemy came in real force?

He decided it was time to leave the command center. He would take the Senator’s bait next, and head up to Crom. He had become curious about what was up there. He’d asked around, but only learned something big and secret was under construction. Most did not know the full story, and those that knew more, spoke less. Over time, his curiosity had grown. It was time to learn the truth behind Senator Yannick Fouty’s hints.

#

On the seventeenth day, Sarah became bored. She had never been a kept woman, and she damned well wasn’t going to start now. Whatever this thing was between Lucas Droad and she, it had been on-again and off-again since the start. The man was, in all fairness, impossible to seriously connect with. He was heroic, intelligent and driven. But he tended to get caught up in bigger matters, in fact, he sought them out. He didn’t have time for a serious girlfriend.

Sarah, since her husband had died, had become a believer in ‘moving on’ when relationships weren’t working. Lucas had asked her to stay aboard the Gladius as he checked out the political landscape of Neu Schweitz. He promised to get back together with her, to take her around the lush green world on a grand tour. The two of them had earned a rest, and they could take their vacation together.

But that wasn’t how things had turned out. He’d gone down planetside, immediately gotten tied up in politics and his personal quest to tell everyone about the aliens, and had never come back. She thought the aliens were very important and dangerous. People should be warned of what might be lurking out there in the endless expanses of nothingness that surrounded all living worlds. She suspected, however, there was more to Lucas’ quest than good will. She suspected he felt guilty about Garm. Who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t want to make things right, after half the millions of people you had been placed in charge of were slaughtered?

She felt for him, and she knew it wasn’t his fault. Neither the slaughter nor the obsession to fix his reputation. But she needed to think of her own life as well. She had to think of Bili.

It was time to move on.

She packed up Bili and Fryx, who still floated in his absurd little fish tank, and took them down the space elevator to the planet. Lucas could catch up with her when he found the time, if he ever did. She was no longer worried about assassins and the like. If they had been lurking, waiting for Lucas, they would have made a move by now. She couldn’t think of a reason why she would be targeted. If there was going to be a move made, it would be against Lucas Droad, not his ignored girlfriend. So far, nothing had happened to Lucas. Nothing.

Bili was overjoyed they were finally going to leave the ship.

“This is great! Will Lucas be down there? Will he?”

She shrugged. “He’s somewhere down there, I’m sure.”

Bili paused and eyed her appraisingly. She tried to look disinterested.

“Aw. Don’t worry about him, Mom. He’ll come back.”

“Probably.”

“Anyway, I want to get into a new school.”

It was her turn to look at him in surprise. “You do?”

“Yeah.”

“Since when have you ever wanted to go to school?”

Bili had a different light in his eyes. He had a plan of some kind, but she couldn’t fathom it.

“I just do. Is that so bad?”

“No,” she said, quickly. “No, that’s great. We’ll set it up.”

They rode the rest of the way in relative quiet. The scene of the planet, rushing up to them outside the windows, was breathtaking. It was quite unlike Garm. She could tell right away this world was smaller. They plunged through the highest cloud layer, and the planet stretched out in every direction beneath them. The world was dotted with tooth-like gray mountains, every one of them capped with ice. In between each cluster of mountains was a pool of lush green. Those were the valleys, she knew, where all the major settlements had been built.

The equatorial belt of oceans, far away, could be seen from this height. The slate-blue seas were hung with occluding mists. The storms down there, she knew, were the worst.

Looking to the northern hemisphere, where they were coming down, she saw the biggest city on the planet directly below their feet. It was quite a place, by Garm standards. An entire valley had been consumed by the sprawl. It was canton Bern, the center of the Nexus. Millions lived there, more than the entire population of Garm.

Then they fell into another layer of clouds and the world was swallowed up in fluffy whiteness.

She wished Lucas had been there to see it with her. She clamped down on that self-pitying thought. She would see him again, when events permitted. She was sure of that.

She watched Bili, who now held Fryx up to see the view. Fryx looked anything but happy about the experience. She wondered what that little creature knew about their surroundings. Could he sense, at least, that they were descending rapidly? Could he see anything? She doubted it. But maybe Fryx could read Bili’s thoughts or understand the explanations of the scenery he was giving...

She shook her head. She shouldn’t have let the boy get attached to that thing. But she had had little choice. He had been about the only kid on the trip, and in such a situation it was only natural for a child to find and adopt a pet, even one as detached as Fryx.

She looked at Fryx, ruffling his spines and floating up near the top of the tank. She squinted her eyes. She was going to get rid of Fryx soon, somehow. As soon as Bili became distracted with school or whatever else came up, that spiny little ball of jelly was going to become someone else’s problem.

They were going to move on, and Fryx was going to be left behind.

Fourteen

Aldo Moreno finally arrived in Bern on a slushy day in late spring. His leg had long since healed to a red scar. Modern medicine was amazing—when one had ready coin.

He hated the north. There were more people here, and that meant more noise and longer waits for everything. If you got into an aircar, there would be a delay somewhere along the line before you reached your destination. If you stopped at an Inn, the innkeep would not come to your table and greet your warmly. They would not have the time. They would bustle about and serve one customer after another as fast as they could, as if they were mechs themselves.

He sighed. The southern cantons were open, free, wild. He preferred the south, and not just because he had been born there. But for now, possibly for a year or two, he was going to have to stay on the north side of the oceanic belt. Hopefully, the Fleet people would no longer be looking for him after that, and he would be able to return home.

Aldo hadn’t fled because of the law, in truth. It wasn’t legal problems he feared. Certainly, they could be inconvenient. What he fled from were friends. Werner Goll, the Fleet Commander he had slain in his last duel, had friends. It was those men, men who might be driven to perform very dishonorable acts in the name of honor, which he ran from.

Aldo feared no man in a fair duel. One who was better than he was would be only marginally better. Such a man would not want to face Aldo, to do so would be to risk his life. A master of the blade preferred to fight those who were easy to defeat. That was precisely how masters lived through so many duels. Those who were not good were of even less consequence. They would die quickly, predictably.

But men from the Fleet who came for vengeance, they might learn they could not fight him fairly. They may well decide to treat him as a criminal, a dog. They could feel justified in their dishonor, telling themselves he had dealt dishonorably with Werner Goll.

In time, however, their resolve would fade. Those men from the Fleet would give up in time and come up with better things to do. They would forget about him, eventually.

Once he reached canton Bern, he sought out a quiet spot. The city still had some of the old quaint flare to it in the colonial districts, but each year more fields of green grass and whip-pine groves were covered over with gray bubble-crete. He found some areas, however, that had been restricted for development, especially among the oldest of the colonial neighborhoods. They were preserved for tourism, if nothing else.

In a park-like area ringed with old-fashioned wooden houses, Aldo found sanctuary. Each day, he flexed his body and his sword in the park. As it was a public park, his weapon could be drawn and thrust into an occasional darkwood without any legal violation. He did notice women frowning and hustling their children away when he practiced, but that was their affair. They could call the constable if they wanted, but he was within his rights. People in the north knew all about dueling, but it wasn’t as common and was more associated with thuggery than chivalry up here. Aldo threw his nose high and ignored the stares.

One evening while he practiced in the park, a stranger approached him. The stranger wore a gray octagonal cap and a stiff cloak of the same fabric. Two rows of gold buttons lined the front of the uniform. It was a Fleet uniform.

Aldo regarded the man briefly, and then went back to pronging his tree. The darkwood had thick bark that split apart like matted hair. The wood beneath, unlike the woods brought here from Old Earth, was not lighter in color, but rather an even darker shade than the bark itself. The sap ran like blood, and was as black as dirty motor oil.

“Aldo Moreno?”

Aldo paused. “Are you addressing me, sir?”

“I am. I would know your name.”

“I’m not accustomed to responding to rude youngsters in parks. Perhaps you’d best run along, Lieutenant.”

The Fleet man stiffened. He was indeed young. He had grown a broad mustache, perhaps to hide his youth from others.

“You claim not to be Aldo Moreno, the rogue fencer?”

Aldo thrust again. He did not have his plasma sword activated, of course. He might well have lit the park on fire if he had, and that would indeed be an actionable violation. He thrust more deeply than before, letting the tip sink a full foot into the tree. The darkwood ran with black sap as if it wept.

“I know of such a man. Let me give you a kind word of advice: do not pursue him. He is not a man to be trifled with.”

As the conversation continued, the Lieutenant became increasingly restive. His elbow cocked and his hand went to the butt of a pistol he had at his belt. His eyes blazed at Aldo.

“Your insulting manner convinces me you must indeed be Aldo Moreno, the southern rogue.”

Aldo left his sword quivering, stuck deeply in the tree. He sauntered to stand near the Lieutenant. His sides heaved from his workout, and the air was fresh with the peppery smell of the trees.

“Is this not a fine evening? Why do you want to ruin it, Lieutenant?”

The younger man blinked at him. Aldo could see, for the first time, the nervous flickering of his eyes.

“Honor must be served,” said the Lieutenant.

Aldo nodded. He glanced down at the other man’s hand, which still clutched the butt of his pistol. He smirked.

“And do you propose to murder me with a shell here in the park? Perhaps I should turn my back, so as to make it less frightening for you.”

Aldo turned his back then, and his nose rose up into the air. His lips pursed together in a tight line. The young man had become tiresome.

The Lieutenant slipped his hand from the butt of his pistol. Aldo glanced back at him and nodded.

“Aldo Moreno,” said the young Fleet officer. “You have wrongfully slain another officer of the Fleet. I demand satisfaction.”

Aldo heaved a deep breath. Steam plumed from his nostrils. The challenge had been issued. There was no retreat for either of them now, not without dishonor. He nodded and retrieved his blade from the darkwood tree. He stood stiffly with the tip pointed down to the earth.

“If you insist,” he said. “As the challenged, I choose the sword. I also choose to duel you here. Now.”

The Lieutenant looked startled. “Without an arbiter? In twilight?”

Aldo nodded.

Rattled, the other man removed his cloak and set aside his weapons belt. From it, he drew a sword. Aldo eyed it appreciably. It was a Fleet weapon, standard issue. It had no power fields, no ability to burn. But it would be well-balanced and familiar to the boy’s hand. The edge would be a single molecule wide, just as sharp as Aldo’s rapier.

“I see your weapon has no power settings. I will turn off all kinetic force on my own.”

Eyes wide, the young man nodded.

They stood en garde. Aldo fenced with him for ten strokes. The boy had promise. With years and a proper tutor, he might make a name for himself.

The first touch came at the boy’s left foot. Aldo pinned it to the ground, then quickly withdrew, retreating.

Gasping in shock, trailing bright blood through the grass, the Lieutenant came on, but he could no longer lunge. Naturally, this was Aldo’s plan.

Aldo caused the other to stumble, dancing away from a thrust that the young man couldn’t follow up upon due to his wound. Aldo charged in then, and the Lieutenant parried the onslaught with growing desperation, retreating on his bad foot, which obviously pained him further with every passing second.

Aldo beat down the Lieutenant’s sword. He drove the point of the other’s weapon into the ground and grabbed his wrist, pinning it and the sword. The boy could not move his hand nor his weapon. He held on, however, grunting and straining against Aldo’s strength until Aldo laid his rapier across the back of the young officer’s neck.

The Lieutenant froze. With a single downward flick, that sword could remove his head effortlessly. His eyes were all whites and rolling irises. He blew out breath like an animal run down by dogs in the forest.

“I would speak with you for a moment,” said Aldo, now that the young man was at his mercy.

“What are your intentions, sir?” asked the Lieutenant, trying not to let his voice raise into a panicked squeak.

Aldo nodded with appreciation. “You are a brave one. I will leave you with the best advice in the world for a swordsman.”

“I am listening.”

Aldo bent down to the other’s ear. “Never start a duel unless you know you can win.”

The other did not nod, as he did not want his spinal cord severed. “I’ll remember that,” he said.

“Now, drop your weapon and I’ll allow you to live.”

The Fleet sword slipped away and clunked onto the ground.

“I must apologize, however,” said Aldo, “for there must be some—unpleasantness.”

The Lieutenant didn’t answer. Aldo thought maybe his pants had become wet, but he did not want to humiliate the boy by looking.

“You see, I can’t have you coming after me for a second round.” So saying, Aldo flicked his weapon to life. It blazed with purple kinetic force. Plasma ran like flame down the length of the blade.

With a single, clean stroke, he swept off both the young man’s legs. He severed them just below the knee. A spray of blood threw hot drops in every direction. The blade flashed as it struck each leg, instantly cauterizing the wounds.

“The Fleet will give you a regrow. You will be fine in—six months.”

The stricken young man fell to the dirt. The fresh, burnt stumps wept blood, but did not gush with arterial red. He would survive. He craned his neck around to stare up at Aldo. Each word he spoke fell like a coin from his mouth. “You dishonor me by leaving me alive.”

Aldo shrugged. “What? You want me to kill you at such a young age? I will not put another questionable death on my record for your pleasure. Learn, heal, improve your technique. Life is worth living, boy!”

He left the Lieutenant there in the park and walked rapidly away from the scene. Law enforcement didn’t always understand these messes.

He thought about the boy’s complaint at the end. He snorted and chuckled to himself. There was simply no pleasing some people.

#

Aldo Moreno continued his trek to the north after the duel in the park. He left Bern behind, there were far too many Fleet people there around Nexus Command, and he’d been a fool to stop there at all. A week later he found himself in a quiet valley that reminded him of home. He found an inn that had a good feeling to it. Warm lights gleamed from within. Wooden bric-a-brac—cut-out shapes of birds and beasts—decorated every window. The light cast from each window shaped itself into squares and curves of yellow on the sidewalk.

He stepped up to the door, and rang the tiny, tinkling bell. He smiled at that. It was quaint to find such an affectation of the old colonial days today. True, he was out at the northern borders of canton Bern, but this bell was something from the distant, windswept valleys where travelers were rare. An inn, out in the wilder valleys, was really someone’s rambling house. Usually an elderly couple ran it, most of their children having long since left. They took in occasional boarders to make ends meet. This place had that feel.

It had been a long time since he’d felt at home in a place. When the door opened, Aldo had high hopes. Matching those expectations, a weathered woman answered the door. She smiled at him and her apple cheeks glowed redly. A hundred broken red capillaries shown beneath her smiling blue eyes. The sun, Kale, had beat down on this woman’s face for many long years. And she had never bothered to edit her face, preferring the honest look of the land.

Aldo smiled at her in return. He was politely ushered inside and set at a table in the common room. She eyed his sword, but didn’t object or try to make him leave it outside. It was a gesture he appreciated.

There was one other person in the common room. A woman, surprisingly pretty. She had a hard look to her, however. She had seen much, he could tell in a second.

She looked up at him, and stared at him a second or two too long. Was she suspicious? Did she run from someone? To put her at ease, he nodded, smiled and took a seat at a neighboring table. The innkeep soon brought out a bubbling pot of hot stew, a basket of crusted bread and a carven mug of wine. He took everything graciously and dug in.

He ate for several minutes, in truth he was ravenous, without looking at the woman. When next he glanced at her, she glanced back, at the same instant. Both looked down at their food, disturbed.

Aldo snorted and shook his head. Why had this woman discomfited him so? He was normally smooth with the ladies. He had charm and wit and a rogue’s good looks. Best of all, he knew these things, and worked them to his advantage.

He was quite surprised when a shadow fell over his table.

He looked up and saw the woman stood over him. She was taller than most. He blinked at her and smiled.

She reached out and tapped his sword, which lay in its black leather scabbard across the table in front of him.

“What’s this?” she asked.

He wiped his mouth with a napkin before answering. Still delaying a reply, he leaned back steepling his fingers and smiling. “That is my sword.”

She frowned. “What’s it for?”

He almost laughed, but saw that she was in earnest. Could she be from off-world? “It’s my protection,” he said. He reached out and touched it, smiling wistfully with half his mouth. “It’s more than that, really. It’s my livelihood—even my companion.”

“You fight with that thing?”

“Indeed. Are you new to this world?”

She nodded.

“Then please, take a seat. Let me enlighten you. And you can share your wisdom with me in turn.”

She hesitated, then brought her food to sit with him.

Aldo smiled. He had the feeling this was to the beginning of a lovely evening. He soon learned her name was Sarah and she had a son named Bili. She was alone on this world, a fugitive of Garm which had suffered greatly some years ago.

“Oh yes,” he said, “I’d heard of that. Some kind of plague of beasts? Quite terrible, I understand.”

“No,” she said. “No, you don’t understand.”

“Enlighten me.”

And so she did. She told him the most horrific of tales. Aldo was no stranger to blood or odd things found in wild places—there were still creatures on his planet that humanity had yet to classify. But her story was one of fantastic woe and destruction. He could scarcely credit it. But here she was, and somehow, he believed her. He believed every word. It was the dullness to her voice, the haunted look in her eyes. She was very real.

#

Aldo felt, after only a week, that he was perhaps in love with this strange woman from another world. He had seen many terrible things; he had fought for his life on many occasions. He had, in fact, made a profession of risking his life and trusting his arm and blade to keep him alive. He had met very few men who had faced death with such regularity, and never had he met a woman who had done so. In Sarah Engstrom, he had found such a woman. He did not know it until he met her, but he had been missing something in his life.

“I did not know a person such as you existed,” he told Sarah as they lay in darkness in his room.

“I’m one of a kind,” said Sarah, running her finger over his chest muscles.

Bili slept in Sarah’s room across the hall. After the boy fell asleep each night, since that first wonderful surprise, she had moved with stealth into Aldo’s room. From the very first time it had been a shock for Aldo. She had bypassed his lock as if it were nothing. He had greeted her with the tip of his blade a centimeter from her fine throat as he commanded the lights to power-up. He thought now, that of the two of them, he had been the more surprised. She had smiled at him, despite the nearness of his rapier, which sizzled under her chin.

He saw right then that her spirit was a kindred to his. She was all about freedom, action and bravery. He smiled back, and they made love. Each night, she came to him the same way, but unlike her approach, the love-making seemed to be infinitely varied.

It was possibly the ninth such fine evening when Aldo heard stealthy sounds again. He came awake, being too finely attuned to danger to allow such a sound to go unnoticed. But he knew who it was. He smiled in anticipation.

The lock rattled slightly, and he frowned. Sarah never took more than a moment to pop it open, such was her skill. At first, he had thought she had a key of her own, but he realized later she was just an expert at picking locks—any kind of lock. He had never asked her how she did it, and she had never offered any answers.

Aldo blinked and turned his head. It was then he made a surprising discovery. Sarah was already in bed with him.

He vaulted out of bed. His feet touched the floor and he slipped free his rapier. The door was about to open.

The first time Sarah had snuck into his room, he had assumed this would be yet another haughty Fleet officer. This time he suspected it again. Another youth out to make a name for himself, most likely. This one, however, had the wisdom of past failures sharp in his mind. He had decided to play the part of the assassin rather than the honorable duelist.

Aldo bounded up and positioned himself behind the door. It was an old-fashioned door that swung inward on hinges rather than sliding out of the way as would a modern portal. Aldo considered flicking on his rapier, but he knew it would crackle and spark, giving him away.

Sarah was awake now and alert. Aldo wasn’t surprised. She was almost as hard to creep up upon as he was. He extended a hand, palm flat to indicate she should move slowly and silently. She nodded in the dim-lit room and glided into the bathroom. His eyes followed her shapely form for an instant, then he forced himself to stare at the door, which began to slowly open.

A thin, pale hand came into the room. It tightly gripped a hand-cannon. The barrel tilted in the direction of the bed he and Sarah had so recently occupied.

Aldo wasn’t one for hesitation. Possibly, it was a mistake. Possibly, it was only an honest member of the militia come to arrest him for past misunderstandings. Such matters could be made clear in later discussions. In the meantime, without warning, he swept the rapier down in a decisive stroke. The hand, and the gun, fell to the floor. The cannon barked once, causing the mattress to fountain feathers. The inn was authentic in every respect, thought Aldo. They even had down bedding rather than synthetic.

His hand sought out the other, lighter man and dragged him into the room, shouldering the door closed in case he had an accomplice. Blood gushed everywhere, swamping his bare feet. Aldo frowned in annoyance. Blood and hardwood floors made for bad footing.

“Who are you?” Aldo hissed, while Sarah stepped back out of the bathroom with a small pistol in her hand. Had she kept that hidden in there all this time? Aldo had to wonder.

The man was mindless and fought with surprising, wild strength. He was horribly injured and his wrist stump sprayed blood everywhere, but still he strove with Aldo, making a strange gargling sound in his throat.

Aldo flicked on his sword and slapped the flat of his blade across the man’s temple. The intruder went down in a heap. Out of pity, Aldo touched his blade to the wrist stump, cauterizing the wound. There was a steamy hiss and the room filled with the smell of burnt flesh.

“He’s a skald,” said Sarah, standing close. She had a robe on now, but little else. She kept her pistol against the strange man’s skull as she bent to look him over.

Aldo noted that her bare knees dipped into a puddle of hot blood. She didn’t seem in the slightest perturbed by this.

She looked up at Aldo suddenly, her eyes wide. “They’ve come for Fryx!” she said, standing. “Bili!”

She was past him and out the door in a second. Aldo, confused, followed her into the hallway. “Sarah?” he called after her. “Let me go in first.”

But it was too late, she was already in her room. Bili lay on the floor. A smaller puddle of blood pooled around his head. Aldo he felt a wave of emotion. He knew Sarah was tough, she was damned near unflappable. But now she was crying and broken. If she cared about one thing in the universe, it was that boy.

Aldo put his hand on the boy’s neck, there was a pulse. Apparently, they had only bashed him down. Sarah was calling for a medical flyer, and pointed to the nightstand when Aldo stepped toward her. There was a splash of saline water, but Fryx, that strange pet of theirs, was gone.

Aldo set his lips in a line. He was still very surprised. Could it be that Sarah had not yet escaped her demons? He had thought he was the one endangering her by his presence. Now he realized she was as much a magnet for trouble as he was. In any case, this assault could not be ignored.

“Bili will live. I’m going after them.”

She nodded, and he left her there on the com-link with the medical people.

Aldo took the stairs down to the lobby. There was the old woman. She had been garroted. Her tongue protruded, more red and bloated than her rosy cheeks. Eyes, still wide circles of shock, stared at nothing. There were odd pinprick marks, tiny bloodspots, all over her face. What had these pallid devils done to her?

Aldo threw open the front door. The bell tinkled madly overhead. He stalked out, looking this way and that. The accomplice who stole Fryx had fled, but most likely would be waiting for his companion somewhere. Aldo spotted him quickly. There he was, at the corner. The skald climbed quickly into a small flitter as Aldo approached. It was one of the newer models, with moving optics and a mind of its own. It was a mech.

They always took a few seconds to get the turbines going fast enough. Aldo made it there before the vehicle could lift off. He slashed off the mech’s silver optics, which stuck out on stalks like drumsticks. Blinded, the mech began rising slowly into the air, circling and complaining. He could not make out the words over the roar of the turbines.

A thin, pale hand reached out of the cab with a hand-cannon. Aldo side-stepped underneath the mech which had risen about two meters into the air. He thrust upward, directly into the cab. The thin white fingers went numb and slack. The hand-cannon dropped into the cobbled streets with a clatter.

It took a few minutes after that to talk the mech into landing, but it finally did. Aldo retrieved the fish tank with Fryx in it. He eyed the quivering, spiny being distrustfully. What was so important about Bili’s pet that men would kill for it? Sarah hadn’t talked much about these Tulk things, only the invading aliens that had destroyed Garm.

Fryx had survived without serious injury. Half the water was missing from his tank due to an overabundance of sloshing about, but the vessel was still functional.

Aldo carried him back up to Sarah, his mind bubbling with questions. He knew the Militia would have quite a few for him as well.

Fifteen

It had taken Droad a week to get up to Crom and a second week to convince enough brass he was on their side to get them to discuss the construction project Senator Fouty had mentioned. Finally, they let him in on the big secret.

When he learned the truth, it came as something of a shock. They were building a battleship up here? A real battleship? As far as anyone knew, it was the only such vessel in the entire Nexus region of space, and probably very few other human colonies had them. Sure, the Cognitive Collectivists on Old Earth held onto their power with a small fleet of such monstrous vessels, stationing one at each of the closest colonized star systems. But the Nexus was too far out for that. They had stayed free of Old Earth’s grip mainly via distance. Not even the craziest of the Collectivists wanted to take an eighty year trip out here just to conquer a collection of backwater planets.

And so, for all conceivable purposes, this would be the only battleship any of them would ever see. Droad was suitably impressed. For whatever military purpose you might want to assign it, a battleship such as the Zürich was up to the task.

The hull and configuration was based on the infamous ships the Collectivists had used to burn down Alpha Centauri B two centuries ago. Their design had many modifications, naturally. Updated, stream-lined and shrunken moderately, the vessel was still a monster of destruction. Fully two kilometers in diameter, the ship was not a sphere, but more of a pie-shaped structure. The bottom of the ship consisted of a vast oblation-shield of heavy metals. Layers of carbonized steel, lead, foam shock-absorbers and heat-resistant ceramics formed the bottom “plate” of the great pie. The “meat” of the ship, the top layer, contained all the weaponry, cargo, magazines and crew quarters.

Being far too huge for traditional propulsion systems to allow it maneuverability, the Zürich used an Orion system. Nothing else humanity had yet devised could compete with the raw power of Orion propulsion. The entire bottom “pie-plate” structure was built to allow the Orion system to work without tearing the vessel apart.

Droad had read of such systems since grade school, of course. But he’d never seen one built. Explained simply, the ship dropped a series of small atomic weapons out the aft end. The bombs were exploded, one at a time, and the resulting force shoved the massive ship forward with wrenching power. The kilometers-wide oblation shield absorbed the thrust and distributed it over the entirety of the ship, spreading the impact so everyone aboard wasn’t instantly killed. Getting the whole thing built just right was an engineering marvel. Not killing the crew on lift off—that would be the tricky part.

“An Orion system? Really?” marveled Droad.

The Commodore stared at him with narrowed eyes. Clearly, he did not relish Droad’s skepticism.

“Perhaps you, ah—governor, could suggest an alternate form of propulsion for such a vessel?”

Droad let the jibe about his former title slide. He was used to such treatment from military people, who rarely appreciated civilian oversight of any kind.

“No, no,” said Droad, shaking his head and grinning. “I can’t say that anything comes to mind. Nothing else will give you anything like the thrust you need to make this ship move faster than an orbital base or cargo vessel.”

The Commodore nodded, mollified. “Glad you approve.”

“Well, if you are going to build one of these monsters, there’s no other way to do it. Oh, and by the way, why did you build this monster?”

The Commodore opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Let me first explain what it can do, Droad.”

Droad nodded. If he was to judge its worth, he needed more to go on than foggy memories lectures at the Nexus University.

The Commodore took in a deep breath. “There are two, or perhaps three basic theories of space warfare. And two basic forms of weaponry, upon which these theories are based.”

Droad pulled up a stainless steel chair and got himself a mug of hot caf. He sensed this might be a long one.

“The three platforms are big ships, small ships and bases anchored to some planet or moon. The two forms of weaponry, naturally, are any form of beam such as a laser, or missiles.”

“What about ballistic weaponry such as bullets or railguns?”

“Any type of basic dumb ballistic weaponry such as a gun is pretty useless unless the target is stationary or very close, so we don’t use them other than for point-defense systems. Bullets or railgun projectiles travel slowly and can’t adjust their trajectory, so they miss too much. That leaves us with beams and missiles. The basic problem to be solved is distance. Since two combatants in space usually have no cover to hide behind, the one with the longer range generally wins. Even firing a laser shot at the speed of light, it takes a full second to reach across 300,000 klicks, which is about the distance from Crom to the surface of Neu Schweitz.”

Droad stirred in some cream. He nodded to indicate he was listening—which he was.

“Beams take power,” the Commodore continued. “The greater the power, the greater the range. That’s where big ships come in. The bigger the ship is the more power it can generate, so the more range it has. This one can reach across the heavens.”

“But by your logic, a base on Crom could outrange any battleship.”

“Ah,” said Beauchamp, standing up in agitation. He began pacing. “Quite right, but the stationary nature of it means it can’t pursue an enemy. Also, it is vulnerable because it can’t evade fire. Everyone knows where it is and it’s a perching rook. We do have several beam bases on key moons, I might add, but they are purely defensive and somewhat easy to take out.”

“You admit then, that your battleship is definitely an offensive weapon?”

Beauchamp eyed him, wary again. “Defense and offense are one and the same in space. You can’t really win on defense. What if the other side throws nukes at your world? Or steers an asteroid at you? They only have to hit once and you are devastated.”

“Are the Vlax apt to do that? I’ve seen no evidence—”

“Then you should look harder.”

Droad stared at the Commodore. He frowned. Was this skirmish between the Vlax and the Nexus escalating?

“Back to what I was saying,” said Beauchamp, pacing again. “The advantages of small ships are stealth and evasion. They have to get much closer to be effective, but you might not see them coming.”

“And what about missiles?”

“They are potent, but take possibly weeks to reach their targets. A beamship battle could take place at a million klicks apart or more, and missiles won’t reach the combatants until the battle is over. Think of them, however, as very small ships that blow themselves up. They have the stealth and evasion, but not the speed of attack.”

“So, with decent intel, we can blow away the Vlax ships or missiles with the Zürich before they can do any harm.”

“Exactly.”

Droad sipped his hot caf. “But, Commodore Beauchamp, you never really answered my question. What are you going to do with the Zürich? What is her real mission?”

Beauchamp stood tall and looked annoyed. “To restore order to the Kale system.”

Droad nodded slowly. He thought that such a ship was indeed a monstrosity, a vast statement of overkill. Fleet had gotten it funded as the final solution to the separatist Vlax Romani problem, as if a few thousand rock-rats could really warrant such treatment. Droad was quietly of the opinion that if the Nexus offered to double their prices for delivered raw materials from the outer system, the entire Vlax problem would vanish at a fraction of the cost. But no one was asking him.

“So, what will be the nature of your report to the Senate?” pressed the Commodore, breaking into Droad’s thoughts.

Droad leaned onto the heavy steel desk between them. Everything on the Zürich seemed to be built of centimeter-thick solid steel. Why not? They had plenty of it, and when using an Orion propulsion system tonnage wasn’t a problem. Taking shocks, that was the thing to worry about. No other easily gathered construction material took those shocks as well as thick steel.

“Commodore, I’m going to recommend you are fully funded. What’s more, I want this project sped up. I want the Zürich up and moving as soon as possible.”

The Commodore blinked at him. Droad’s response was not the usual, expected prattle about budgets and election timing. The Commodore stared at him for several heartbeats, puzzling it out.

“Oh. I’ve got it,” said Beauchamp at last.

“I knew you would,” smiled Droad.

The Commodore’s face flashed annoyance, but he maintained a friendly attitude. “You want this ship for your monster hunt. Is that it?”

Droad nodded. He stood up. “That’s right, Commodore. We are on the same side in this matter. I want this vessel up and flying—sooner even than you do. It will excel at defense, whether we are hunting the Vlax—or other things.”

“You really believe these creatures might turn up here? Three lightyears away from Garm?”

Droad nodded grimly. “I turned up here, didn’t I?”

The Commodore nodded. “Okay, then maybe you can help me. You see, we have a bit of a problem.”

“What can I do?”

The Commodore explained to him about the radiation leaks. Droad frowned through it all.

“What about mechs?” Droad said as the Commodore finished.

“Mechs? You mean to work on the Orion system? They are expensive, and many of them are built into various forms of transport.”

“Yes, but they are also somewhat immune to radiation. I know Rem-9 is highly resistant. His braincase is in his thorax and lead-lined. They are stronger than humans and can work around the clock. One mech could do the job of fifty men in a day, because they won’t have to be pulled out after an hour and sent to medical.”

Commodore Beauchamp nodded, making an appreciative grunt. “I like this idea of yours. Let’s try it out with your two mechs.”

Droad opened his mouth and snapped it closed again. Finally, he nodded. “Put up or shut up, is that it, Commodore? Very well. I’ll talk it over with them. But I think you’re right, they can serve as a test case.”

When Droad met with his two mech companions Zuna was painfully eager to please, as usual. She insisted she was resistant to radiation as well. Rem-9 was less excited about the prospect. He didn’t want to leave his post and stop guarding Droad.

“For a day, I relieve you. I’ll be on my own for protection. This is an experiment, and I’d like you to become my test subjects.”

The two mechs started that night. A pale, human robot with red-rimmed eyes showed them what to do. Soon, they were scooping shovelfuls of loose stone and ash from beneath the Zürich’s belly. Droad watched on the monitors apprehensively. Occasionally, blue shimmers ghosted across the video pickups. White flashes appeared here and there, like sparks or half-seen fireflies. What had they spilled down there? Droad shuddered just to think about it.

But the mechs operated smoothly. After everything had gone flawlessly for over an hour, Droad finally took a break from his vigil. He smiled and went to his cabin, making a call to Sarah. How long had it been since he’d communicated with her? He frowned, had it really been weeks?

#

Zuna and Rem-9 worked non-stop for over forty hours. After that, they both needed recharging and refueling. To everyone who asked, Zuna told them she felt fine, that the radiation had not affected her in any way. It made her happy to see how pleased the humans were. They were not strong in this sort of dirty environment. She felt as though she could operate forever down there in the slag heaps.

But she did not feel perfectly normal. Right there, she was faced with an anomaly. She knew that she wasn’t feeling quite right, and yet she had told everyone she was fine. She had—lied. That was just the sort of thing she sensed was wrong. She didn’t feel sick, far from it. In some ways, she felt invigorated. The radiation made her fluids run hotly, with a higher viscosity.

The fact remained, however. She had not been truthful. She did not feel the same, and yet had kept that to herself. Why had she done that? As a general rule, mechs weren’t capable of deception. They always told the truth whether the listeners wanted to hear it or not. It was one of their personality traits the mind-cleansing efforts of mech designers always built in. Nobody wanted a seven hundred kilo liar stomping about.

Mechs were essentially robots with a few critical, biological components. Rather than building a super computer into each robot, a chunk of human brain tissue was always used. This made a mech much cheaper, because a few pounds of human brain was essentially valueless once its owner no longer had a need for it.

Zuna had always been told humans volunteered for the honor of becoming a mech, perhaps because they were terminally ill. They lost their old personalities during the mind-cleanse, and afterward they were always dedicated and cooperative.

She had occasionally wondered about the person she had been before the transformation, before she had been turned into a mech. What had the mind-cleanse—cleansed?

For the first time in her memory, this very day while she cleaned the glittering motes of plutonium dust from the beneath the great battleship, she had found the first clue to her old personality. She had been a person who lied. Just as she lied now to anyone who asked about the effects of the radiation. She had been a person, she thought, who had lied a lot.

She felt strange for a moment and froze. A bucket full of dust swung in her motionless gripper. Tiny bursts of light popped around her like infinitesimal flashbulbs. Subatomic particles beamed through her superstructure, a few even penetrating her biomass every once in a while. She felt as if she could almost remember...

But no... The feeling was gone.

Sixteen

The Savant had spent weeks studying the Nicu creature in her spare time, of which there was little. She had ordered the creature captured, rather than killed or processed, so she could figure out what was different about it. The creature had been given sustenance and oxygen through its survival suit, which was kept charged and supplied.

This single creature had done more to thwart her plans than any of his comrades. It had also saved her campaign more than once. More intriguing, it did not seem to operate within the directives of its superiors. It worked as an individual. In some ways, it was the most dangerous of the enemy, in other ways, it had been a great help to her. As a scientist, she naturally wanted to probe it, to understand its unusual nature.

The warbling and seemingly random squeaks of the human language meant nothing to her. She normally didn’t used sonic vibrations for communications purposes. Making matters worse, often the aliens seemed to use their guttural, noise-production organs for creating random cries of warning, anger or pain that had no direct purpose and did not translate into anything other than linguistic nonsense.

Patience always paid off for a diligent scientist, however. The Savant’s answer to this problem was a familiar one: she specially designed an organism to perform the task of translation. She had grown a polyp in order to communicate with the alien. The polyp could suck in gas and release it in controlled, modulated fashion to generate audible speech. It also had an ear and a rudimentary brain. With its neural net learning-rate set to high, the polyp was given the task of sifting through the primitive grunts and hootings that served these humans as a language. Some of this data was available in deep memory from the transmitted reports from Garm. After several days of exposure to recorded alien speech, the translating polyp was deemed operable and brought into the presence of Nicu and the Savant.

“Slave creature,” the polyp translated the Savant’s transmissions. “Respond.”

Nicu lay supine in his spacesuit. He had been restrained and could only operate his suit via his limited helmet selection system.

“Is that Boldo?” Nicu asked in a hissing whisper.

“You comprehend this speech?”

“Boldo?”

“What is the meaning of ‘Boldo’?”

Nicu was silent for a time. “You are that alien thing, aren’t you?” he asked at last.

“You are speaking to the Savant. You will answer all questions.”

“Of course I will. I will tell you everything, and I will be very truthful.”

The Savant found this response to be unexpected. Could this alien truly be on her side? She understood, to some degree, that the enemy genetics were very individualistic. They were all ‘wild’ in the sense that they lacked cohesion as a group. According to the reports of human behavior from Garm, these creatures were often at cross-purposes. They were even capable of splitting into factions and killing one another. Baffling. How could a species survive that would seek to destroy others members of the same genetic stock over a disagreement?

Even as a hive-creature, the Savant was accustomed to disagreement and discord. Leaders did not always agree on the best course of action. But there was always a chain of command and it was always respected. Arguments never rose to the unthinkable level of taking action against your superiors, no matter how wrong you might think they were. To do so was—madness. Like a scorpion stinging itself out of spite.

Could this thing called Nicu be an aberration? Could it be a creature that was non-human, in the sense it was apart from the others, not a member of the same faction? Such a possibility was intriguing. Perhaps, it truly would turn against its own species, seeing them as the enemy. The concept was monstrous, but could be useful. She felt a rising level of disgust to be associating with the Nicu-creature at all, but pushed on with the interrogation.

“Where have the other humans gone?”

“To the inner planets,” Nicu responded promptly.

“Why did they leave you behind?”

“I am their enemy. Or rather, I’m not on their side.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“I am Nicu. I am on my own side.”

The Savant thought about the creature’s response. It was as she had suspected. This attitude matched up with every behavior the animal had taken. The thing was a rogue. She shivered and scooted away from Nicu. Somehow, the other humans seemed wholesome in comparison. They fought and they died for their families. This one—it was almost unspeakable.

“May I ask a question, master?” Nicu asked.

The Savant ruffled her tentacles. “My proper title is Savant.”

“Ah yes, I apologize. My Savant, when I disabled the explosives on the reactor core, did that save your people?”

“It was extremely helpful, yes.”

“Good, excellent.”

“Why do you say that? Why are you pleased?”

“Because your enemies are my enemies. Since you have killed my enemies, I wish you to live.”

The Savant slid her body around into a new arrangement. Her brain lobes now rested upon her massed tentacles. She made popping sounds as she bubbled thoughtfully. The argument made sense, in a twisted way.

“We will accept your further help,” said the Savant. “What do we face? What enemy defenses circle the third planet?”

“You mean Neu Schweitz? They are fairly strong. They have many small ships like our rooks. They have a thousand times more population. They have defensive bases on many of their moons with large lasers.”

The Savant knew these things, but still had a hard time believing the confirming information was offered up so easily.

“What will be their response if they see incoming ships from Minerva?”

“They will probably assume it is an attack from the Vlax Romani—from the people who owned this base.”

The Savant noted that Nicu had not said from his people. He truly was not identifying himself as a human from the same group. Could humans be so aberrant that their minds allowed for a faction of a single individual? It was fascinating and disgusting at the same time.

“How would you suggest that we overcome the defenses of—of our mutual enemies?” asked the Savant, playing to the mad creature’s delusions.

The Nicu-creature shrugged. A curious gesture, which at first made the Savant shy away, but realizing it was not meant as an attack, she glided closer again.

“I’m not a military expert. I would expect they will send out their ships to meet yours. You must have more ships, better ships.”

The Savant, naturally, had already made this determination. She now had enough biomass and electronic circuitry to grow and craft her own armada. She had hoped there would be an easier path. But the Nicu-creature’s open honesty made her trust it more. She had expected it to require non-lethal persuasion to be applied. She decided against such action now. Why make this strange alien categorize her as an enemy? If she had questions, they would be freely answered.

Unlike most of her kind, she had a flexible mind. It was a requirement for a true problem-solver. She would treat this creature with care. She could reprocess its biomass and make a new killbeast out of it, but the Nicu-creature could prove much more useful in its current form.

“You will be given a cell. You will be given sustenance. We will speak again, after the fleet has fully launched.”

“The fleet?”

The Savant shivered with amusement. “Did you think I waited for your advice to act? Know, Nicu-creature, that the Imperium has grown a new battlefleet of small ships. Already they orbit in squadrons around Minerva. We will launch toward the enemy as soon as our preparations are finished.”

Nicu shrugged again. This time, the Savant didn’t shrink back.

“Can I get into the kitchens?” asked Nicu. “I’m pretty tired of the paste my suit feeds me.”

The Savant marveled at Nicu’s lack of concern. It cared not one whit for the destruction of its species. The creature truly considered itself a faction of one.

“Yes, you will be taken to the kitchens under guard.”

Seventeen

When Droad found out about Bili and Sarah, and specifically that Bili was in the hospital, he was quite upset. Why hadn’t she called him? What was going on?

Her answers were evasive. Something was definitely going on. Either she didn’t trust him anymore, perhaps feeling he had endangered Bili, or she was drifting away. This was nothing new for Droad. As a driven man he found that all women, eventually, drifted away from him.

Droad promised to head back down planetside as soon as he could get away from Crom. He would come see Bili. He would also, he promised Sarah, pay a visit to Senator Fouty. He closed the connection and stood up in his cabin, fuming.

That old bastard Fouty had told the skalds who had Fryx. Maybe they had pressured the Senator, maybe they had insisted that he give up Fryx right now. Whatever the scenario, they had not followed Fouty’s plan to hand the evil little spine-ball over publicly right before the coming election. The skalds had made their move.

Droad frowned fiercely and paced in his steel cabin. Why did things always have to spin out of control just as he felt he was making some progress? This battleship could be ready to lift off in a few weeks and then he would be able to breathe more easily about the survival of the Kale system. But now Sarah was distant—feeling ignored, no doubt. Bili was in the hospital. Killer skalds were after Fryx, and lastly Senator Fouty, his single major ally in this system, apparently had moved against him.

He wondered briefly about Zuna. She was the Senator’s creature. Why had he offered to send her along on this mission? Droad’s old paranoia had returned. Was he a pawn in a bigger game than he realized? Perhaps Zuna had been around, all along, to keep a certain crazy ex-governor under surveillance, and to take him out when everything in some grand scheme had aligned.

Droad shook his head as if to clear it of evil thoughts. It was hard to believe Zuna was anything other than what she seemed. He had to know how things stood, however. He thought of Sarah and Bili, they had suffered much and couldn’t be allowed to suffer further. Sometimes, even when dealing with critical issues of state and defense, a man had to look after his own house.

But first, he would go to Senator Yannick Fouty. He would have a talk with him and determine what was going on with the skalds. Such visits were best done by surprise, so he did not communicate first.

He packed and went to the command deck to talk to Commodore Beauchamp. The man seemed truly glad to see him. Lieutenant Karin Minard was with him. Droad had begun to like her. She was dedicated and efficient. She was pretty too, in a severe, brown-hair and no-makeup manner.

“Droad!” said the Commodore. For a second, Droad thought the man was going to hug him. Instead he laughed and ushered him into the command area. “Look at this, man. Look at our progress.”

Droad puzzled over the screens and instrumentation, but it was hopeless. Lieutenant Minard stepped in, clearing her throat.

She talked Droad through the measurements. Essentially, due to the efforts of the mechs they were now weeks ahead. The Orion systems would be functional very soon.

Droad nodded, impressed. “Just two mechs managed all this in a few days?”

“No, no,” laughed Beauchamp, leaning forward. “I sent the ship’s entire complement of mech marines down there, an entire squad. They’ve reported no ill effects.”

“We’ve even been able to stop the human robot shifts,” added Lieutenant Minard.

“The what?” asked Droad.

Beauchamp cleared his throat and stepped closer. “Don’t worry about it. We’ve had to be, broad-minded up here.”

Droad stared at him, alarmed.

“Never mind about that, we are on schedule and all due to your resource logistics. I had considered the mechs, but didn’t want to damage such expensive assets. But you showed me the light. I like problem-solvers, Droad, I really do. If you ever need a favor...”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Droad, interrupting, “but now, I’m going to have to leaving for the time being.”

“What? Where are you headed?”

“Politics,” said Droad, tilting his head regretfully. “I’ll come back to check on you as soon as I can. Let me know if you need any other... resources.”

“Right. Well, are you thinking of taking those mechs with you? I was hoping that...”

Droad opened his mouth to say yes, he was taking them, that Beauchamp would have to make do with his own squad, but then he had a thought. “Well, I think I could leave one of them. For now.”

The Commodore beamed. “Excellent! Truly excellent!”

When Droad asked Zuna if she would mind staying behind until the job was done, she offered no resistance. In fact, she seemed happy at the prospect. Her response, however, was an odd one for a mech.

“I’ll stay until I drop, Droad,” she said. Then she laughed. It was a mechanical sounding laugh, but unmistakable.

Droad stared at her for a moment. Mechs were quite capable of having personalities, but usually they were pretty formulaic ones. He didn’t quite know what to make of Zuna. She had to be one of the older, twitchier models.

In any case, he was glad to see her staying behind. Here on the Zürich he felt sure she could do some real good. And she wouldn’t get in the way when he went down to confront her boss.

When Droad met with Senator Fouty again, he intended to have the only mech in the vicinity standing behind him.

#

Droad landed at the Senator’s house, climbed out of the mech-driven flitter and waved it off. He could always call another. The things were everywhere, serving the Nexus community of Bern as taxicabs. Things had changed significantly in the last decade around Neu Schweitz. It still felt odd to him, since from his point of view he’d only been absent a little over two years.

He signaled Rem-9 to follow him. When they tried it, the door didn’t respond. Not even Lena came to their repeated calls. No one else had seen the Senator leave his manse for a day or two, so he had to be up here. Droad made a sour face when Lena didn’t appear. He had rather looked forward to seeing Fouty’s consort in her strappy arrangement of towels.

He signaled the door more urgently, waving his hand in front of the sensors and finally hammering on the portal itself. Only recordings greeted him. Droad stood there, frustrated and glaring. Had he flown 300,000 kilometers for nothing?

Finally, he signaled Rem-9. “Open the door.”

Rem-9 dutifully clanked forward, grasped the knob and rattled it delicately.

“I’m sorry sir, it appears to be locked.”

Droad rolled his eyes. “Well then, unlock it.”

The mech swung his optics to Droad, then back to the door. His gripper still closed delicately upon the handle.

“I don’t have a key, sir.”

“Force it open.”

“I don’t have the authority—” began the mech.

“Captain Rem-9, as the military liaison for Senator Fouty, I give you permission. I’m worried about the Senator’s health. He’s not been seen for a few days, and I’m checking up on him. He’s an elderly man, you know.”

Both of Rem-9’s silvery optics stared at Droad for perhaps three seconds. Droad wondered what the mech was thinking. He was definitely a stickler for rules.

“Very well sir, upon your authority and suspicions.”

The mech turned the door handle and it made a grinding sound. The handle came off in his gripper. He dropped the twisted piece of metal and gently applied lateral pressure to the door near the lock. Droad smiled. It was amusing, watching Rem-9 in an effort to be gentle. He just wasn’t built for it.

The door finally crushed open with a splitting sound. Droad winced. It sounded expensive. He moved to step past Rem-9, but the other interceded with the same gripper he had used to break down the door.

“Excuse me, sir. I detect unusual odors inside.”

“What odors?”

“Cordite and various organic compounds.”

Droad’s mouth opened. He closed it again and nodded, waving for Rem-9 to walk in first. The mech stepped cautiously forward. His grippers were slightly open and held at chest level now. He had no weapons, but as a combat mech they weren’t required.

Droad wondered if he had been prophetic concerning the Senator’s health. He peeped around Rem-9’s legs. He thought perhaps the mech was right, he did detect an odd stink in the air. Hopefully, it was only a burnt meal. Lena didn’t seem like the type of assistant one hired for her culinary skills.

The inside was a disaster. Fouty and Lena were both dead. Wide eyes, protruding tongues and red lesions on their faces told the story. They had been garroted, which caused the mouth and sinuses to involuntarily open. Something had then been able to crawl inside.

“Skalds,” said Droad. He left the door open to let in some fresh air. This crime had to have been done over the last day or two.

“Why would skalds behave so poorly?” asked Rem-9. “I was under the impression they were a peaceable people.”

Droad thought of all the killing the mech had done, but made no comments about peaceable mechs. Sometimes mechs were like children, sometimes they spoke with the wisdom of ancients. “Well, Captain, people can be like that. They do awful things when given the wrong stimuli. Keep in mind, the skalds might be peaceful, but that doesn’t mean the Tulk riders in their heads are. I blame the Tulk. They coerced the skalds into this. See these red marks? They must have had at least one exposed Tulk. It sunk in its spines. That’s how they do interrogations, I understand. By invading the nervous system of the victim. People must then tell the truth, because they have no choice. One can’t easily lie to another part of one’s own mind.”

Droad was careful not to touch anything. Investigators would no doubt come after him, but there was no need to give them any problems, nor any reason to come after Lucas Droad.

“Sarah and Bili Engstrom are in possession of a Tulk creature,” said the mech.

Droad was frowning fiercely. “I know. Let’s go. Call back that cab. We’re going to back to Bern.”

#

Operation Storm Assault had begun. The flight toward Neu Schweitz would take over a month, and the attack waves were launched separately over a period of weeks.

The Savant had been very busy indeed. She had managed to convert seventy human females into breeding factories, growing all manner of creatures and polyps from their hard-working tracts. Night and day the living factories churned out new young fighters, weaponry, organic control systems for spacecraft and other, stranger things.

Using all the biomass from the captured Minerva, plus the endless supply of gas the Tyrolia’s huge pumps sucked up in great quantities from the planet’s atmosphere, the Savant had no lack of raw materials. What she lacked was time. The longer she waited, the greater the odds the Vlax might warn the military humans of Neu Schweitz, who she had learned called themselves the Nexus. So far, there had been no transmissions monitored from the Vlax fugitives to the Nexus, but the Savant didn’t want to trust to her luck. At any time the enemy could decide that the bond of species was more important than whatever squabbles these humans had amongst themselves. It would be far too easy for the Vlax to warn the Nexus, and then all element of surprise would be lost. Accordingly, she worked at frantic speed to build her attack force.

The Savant’s attack flotilla was launched in four waves. The first wave had already been fired off weeks earlier, as soon as she had been able to put them together. The initial wave consisted of very small pods full of killbeasts. She had considered using vacuum-functional trachs, or altering her killbeasts so they could fight in vacuum, but decided instead to use the Vlax’s ready supply of nanotech spacesuits. Since they were already equipped with rebreathers and could change shape to fit the form of a killbeast, using the spacesuits was a more efficient approach. She had grown them smaller than the usual, only two meters in height, so they could fit easily into the human equipment.

The mission of the first wave of vacuum-capable troops was to fall upon the moons where the defensive bases were located. With luck, the invasion pods would be overlooked as tiny bits of organic matter. There was very little metal in them. They would overwhelm the base defenders and allow her flotilla of ships to get closer to the real target, Neu Schweitz. The invasion pods could not afford to brake until the final descent, however, as they had to avoid detection. They necessarily were launched first and at lower speeds, so they wouldn’t smash into their target moons.

The second wave of the attack had also been launched days earlier. It consisted of around thirty asteroids, each one chosen to be dark in surface appearance and of relatively low metallic content. Being ten to forty meters in diameter, they were not too difficult to detect, but unless they were destroyed they would wreak great destruction. She had sent out all her captured rooks to tugboat the asteroids into new orbits. The smaller ones targeted the human laser bases, the largest targeted human cities. They would arrive at approximately the same time as the rest of her fleet, and had the advantage of not needing to worry about slowing down.

The third wave was made up the salvaged rooks. This was the decoy wave, the one that was to gain the attention of the enemy. Hastily repaired and modified, they would show up on active sensors as metallic. With luck, the enemy would assume they were being attacked by the Vlax Romani. They would react as if under attack by a conventional force.

The fourth wave consisted of her true combat ships, grown for the purpose. She didn’t have enough of them, but those she had managed to construct were deadly. Dark, organic shells with weaponry made with minimal metallic content, these frigate-class Imperium vessels were larger, but more difficult to detect for the known enemy alert systems. They were teardrop-shaped, with burrowing tips at the narrow end. They could be used to for planetary invasion or ship-to-ship combat.

The Savant herself boarded one of these sleek vessels, ordering that the Nicu-creature be left behind on the Tyrolia. His usefulness as an advisor, she judged, was at an end. She would leave it up to the Parent garrison commander she left charge of the Tyrolia to do as she wished with him. In truth, she had found him and his endless requests for personal indulgences to be a growing irritant. She would not be at all surprised to learn Nicu had been torn into strips and sucked up the young Parent’s foodtube. Who didn’t yearn for a fresh meal at this point?

Radio transmissions had been dampened to their weakest level, allowing ship-to-ship communications but little else. She hoped the enemy didn’t know what to look for, and at the end of each command briefing she informed the flotilla concerning what frequency the next communication would use. By constantly varying frequencies and keeping the signals targeted and weak, she hoped not to alert anyone concerning their approach until it was too late. Once they reached a range of about one million kilometers, complete radio silence had been ordered until enemy contact was made.

As her ship launched, she knew the satisfaction of great personal achievement. If she could get this flotilla past the enemy defenses, her troubles and her stint as commander would be over. The Parents would quickly create nife commanders, and she would relinquish her leadership gladly.

A datablip tickled her senses. It was from the young Parent she had left in charge of the Tyrolia. She opened a neural pathway, receiving the signal with irritation. What part of a transmission blackout did this youngling not understand?

She listened to the report. Her irritation melted into bafflement, and then finally concern. The Nicu-creature had vanished. No one could find him on the Tyrolia station. They suspected, in fact, he may have spaced himself, but could not be certain.

The Savant took a huge, shuddering breath. That human was more slippery than a shrade in a waste-tube.

Eighteen

Droad found Bili’s room at the hospital and made his way there. He didn’t call Sarah first, he wanted to surprise her. He felt he had neglected her since his arrival, and she had clearly drifted away from him. With luck, he hoped to rekindle things by showing up quickly in her time of need. Perhaps, their relationship could be recovered. In his mind, as he traveled to the hospital, he rehearsed his apologies.

Realizing what he was doing, he heaved a sigh. It seemed to him his relationships with women always got to this point eventually. Abject apologies. He was an expert on the topic. He could write a book on them.

He made a mental effort to shrug off his mood as he reached the floor via the freight elevator. Rem-9 had exceeded the weight limit for the standard elevator. Droad had never considered leaving the mech outside, as the receptionist and duty-nurse had recommended. He had come to think of the mech as his replacement for Jarmo. He wasn’t quite as much of a thinker as Jarmo, but he was just as dedicated. Droad liked that dedication and didn’t want to leave him out of anything because of his physiology.

So, they took the freight elevator up and ignored the frightened whoops and gasps of surprise people made when they encountered the mech marching behind Droad down the corridors. People were used to mechs on Neu Schweitz, but combat models were not the usual mech. Even with his sensors withdrawn and his body leaning forward in a crouch, Rem-9 had to dodge every light fixture.

Droad tapped at the door, but there was no answer. He thought he heard a rustling as he reached for the handle. Perhaps they were asleep, as he had come late.

“Sir,” said Rem-9, modulating his voice down to what served as a hospital-appropriate whisper for the mech. “Let me go in first.”

Droad shook his head. He wanted to make the grand entrance. He wanted Bili to get the surprise of the night from this visit. Even though, in truth, he thought the kid probably liked Rem-9 as much as he liked Droad himself.

Droad opened the door and pushed it open slowly. The room was indeed dimly lit. On a table, one of the sole sources of light was the one inside Fryx’s fish tank. There the little monster still floated, thought Droad. At least the skalds hadn’t managed to grab him yet. He wasn’t surprised. Sarah was more resourceful and capable than half the members of his staff had ever been.

“And who might you be, sneaking into a boy’s room at night?” asked a voice from behind Droad.

Droad turned, eyes wide in surprise. A man stood there. He must have been hiding behind the door. He had an aristocratic nose and dark, curly hair. Droad guessed he came from the southern cantons—the Italian zone, as older colonists would call it. The man had something long and metallic in his hand. Was that a rapier?

The sword sizzled into life and ran with purple kinetic forces. The man’s eyes fixed upon Droad, glowering at him.

Droad took an involuntary half-step back. A single touch from that weapon, he knew, could be fatal. He put up his hands, palms out in a gesture for calm and peace. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, a new party entered the conversation.

A silvery, metal gripper flashed forward and tried to clamp upon the swordsman’s wrist. The swordsman was blindingly fast, however, and dodged the grab. He positioned his blade between the mech and himself.

“By the stars!” said the man. He looked as surprised as Droad had.

Rem-9 leaned into the room threateningly. The door frame groaned. He was so broad that he would have to tear new space in the walls to achieve entry. Droad knew that he would do it too, if he felt the situation warranted property destruction.

“Let’s stay calm, everyone,” said Droad, his hands still upraised. “I think this is all a misunderstanding. I’m Lucas Droad, sir. I’m a friend of Sarah’s and Bili’s.”

“Ah,” said the swordsman. He lowered the tip of his crackling sword a fraction. “I’m Aldo Moreno. I’m also a friend of theirs.”

Droad and Aldo blinked at one another for a second or two. Both soon grasped the situation. Aldo powered-down his sword and made it vanish into a long black sheathe at his hip.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call first, I thought I would surprise the boy. How is he?”

Aldo nodded to Bili, who was awake now, watching them all with comic surprise.

“Lucas? Rem-9!”

Droad smiled. At least someone was happy to see him—and his mech. For a time, the conversation revolved around Bili and his state of health, which was improving. Sarah was absent, however. When there was an opportunity to slip away, Droad asked Aldo to come out into the corridor for a private conversation.

As they talked, both noticed that Rem-9 stood blocking the kid’s doorway, watching Droad with one optic while the other roved over the nurses who hurried by, intimidated.

“I don’t like leaving the boy alone,” said Aldo.

“I think Rem-9 can guard him for a moment or two,” said Droad. “I wanted to ask you about Sarah.”

Aldo looked him over. “Ex-boyfriend?” he asked.

Ex? thought Droad. His heart sank. Really, Aldo didn’t need to say anything else.

Droad’s mind whirled. It was hard to be upset. Their relationship had been casual at best. He hadn’t even called for weeks. During his absence, Sarah and her son had been attacked. He should have dragged them along if he wanted to keep her. That just hadn’t seemed practical. He sighed quietly.

Aldo watched his face, expressionless.

Droad cleared his throat. “Yes. Something like that. I take it you are here to guard the boy? What is Sarah up to then, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Aldo stared at him, and then nodded to himself, as if deciding to trust Droad. “She’s digging up what she can on those skalds. She doesn’t believe in leaving well enough alone, does she?”

Droad smiled. “No, not when it comes to Bili. Has she learned anything?”

“They are after Fryx.”

“Well, I knew that. Has she considered just giving the little bastard up to them?”

“She said that you told her not to.”

“We had an arrangement with a politician. I think things have gone far beyond that now,” Droad said. He proceeded, in a low voice, to fill Aldo in on the Senator’s murder. Aldo was scandalized.

“The Militia will dig them out! We will run them down and burn them out. I’d do it myself. Assassins! They are guests on this world, and they think they can murder as they please?”

Droad noted the man had a quick temper. He made good points, however.

Aldo stepped closer, he leaned toward Droad in a conspiratorial manner. His attitude had changed now, clearly he considered Droad to be trustworthy.

Rem-9 made a whirring sound. Droad suspected both the mech’s optics were focused squarely upon them now that Aldo had moved closer.

“We know more. They have moved to the Gladius.”

“The skalds?”

“All of them. At least, all that we know of. They are going to leave this world, we think.”

Droad nodded, for him, things suddenly made more sense. “That’s why they wanted to take Fryx. They are cleaning up. That’s why they were willing to kill a Senator.”

Aldo grunted. “I thought they were peaceful pilgrims—playing flutes, begging and wandering. You are not surprised they would kill?”

Droad shook his head. “I’ve learned something of the skalds and the Tulk that ride in their skulls, controlling them. They can be allies for humans, but they don’t really consider us equals. They think of us as—as a herd of wild cattle, I suppose.”

Aldo snorted. “We should call Sarah back then. She has gone to speak to them.”

“Up to the ship? I’ve got to go after her. It’s not safe.”

Aldo put his hand on Droad’s arm. Rem-9’s grippers made a clacking sound immediately. Droad wondered if the mech’s movement was involuntary. Aldo got the message and released Droad.

“I should go,” Aldo said. “You can stay with the boy.”

Droad looked at him. “Is that how you want it?”

Aldo looked uncertain. He heaved a sigh. “I don’t know. I’m not good with women. Not beyond the first stage, anyway.”

Droad chuckled. “I’m no expert with women either, obviously. But I know the skalds. I know their game, or some of it.”

“You go then. Do you know why are they leaving?”

“I think maybe I do. What I want to know is if my suspicions are correct.”

Droad said good-bye to Bili and tapped on Fryx’s tank, admonishing the creature to behave itself. Fryx ruffled his spines as if in response.

Could the Tulk have understood? Droad thought it unlikely, but wondered about it as he left.

#

A day later Droad caught up with the Sarah on the Gladius. She was frustrated. The skalds had locked down their compartments and refused to speak with her.

“Lucas?” she asked, surprised. “How did you find me up here?”

“Aldo told me.”

They stared at each other. She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “I’m an adult. Back on Garm, after the invasion, I strayed from you first.”

“That wasn’t why—” she began, then stopped.

“It doesn’t matter. Forget about it. We can talk about it later. What matters now are these skalds and what they’ve done.”

He filled her in on the murder of the Senator. She grew more alarmed as he spoke. “Does the Militia know?”

“Yes, I’ve sent word discreetly. I don’t have time to be hauled in for questioning just now. The skalds seem to be betting they will be out of this system before anyone can catch them. While onboard this ship, they are technically not in the Kale system. There will have to be extradition proceedings, and no one at Nexus wants to stop an interstellar ship from traveling freely. It’s bad for business, once your system gets that kind of rep.”

“What’s one little assassination in the face of commerce?” said Sarah bitterly.

“Well, no one has proven anything yet. That will take months, and they will be gone by then.”

“So what are we doing here? They’ve clearly given up on Fryx and want to get out.”

“They know something, and I want to know what they know.”

Droad produced his code-keys. He still had them, the illegal ones he’d gotten on Garm, the keys that identified his clearance level as that of a planetary governor. He used them now to open the door into Lido Deck Twelve, the deck the skalds had rented in full. Somewhere, an alarm would go off up on the bridge, he knew, but he would worry about that later.

He stepped inside with Rem-9 behind him. Sarah followed them both at a cautious distance.

Skalds, left to their own quiet ways, were an odd bunch. When Droad broke in unannounced, the three in the public area of the deck did not even look up. Each sat around a circular divan. All of them had their arms stretched out so that their fingertips touched the pallid fingers of both the others. They stared at nothing. The pale fingers flickered and tapped at one another.

The skalds wore flowing, brightly-colored robes. The two men wore azure. The female wore vermilion.

Droad scanned the group for weapons, but saw none. That didn’t mean they weren’t hiding them. Their robes were voluminous.

He took two swaggering steps toward them. Rem-9 followed, servos whining as he looked for trouble. The skalds continued to stare at the walls, eyes unfocussed.

Droad knew they were in a state of communion, but he suspected they were aware of his presence.

“I have questions. I require answers. I’m willing to release Fryx into your custody in trade for your cooperation.”

The skalds tapped with their fingers for several more seconds. Droad crossed his arms and waited for a response. A few seconds later, they disengaged their hands from one another and stood simultaneously. Droad watched expectantly, but instead of turning to address him, the three skalds each marched forward. Each grasped the handle of a stateroom door. Such rooms ringed the central hall.

“Hold on!” he said, walking after the nearest, who was the female.

She ignored him completely. She opened the stateroom door and slipped inside. The door clicked behind her. Droad tried it and growled. Locked.

“They’ve all locked themselves in,” said Sarah, coming into the room for the first time. “They’ll call security and wait inside.”

“That’s accurate,” said Rem-9. “I’m picking up distress calls now.”

“Can you jam them?” asked Droad.

“Negative.”

Droad nodded. He put a hand to his chin.

“We don’t have much time unless we want to battle the entire ship’s security detail.”

“What are my orders?” asked Rem-9.

Sarah pointed to the door the woman had retreated into. “They tried to kill me and my boy. They’ll not get away this easily. Tear open that door, Rem-9.”

Rem-9’s optics swung to Droad, who took in a deep breath. He was getting into diplomatic territory. If he were wrong...

“Do it, Captain,” said Droad, gesturing to the door.

Rem-9 took three strides forward. He removed the door handle with a metallic klinking sound. The door hung ajar. Sarah moved to duck her head inside, but Rem-9 interceded. He leaned inside and a hand-cannon boomed.

Rem-9’s grippers flashed. He retracted his right one. In it, a twisted hand-cannon was clamped between the pads. There was a streak of blood on the silvery metal of his gripper.

Droad winced. Hopefully, he hadn’t removed her hand. He and Sarah walked into the stateroom.

“We only want to talk to you,” he began, but the skald female wasn’t in a talkative mood.

She flailed at them, making desperate hooting sounds. They grabbed her arms and bore her down onto the bed. Sarah struck her face, but this appeared to have no effect. Blood trickled over her white teeth and fluttering lips. Spittle and hot exhalations flew.

“Tulk!” shouted Droad, looking down into the woman’s face. She would have been pretty, he thought, had she not been bloody and half-mad. “Tulk rider, stop fighting. We are not here to harm you or your host. We only want to talk. To negotiate.”

His words finally seemed to get through to the skald. She blinked and turned her eyes toward Droad. There was something behind those eyes. Something that plotted coldly.

“What talk?” she hissed. He knew, from her manner, that her rider had taken over her bodily operations directly and spoke with her bleeding mouth.

“We have Fryx. We wish to negotiate his release into your custody.”

“Then release me now.”

Droad and Sarah exchanged glances. Droad nodded and they let her sit up.

The skald eyed them both with a bland expression that belied her words. “You have disturbed the deliberations of—”

“Yes, yes,” said Droad impatiently. “Time is of the essence. Do you have an interest in the return of Fryx?”

“He is great among us, but his rescue has been determined too costly.”

“Costly?” asked Droad, not sure what she meant. This was always the way it went when conversing with skalds. One never quite knew what they were thinking. “You have killed several people trying to retrieve him. Is that what you mean?”

The skald shook with amusement. She didn’t laugh, exactly, but her chest shuddered in an odd manner. “Host-creatures have no intrinsic value.”

“Our lives are as valuable to us as yours is to you. It’s all a matter of perspective.”

The skald seemed to consider that. “The problem with your logic is that your perspective is the incorrect one.”

Droad waved away her words with an impatient hand. “Just tell us, why are you leaving this system?”

“Because it is time to leave.”

Droad sighed. He knew the security people had to be on their way. Was this Tulk delaying purposefully? Or were they simply unable to connect directly with humans one-on-one? When he had dealings with Garth, a skald back on Garm, he had experienced similar disconnections.

“Look, just tell me the truth. Are the aliens coming here? Are the Skaintz Imperium on their way?”

The skald stared at him. “I have no reason to comply with your demands.”

“Yes,” said Droad, hauling the woman to her feet. “Yes, you do.” He addressed Rem-9 and Sarah, who watched closely. “We will remove her Tulk and put it into the tank with Fryx.”

At that, her arms came up again and the frenzied struggle continued for a time. She was weak, but she struggled with fanatical strength. Droad feared she might snap her own thin bones. At last, Sarah and Droad got her to the doorway. There, Rem-9’s grippers gently clamped down upon her wrists. She was dragged helplessly to the deck exit.

Suddenly, the skald’s struggles subsided. “I do not wish to be exposed.”

“Then answer my questions.”

“Proceed.”

“Are the Tulk running from this system?”

“Yes.”

“Are the Skaintz planning to invade this world?”

“The Skaintz plan to invade all worlds.”

Droad heaved a sigh.

“Let me try,” said Sarah, stepping forward. Droad waved for her to proceed.

“How close are they?” she asked the strange woman. “How long do we have before they invade?”

The skald looked at her. “They have already arrived.”

Nineteen

Zuna’s first murder in decades felt good. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. Unfortunately for Zuna, she was a perfectionist. She’d learned several things about her past life. It was coming back to her in flashes, like the tiny motes of exploding particles that popped around her as she worked down in the radiation pits. She remembered now that she had been human once, and she’d been a happy human. She ran a very clean operation, something that cared for people. She had been proud of how clean it all was. No health inspector had ever found a skink in her kitchen!

She had been a perfectionist, a liar, and a murderess. This last part she’d only just put together. She had murdered people, over the years, and buried them quietly in her garden. There, useless people had been put to work, pushing up fresh vegetables that others could eat. For many of the dead, she recalled vaguely, this was the height of their existence. For once in their long, useless lives they’d finally done something of value.

But the first murder wasn’t perfect. And since she was, after all, a perfectionist, she wanted to know to make it perfect, to make the experience feel—complete.

Before all of that, she needed to get rid of the body. The murdered man was something people oddly called a human robot, one of the hapless enlisted personnel who worked underneath the great ship.

Zuna had known, within minutes of first meeting him, that this man needed killing. He was irritating. He hummed constantly, very loudly and out of tune. He hummed while he shoveled. He hummed while he rolled loads of black dust to the chutes and emptied his wheelbarrow. He even hummed on his breaks, up above on the safe side of the radiation shield. Zuna cursed her audio sensors then, because she had very good hearing, and she could not escape his endless, tuneless, humming.

The seventh time the humming man reentered her dusty, sparkly world below the ship, she had already decided she was going to kill him. She wasn’t angry with him, not exactly. She simply wanted him to stop humming. And to ask wasn’t possible for her. Zuna was too polite for that.

So, she beat him to death with her shovel, when no one else was around. She drove the shovel so deeply into the loud-humming man’s back that it exploded out the other side, from his chest. She let go of the shovel handle with her gripper, and he slumped, twisting around onto his side. His ribs were exposed—gray-white and wet-looking—where they had popped from his chest with great force. His dead face bore a frozen look of almost comic surprise.

Zuna naturally felt a great relief. The infernal humming had finally stopped. She nearly made a mistake then. Her first thought was to run away from the scene. But she stopped herself. She realized vaguely that she couldn’t let the other people and mechs who worked down here find the corpse.

Gripping the shovel again, still embedded in the body, she steered the corpse across the sifting black dust to one of the chutes. She stuffed it down there, and soon it vanished into the depths of the asteroid. No one really knew where the chutes went. They were kilometers deep, some of them. Old tubes that had been dug when they’d first built this base and begun constructing the great ship. She was fairly certain no one would go down there to find the dead, humming human robot.

She tramped off to find a new tool. She really should scoop out the dust the hummer had clotted up with his worthless blood.

It was on her way up through the array of spraying nozzles and decontamination vacuums that she spotted something wonderful. There it was, mounted on the wall. The box was red, and identified itself as fire equipment. Inside, she could see through the transparent cover, was a hose, a medical disk, and an axe. It was the axe, with its red handle and hooked blade, that caught her optics. The shovel had been wrong, somehow. Like the hummer himself, the shovel grated on her nerves. That was not how she was supposed to do it. A shovel was not the proper murder weapon. She liked the axe.

Zuna passed the axe, and tried to not to fixate upon it with her optics. But that was hard for her, because to her the axe was a thing of beauty. Reaching the supply depot, she requisitioned a new shovel, claiming the old one had broken, which was true enough.

“You seem to be in a high spirits today, Zuna,” said Lieutenant Karin Minard, who approved the new shovel and gave it to her out of the ship’s stores.

“I am,” said Zuna.

“Why is that, may I ask?”

Zuna fixed her with twin, silvery optics. “I like it here. I feel—useful. I think I was growing stale back home. I’m happy to be doing something more important than feeding Senator Fouty’s cat.”

Karin stared at her bemusedly. “That’s good,” she said.

“I’ll be going back to work now, Lieutenant Minard.”

“Okay. But don’t you want a break? Oh, and by the way, we’ve scheduled a check-up for you tomorrow as 0800.”

“I feel fine. Really, I do.”

“But I think we should check all your systems just the same. Okay? Even you must be under some effects from the radiation. We want to make sure you’re functioning properly.”

Zuna hesitated. “Is my work substandard?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. In fact, you’re keeping up with the combat mechs. Not even they have been exhibiting your—zeal for the work.”

“Well then, I take it you insist on this inspection?”

Lieutenant Minard breathed uncomfortably and hesitated. “I’m afraid I have to.”

“Could you come for me at 0500 instead? That would be more... convenient.”

“Certainly.”

“Okay then. Bye now, Karin.”

“Uh—bye, Zuna.”

#

After learning from the skalds that the Imperium were somewhere in the system, Droad decided to head back down to Nexus Command.

“I’ll try to get them to raise the alert level,” Droad told Sarah, who rode down with him in the orbital elevator.

“I can’t believe it’s happening all over again,” said Sarah.

Droad looked at her, and realized she was distraught. This surprised him, as Sarah had always been one of the toughest people he’d ever met. In fact, he’d never met anyone other than Sarah, Bili and Garth the skald who had made it out of an alien nest alive.

Unsure of their status, Droad made a slow, half-hearted attempt to embrace her. She hugged him fiercely, but then let him go. Droad reached out and clasped her hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “About the Aldo thing. That was a terrible way to learn about it. I should have talked to you. I should have tracked you down.”

“Forget it,” he said. “Let’s move on. We have a world to save. Again.”

She nodded. “I can only save my tiny part of it, Lucas. Should I tell Aldo?”

“Of course you should tell Aldo. He’ll be quite an asset to your survival—in case things go badly.”

She nodded again. “What about Bili? I wonder if I should try to get him up here again to the Gladius and head out to the next system. They are almost done repairing the ship, fixing the damage suffered at Garm. I so hate to do it though. It’s like erasing another year from his childhood.”

“I think you should go. Just get out while you can.”

“You’re that sure that they won’t be at Ignis Glace too?”

Droad blinked at that. He really had no idea. What if the Gladius made it most of the way to the next system and received word that the system they were flying into was teeming with aliens? It was a dreadful thought.

“You’ve got a point. The signal went out that way too. If it awakened something here, the odds are good...”

“Okay. I’m going to stay. I’m going to stand my ground and fight them here. I’m not going to run and end up facing hopeless odds. At least here we have a real military. The Nexus is much stronger than it was on Garm.”

“I support you decision, and I’ll do what I can to make sure the enemy never get down to you and Bili.”

They stopped talking for a time, listening to the whoosh of the thickening atmosphere, which now slowed the elevator’s progress. The system worked very well, but took hours. Droad began wishing he had demanded a shuttle from the Gladius crew.

A clanking sound heralded the approach of Rem-9. He brought them squeeze-bottles of refreshment. Droad had sent him on the errand so he could be alone, even briefly, with Sarah. She had not confessed any overwhelming love for him, so Droad felt disappointment, but he was resolved to protect her and everyone else on this world as best he could. He would do anything and everything. He did not want another slaughter on his conscience.

The two humans took the drinks and sipped them. Rem-9 helped himself to a bottle of glucose and a squeeze tube of light lube.

“I’ll take Bili and hole up somewhere,” said Sarah, “out in the Alps, maybe. Aldo will know a good spot, it’s his world.”

“No doubt.”

“What about Fryx? What should I do with him? Do we return him to the skalds?”

Droad shrugged. “You can flush him for all I care.”

“Lucas! He is a thinking creature. Even if he is a little—unpleasant.”

“Well, I would not suggest you take any special pains to help him. His people certainly don’t consider us worthy of humane treatment.”

“I could just hand him over to the labs.”

“Good idea.”

“Bili will be upset.”

“All kids have to get over a lost pet at some point. Keeping Fryx is like keeping a rabid howler in the house.”

#

Sarah gave him only the slightest peck on the cheek when they finally reached Nexus spaceport. Droad said goodbye stiffly. He was in a foul mood. What did that swashbuckler have that was so instantly appealing? Was a thug with a sword that much more interesting than a man who was engaged in saving his second planet? He tried with great difficulty to put all such thoughts aside. If he failed, there would be no more Sarah, Bili or Aldo to worry about.

He considered his options. He had relatively few. He had an appointment that was only as good as the reach of a dead senator, which was to say it would run out of hydrogen powder very soon. He still had the Senator’s writ, in a blue envelope, but he had no idea if that would even be legally valid. Perhaps it would be considered so until the next Senate session, where they would no doubt choose a new defense chairman. It wouldn’t last that long if someone figured out he had it. As soon as they did, they would get someone else to sign something to overturn it.

Droad sighed audibly. Rem-9 flipped his optics to check on him. Once satisfied the sound did not indicate he needed to do anything, the mech went back to scanning the environment for assassins. This made Droad smile. He found Rem-9 to be an excellent companion. If he could find a woman who was one tenth as loyal and dependable, he’d be set.

Again, he had to stop his mind from chasing those ghosts. He had to stay focused. By the time he had refreshed himself with a plate of the local venison, which came from domesticated deer the size of elephants, he felt ready to face the bureaucrats in Nexus Command again.

It was as he poured schlag, a thick, whipped creamy substance without sweeteners, over his venison that he came up with a plan. The plan made him smile. Yes, finally, he was thinking along the correctly manipulative tracks. He looked at Rem-9, who watched him with one optic and the restaurant with the other. He would have to get rid of Rem-9, at least temporarily, to execute this plan.

“Captain.”

“Yes sir.”

“I think, when I go into Fleet Command I’m going to leave you in the lobby.”

“Do you think that’s wise, sir?”

“I’ve not found any assassins or made any enemies here, other than the skalds, perhaps. There are no skalds in the NC.”

“May I ask why I must stay in the lobby, sir?”

“Yes, well.... I don’t want to intimidate them. I don’t want to be seen as attempting to intimidate them.”

Rem-9 paused for a moment, thinking that one over. Droad knew the mech would not give up on following him everywhere. It was all Droad could do to walk into the restroom alone.

“There are other mechs around the NC, sir. There are marines and officers who are mechs. I don’t think the—”

“You don’t take hints easily, do you?” asked Droad, interrupting.

“Not when I don’t like them, sir.”

Droad chuckled. “Very well. I hear-by order you to stay in the lobby. It should only be an hour or two. I will keep a handset nearby to call you if your services are needed.”

“I acknowledge your orders. But I must insist my objections be recorded.”

“Noted and agreed,” said Droad. “I will log your objections.”

Finally, Rem-9 dipped his optics, his version of a nod.

Droad got out a napkin and scribbled something on it. He signed it, then passed it over to Rem-9.

“What’s this, sir?” asked the mech in confusion. His optics swiveled to get a better look at the writing. “Is this a clandestine set of orders?”

“That is the logged record of your objections. You see? I signed it.”

The mech studied the napkin for a few seconds, optics whirring. “I find your record to be substandard, sir.”

“Noted,” said Droad. He speared a last bite of his venison, popped it into his mouth and paid the bill by flicking his thumb upon the tabletop. He dialed up a healthy tip and left.

Rem-9 followed him, still holding the napkin in his gripper.

#

When Droad entered Nexus Command, there were some sidelong glances. A few people, he thought, rolled their eyes. He sniffed. That was how it was going to be. Already, he had become the crazy annoying guy on a monster hunt. Very well.

“I have an announcement, everyone,” he said in a loud voice. “I’ve been talking to people on the Gladius and at a certain base on Crom. A base where there is an interesting construction project in progress.”

He had their attention now. Already, a few staffers were on the move. One bustled over, probably to shut him up. That was the attractive Ensign Tolbert. The others exited various doors. They were probably searching for upper command personnel to come and shut him up. Several others, however, had stopped shuffling their computer scrolls and waving their stylus over the big boards. They looked at him, frowning. He could tell they were listening despite themselves.

“I believe there will be a large attack against Neu Schweitz,” Droad announced. “And soon.”

Joelle Tolbert partly occluded his vision. “Mr. Droad,” said the Ensign.

“Inspector Droad,” he corrected her.

“Yes, of course. This might not be the best way to present your theories of an invasion by the aliens that attacked—”

“Who said anything about aliens?” snapped Droad, cutting her off.

“That’s all you talk about, Droad,” said a Brigadier General from the back. There was a widespread chuckle throughout the room. The Brigadier approached Droad. He was a pink man with a smattering of white hair here and there. Each tuft looked carefully waxed and groomed.

“I’m Brigadier Klaus Druzman,” said the man, not offering his hand. Droad didn’t offer his, either. “I’m in tactical command here.”

“You sir?” asked Droad.

The Brigadier’s nose lifted higher. He peered at Droad with unfriendly, slitted eyes. “We rotate tactical command. This is my week. You’re through here, I’m afraid, Mr. Droad. We’re very sympathetic to Garm and what happened there under your watch.... Tragic.”

“I’m an Inspector and I have full access to military command installations.”

“I’m surprised your status as an Inspector hasn’t been pulled yet.”

“My appointment was made legally and is on-going.”

The Brigadier leaned forward. Half his pink mouth smiled. “Perhaps you haven’t heard, Droad, but your benefactor—ah, passed on.... Tragic.”

Droad nodded. “I’ve heard. I’m here today, in part, to investigate that assassination.”

“Assassination?” said the Brigadier. Some of his confident air had vaporized. Now, he looked at Droad as one might look at a coiled viper. “Explain yourself.”

“Finally,” said Droad, smiling, “someone is interested in my report. What I’m trying to say is that the Vlax Romani are coming here to Neu Schweitz.”

That got their attention. Every head swiveled in his direction. Every conversation stopped. Hard stares pierced him.

He lifted a data-bean. “If you could play this, Ensign Tolbert.”

Tobert looked at the Brigadier for guidance. He made a small, brushing gesture with his hand. The Ensign took the data-bean and slipped in into a receptacle. The big board showed a base, an asteroid mining venture. Soon, several of the brass watching the incoming ships muttered. As it played, the Brigadier leaned close to Droad.

“I don’t know where you got this, but it’s classified.”

“I wasn’t under the impression that anyone here lacked clearance, Brigadier Druzman,” Droad said in a conversational tone.

“You do,” said the Brigadier.

As the nukes went off at the end, many gasped. There were sounds of outrage. Some looked worried, eyeing the others. Perhaps, thought Droad, the worried ones were those who had already seen the incriminating vid file.

“I repeat,” said Droad loudly. “There is an attack coming. This one occurred a short time ago, and they are not finished yet. I have several pieces of evidence to back up my claims. For one, the entire skald population of this planet has fled Neu Schweitz. They are all aboard the Gladius, which is now repaired and will soon depart for Ignis Glace.”

“Skalds?” demanded a man from the back. “What do they know?”

“They killed Senator Fouty—”

“An unconfirmed accusation, sir!” interrupted Druzman. His face was redder than ever.

“So when I found they had fled to the Gladius,” Droad went on, ignoring the outburst, “I went up to—to ask them about it. They confirmed for me, only yesterday, that they are leaving because an attack is about to strike this planet. They did the same thing when disaster struck Garm, so I took an interest in their exodus.”

“Garm again. How is this related to your monster hunt?” demanded Brigadier Klaus Druzman.

“As far as I know, it isn’t, sir. But I thought you should know, as this center is responsible for world defense.”

Everyone stared at him. Many people talked at once. The Brigadier went to stand with two of the brass from Fleet. After a minute or so, they nodded and separated.

The Brigadier returned to lean near Droad, who found his breath slightly offensive. “I know you’re bluffing. But you also believe there is a real danger. We’ll double the deep patrols. We’ll put every eye we have on Minerva. The Vlax have been moving in large numbers lately. Reports from there are confusing. Possibly, they are planning something important.”

“Thank you, Brigadier Druzman. But I need one more thing.”

“What’s that?” snapped the Brigadier.

“I need workers. Robots, mechs, something that can withstand intense radiation. I need a lot of them, and fast, up on Crom.”

“Crom? You don’t mean—”

“Of course I do, sir.”

The Brigadier stared at him for several seconds. “You’re working for him now, aren’t you? For Beauchamp. He’s crazy about that ship. As crazy as you are. Huge waste of money, if you ask me.”

“Will you give me the resources I need, sir?”

“No. Not without proper authorization. You’ll go through channels on this one, Droad. No more showboating will be tolerated.”

“Very well,” said Droad, he signaled for Ensign Tolbert’s attention. “Joelle, if you would be so good as to show the second clip I have on that data-bean.”

The Brigadier jumped. “Belay that! Give me that thing.”

Tolbert handed it over. Her eyes were wide and flicked back and forth between the two men.

“Droad,” said the Brigadier dangerously. “You have caused quite enough trouble around here today.”

“I’ll be going then, sir—as soon as I have my authorization for the workers.”

The Brigadier glared, while Droad gave him a flat, calm stare.

“Beauchamp already has a squad of mech Marines up there. What more does he want?”

“A second squad would help.”

“A full platoon? Didn’t you lose a full platoon of mechs on Garm, the last time we gave you one?”

“I’ve got one left. Their commander. And he’ll be the one commanding this new platoon. I’d like an order to that effect on the hardcopy as well, if you would.”

Brigadier Druzman heaved a sigh. “I don’t want to see whatever else you’ve dredged up. We want this war with the Vlax to stop, not to fan it to new heights. Don’t you understand that, Droad?”

“Of course I do, sir. Could I have my data-bean, sir?”

Druzman tossed Droad’s data-bean into the air and caught it in his fist. “I suppose you have copies of this,” he said.

Droad smiled in response.

The Brigadier sighed again and handed it over.

“Excellent,” said Droad, making the bean vanish. “I’ll be on my way then. As soon as you give me the mechs.”

“Why mechs? They’re incredibly expensive. We only have a few hundred combat mechs in the system.”

“They do the best work. But just imagine sir, if I’m right. Do you want an enemy force to gain control of the Zürich? Do you want to take that chance?”

In the end, the Brigadier signed orders releasing a fresh squad of mechs into Droad’s hands for transport up to Crom. He was also given orders for Rem-9 to assume tactical command of all combat mechs on the Zürich.

“Bring them back in one piece this time,” growled the Brigadier.

“I’ll do my best.”

As Droad left, Joelle Tolbert came to him with wide eyes. She whispered her question. “What was the second vid on the bean?”

Droad smiled. “There wasn’t one.”

She breathed deeply, then flickered a smile. “I thought no one could bluff Klaus Druzman.”

An answering smile played over Droad’s lips. “We live in surprising times.”

Twenty

“Droad, I can’t thank you enough for this support,” said Commodore Beauchamp, beaming. “You sir, are a miracle-worker.”

“And I thank you Commodore, for your diligent efforts in getting the Zürich ready for service. On that point, what is your status?”

“I’ll get Lieutenant Minard,” Beauchamp said. “She has every detail at her fingertips.”

The two of them stood in Beauchamp’s office. The walls were covered with small framed shots of various vessels the Commodore had served on throughout his career. The first of them was a rockrat, Droad noted, a one-man asteroid miner.

The Commodore proceeded to work at contacting Minard, but without success. Finally, he summoned an underling with his handset and rumbled at him for a while. When he broke the communication, he looked disturbed.

“What is it, Commodore?”

“Minard. Always so punctual. She’s missing. Very strange goings-on down there.”

“What are you saying, sir?”

“Eh? Yes, well,” said the Commodore, straightening his uniform. “We’ll sort it out. No need to worry about any glitches on our end.”

Droad stared at him for a few seconds. “Look, Commodore—I hope I’ve demonstrated by arranging these extra mechs that I’m on your side. The new squad will be here shortly, and we’ll unpack them and put them to work. They should exactly double our speed of progress.”

“Yes, and I’ve said thank you. Isn’t that enough?”

“No. It isn’t. I need more than your thanks, I need your trust. I’m very much in favor of this project. In fact, sir, I would say I’m the best friend you’ve got in the Nexus right now.”

Beauchamp cleared his throat. “That’s just it, Droad. I mean, you aren’t really in the government, now are you? As soon as someone figures out your sponsor is dead, they’ll pull the plug on you. Sad to say it, but I think you understand how these things work.”

Droad crossed his arms and sat on the Commodore’s steel desk. This brought a frown to Beauchamp’s face, but Droad pretended not to notice. “In the mean time, let me help you. What’s happened to Karin Minard?”

Beauchamp looked troubled. “She’s missing.”

“Down in the pits? What has she been doing down there?”

“Overseeing the cleanup. We had an incident, you see. There was a serious leak—you aren’t going to take any of this back to Nexus when they recall you, are you Droad? You understand the damage that talk of errors can cause for a project like this?”

“I want nothing more than to see this ship through to completion as fast as possible.”

“All right. I’ll tell you what we know. Some of our men have been vanishing. Not mechs, just the—ah, human robots. We’ve all but stopped using humans now. With your new squad of mechs, they would just get into the way.”

“What’s been happening to them?”

“They just vanish. There are a lot of dangerous things down there, under this ship, you have to understand. It’s pressurized, but the area is really just the bottom of a crater on the surface of Crom. There are sinkholes, crevasses.”

“If there’s a radiation leak, so what?” Droad asked. “Isn’t that exactly what this ship is built for, throwing bombs under it for propulsion?”

“We have to lift off, to get started. We have to have a big open area under the ship, or we’ll put too much pressure on the oblation shield when we lift off. With some of our initial tests—well, mistakes were made. We aren’t experts at battleship construction here at the Nexus, you understand. This is our first one.”

“Karin fell into one of these holes?”

“Possibly. She’s never late, but she can’t be found. Her transponder is dead or out of range.”

“How many people have you lost like this?”

Beauchamp shrugged uncomfortably. He did not meet Droad’s eyes. “Two or three.”

Droad nodded. “You mean nine or ten.”

Beauchamp sputtered, but didn’t argue.

“Commodore, let’s pull all the humans out of the lower decks. Let my mechs do the work. We’ll have the humans work on the upper decks and armaments. Rem-9 and I will proceed with the investigation into what the hell is going on down there.”

Beauchamp agreed. “But Droad?”

“Yes?”

“You should know, that’s what Karin was doing down there—before she vanished. She was investigating these disappearances.”

Droad headed down to the lower decks with Rem-9 clanking along behind. Once alerted about possible dangers, Rem-9 had become almost insufferable. His optics never stopped whirring and rarely were both directed at the same target at once.

“Don’t you get a headache looking every which-way at once?” Droad asked him.

“There is a mild sense of disorientation when scanning two remote regions at different ranges simultaneously,” said Rem-9.

“But you do it anyway.”

“My physiology makes it easy to examine multiple targets. It’s much more efficient than having a single focal point for visual input. I’ve trained my mind to accept the incoming data as presented.”

“Sometimes, it’s hard to believe you were ever human, Rem-9. You talk more like a true robot.”

“Possibly, sir, that’s due to my remoteness from my beginnings.”

“What do you mean?”

“I recall nothing of my former life. This biomechanical body is all I remember.”

“I see. You think that puts you into better balance?”

“I believe so.”

Droad thought about it. He would have to bring it up with Zuna, when they saw her. She seemed much more human than most mechs. In fact, if he were to put a word on it, she seemed almost ‘ditzy’.

They reached the lower decks and Rem-9 insisted Droad don a full hazard suit. He had to admit, the mech was right. If some of those dust particles floated up here, sparkling in the air, they could lodge in his lungs and poison him.

They quickly discovered there was quite a bit of damage down here. The vid lines were out, and the wireless was hopelessly fuzzy due to the radiation and high voltage interference. Poking around in the lower levels, it was Rem-9 that noted something odd.

“Sir, I think the emergency equipment has been tampered with.”

Droad appeared at his side and they investigated a module of emergency supplies. The fire axe, in particular, was missing. They checked, and quickly found that all the axes were missing.

“Odd,” said Droad. He didn’t like the look of this. Who would take a dozen red axes? Where had they gone?

“Droad?” asked a tiny voice in his helmet. He could barely hear it.

“Hold on,” he told the caller. He headed up two decks and got a better signal.

It was Beauchamp. Droad listened in growing alarm. He turned to call down to Rem-9, but found the mech captain had followed him up the ramps and was indeed standing about ten centimeters behind him.

“Oh, there you are,” Droad said. “We have to go up to the bridge. It may be starting.”

#

The first set of contacts was metallic in composition. There were over thirty of them, all about the size of a Vlax rook. They were coming in fast. But it was the second set of contacts, behind the ships, that worried Droad more. They looked like asteroids. Flying rocks rolling through space, coming in at several hundred thousand kilometers per hour.

The rooks, if that’s what they were, had begun to decelerate. But the rocks had not.

“The Vlax have gone mad!” said Beauchamp. “If one of those big stones gets through, just one, we’ll destroy every habitat they have. It will be Armageddon.”

“I thought everyone wanted peace at the Nexus, Commodore,” said Droad.

“This is no time for flippancy, Droad.”

“Indeed not,” said Droad, watching the incoming intel from Nexus Command. They had the big viewscreen on the battleship’s bridge operating now. This was a very good time, in Droad’s opinion, to get this ship fully functional.

“The deep patrol forces are gathering to go out there and meet them. Suicidal, really. The Vlax will be wiped out. We can meet them with twice their number. And our patrol ships outgun them ship for ship.”

“And what about the rocks?”

“Our laser bases will take them out. That’s all they’ve ever been used for, up until now. This system is full of debris. Every dozen years or so a large asteroid orbits too close, or comet comes in from our heavy Oort cloud.”

“There must be dozens of asteroids, all at once.”

“We are overbuilt for it. These rocks are small. All I can think is that the Vlax hope we’ll use our base lasers on them and forget about their ships.”

Droad rubbed his chin. “How long until they get into range?”

“The deep patrol will reach them first, within twenty-four hours, I should think. If anything survives that, they’ll come into range of our bases about fifty hours after that.”

Droad grunted unhappily. “We don’t have much time then.”

“Eh?” said Commodore Beauchamp. “Not much time? Not much time for what?”

“To get this ship operational and launched, Commodore.”

Commodore Beauchamp laughed. “What are you talking about, Droad? She won’t be ready to fly for two months, probably more like six.”

“While I’ve been here, I’ve carefully monitored your operational status. With the exception of the Orion drive, which I admit is a problem, this ship could launch today. Once out there, she won’t have everything she’s capable of, but even a single good mobile laser could take out that rook fleet before any of them could get close enough to fire on us.”

“Yes, but Droad—”

“I suggest we do just that, Commodore. We must launch before they get here, and we must destroy them and the asteroids before they get too close.”

Commodore Beauchamp stared at him as if he had gone mad. “I appreciate your fervor for this ship and this project, Droad. Really, I do. I can’t say I ever thought I’d meet a Nexus hack—excuse me, that’s what Fleet people call political appointees, you understand. No offense meant.”

“None taken.”

“Anyway, I never thought I’d meet someone from Nexus who was more fanatical about the Zürich than I am. In fact, you’ve made me wonder what others must think of me!”

“Nothing but the best, I’m sure.”

Beauchamp grinned. “Of course. Anyway, I’m telling you, the regular patrol ships will take care of those rooks, and our moon bases will take care of the rocks.”

Droad nodded and began pacing. “I don’t think you’re seeing the big picture the way I am, Commodore. Here’s what I see,” said Droad, ticking items off on his fingers. “First off, we have an obvious attack by the Vlax, after a previous devastating base destruction. The attack includes two waves as we see it now.”

Commodore Beauchamp shrugged.

“But in addition, we have sabotage going on right here, aboard this ship,” Droad said. He told Beauchamp about the missing axes, damaged surveillance systems and other oddities he’d seen on the lower decks.

“You think these events are connected? You think the Vlax know about this ship?”

“We must assume that they do. We must assume the worst. To do otherwise is to shirk our duty in defending this world.”

“What else have you got?”

“The very nature of the attack is my greatest piece of evidence. Have the Vlax previously made suicidal attacks? Do they usually suffer mass casualties when they execute their raids?”

Beauchamp snorted. “Hardly. We’re lucky to damage a single rook. They are masters of deception and surprise.”

“Exactly. So, why then are they throwing away their ships on this attack?”

Commodore Beauchamp leaned back in his chair. He nodded slowly. “I don’t like it, but you have a very strong point. We have to assume the worst, as you say. We have to assume the Vlax can win this, or at least they think they can.”

“Will you prepare this ship for lift-off?”

“I’ll form a list of emergency steps and follow them. I’ll meet with my officers. We’ll come up with a plan and put it into motion. We will get the Zürich ready to do her best in her unfinished state. With whatever armament she can bring to bear.”

“We will need Nexus Command’s approval to launch her.”

Beauchamp made a huffing sound that Droad soon realized was a laugh. He’d never heard the man laugh before. “Don’t worry about that. If the Vlax blow through our patrol ships somehow, Nexus will be screaming for me to launch. Hell, I’ll give the order myself if need be.”

Droad met with Rem-9 out in the corridor. “Any hints about the saboteur?”

“None, sir.”

“No suspects wandering the halls down there with axes?”

“No sir, the only person I’ve met down there besides my own troops is Zuna.”

“Hmph. Well, keep patrolling. Whoever it is, they are bound to strike again. This is the moment they’ve been waiting for. Whether they are Vlax or alien, they must be trying to stop this ship from becoming operational.”

Sending Rem-9 below decks to keep an eye on things, Droad retired to his cabin. He made warning calls to everyone he could think of, including Sarah.

Twenty-One

Sarah was in a panic after Droad’s call. Her eyes stung. How could these things have chased her here, all the way across the ocean of nothingness between stars? What else was happening, out there among the other human colonies? Were monsters and wars occurring everywhere?

She walked out onto the verandah of her hotel room and stared up at the swirling moons and the stars that shined between them. She felt very vulnerable. She felt as if she were only seeing the tip of a vast iceberg. These aliens were quite possibly all over the cosmos. Horrible things might be happening on neighboring worlds, such as Ignis Glace, Thorsen or even tiny Cigni. Worse, she thought to herself, things might have already happened. They wouldn’t know for years. Word of some battle might come to them, lasting for days or months, watching the transmissions of millions of colonists as they cried for help and finally died out. Extinguished.

It was a terrifying thought.

She turned around and found Aldo standing in the doorway, watching her. He looked into her eyes and she could tell he saw the horrors she imagined there.

“You are troubled, my lady.”

“Greatly,” she said. Then she told him what Droad had told her. Either the Vlax were coming to destroy them, or it was the aliens. Either way it didn’t matter much. Things were going to go badly soon.

“We have to get out of the city. The people of Bern will go mad. They will clog the ground and sky as they try to get away.”

She nodded. Who would sit still with dozens of huge rocks tumbling through space toward you, any one of which could destroy the entire city? The planet was pock-marked with craters anyway. It was an underlying worry of everyone on this world that each year would bring ‘the big one’ or worse, one that no one saw until it was too late. In the colonies first century, their third largest city had been taken out by a strike. After the next election, the funding to build the proposed—but long postponed—moon bases was suddenly found by the newly elected senators.

“I know a place. A bunker farther north. We’ll be as safe there as we can be anywhere.”

The people of Neu Schweitz had brought with them many habits from the old country. One of them was the digging of bunkers into deep mountainsides. The alps were riddled with them. In the early days, this had been done for protection from meteor showers, which were frequent and violent. Like high mountain shelters kept open for any who needed them in a blizzard, the bunkers were there for anyone who needed them in case of a disaster. Even after the network of moon bases had been built and had become reliable, the bunkers were maintained. They were dusty, but serviceable. There would be weapons and supplies for any emergency.

They packed up and told Bili the minimum. He quickly guessed they were in real trouble, however. His eyes were big and dark with worry again. Sarah hated to see that.

Before they had finished packing, another call came in from Droad. Sarah answered it with trepidation. Would this call be worse than the last? Were they out of time? Were the aliens already on this world, eating everything?

“Lucas?” she said. “What is it?”

“Nothing terrible,” he said. “I’ve got a new idea. I want you to come up here with me. I’ve got an okay from the Commodore Beauchamp. You’re civilians, but I told them you are a pilot and can serve as an advisor on alien tactics.”

“But why should I go up there? Can’t we just get out into the countryside here and be safe?”

“I don’t think so. Sarah—they are throwing big rocks at us. Asteroids, lots of them. If they land... Well, it won’t matter where you are. We’ve plotted the courses now. All the major cities are targeted. And the oceans. Things are going to go badly down there if we can’t stop the attack.”

“You think we’d be safer on a battleship in the middle of the action?”

“Maybe. But also, I’d like to see you one more time. You and Bili.”

Sarah thought about that. It didn’t sound good. Lucas Droad wasn’t a man who talked this way, who spoke of doom. It filled her with dread more than anything else she’d heard. She took a deep breath. Aldo, she knew, watched her. So did Bili.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll come up. I’d rather be up there where maybe I can do something against—whatever is coming.”

“Excellent. Go to the shuttle station. The next one will bring you up with a load of emergency supplies.”

“Lucas? Can Aldo come to?”

A tiny hesitation. “Of course. I can always use another good fighter.”

“Thanks, Lucas.”

Aldo agreed to come after a brief conversation. He had no more desire than she to sit this battle out in some dusty bunker. She thought too, he didn’t want to just hand her over to Droad. To separate now might mean the end of their relationship.

At the last moment, Sarah tried to leave Fryx behind. She thought maybe they could just forget about him on the dresser by the bed, where he floated each night next to Bili. Naturally, her son had different plans for his pet. He grabbed up the handle on top of the tank and lugged it, sloshing, down the hall toward the elevator.

Aldo and Sarah exchanged glances. They would wait. Now was not the time to add further drama to the evening.

Under the starry, moon-filled sky, Sarah, Bili and Aldo piled into a rented mech flitter. They were whisked away to the shuttle station. Sitting in Bili’s lap was the fish tank. Fryx bobbed inside, his spines flexing slowly in the saline.

Sarah gazed out the windows at the looming moons and bright stars. What did those glittering points of light have in store for her now?

#

Zuna became frustrated. She had several reasons for this. One was her supply of axes. She only had so many of her precious, red, fire axes. She had stolen thirty-one of them, to be exact, but that supply would run out eventually.

She simply must stop breaking them every time she killed someone. The handles were the weak point. Why didn’t they make these handles out of durable steel like everything else on this immense ship? The heads were steel, with exquisitely sharp monofilament blades that could chop through metal as if it were whip-pine. But the handles were only a cheap polymer. The axe handles were built to be strong enough for any human wielder, but when she drove them in a wild stroke that clove a victim from head to crotch, they invariably broke.

That’s where her second frustration lay. She had no self-control when it came down to the moment of the kill. She told herself, every single time, that she didn’t need to strike with every ounce of force her artificial muscles could muster. Even a light tap would kill one of these humans, who seemed ready to explode into red liquid if you so much as jostled them. But she couldn’t help it. Whenever she managed to position herself behind an unsuspecting human, such as she had with Lieutenant Karin Minard at their 0500 meeting, she couldn’t contain herself.

Zuna was very good at this positioning, and she was proud of her talent. First, she would distract them by pointing at something. She couldn’t really sneak up on anyone, as she clanked with every heavy step. So the trick was to get them to turn away.

The last time she’d lost control, the last hot joyous moment, had come only this morning. Like every murder, she’d carefully planned the proceedings. She had arranged to meet with Karin early, before the other humans were moving about. The mechs were always active, but they worked below decks in the pits. She met Karin it was at a quiet, deserted station where there was no one around to hear anything.

The magic occurred as always, in the sweet moment when her victim turned away. That’s what drove Zuna over the edge every time. She lost all control, when they turned and were so—helpless. In truth, she had begun to live for those hot moments. She thought of little else. It was only then that she felt truly alive and whole again. She was her old self in those fleeting moments, and she loved it. She felt like her humanity had returned to her. She felt whole and complete.

And when she struck, she did it the old-fashioned way. The way she had struck when she had been only a weak bag of human blood and bones herself, so long ago. She did it with a sudden, joyful ferocity. She did it with all the strength in her body of metal, polymers and circuitry.

Zuna realized she might never be able to control her urges in those moments. She resolved to dig the axe head out of her next victim.

After this morning’s murder, as was now her habit, she had gotten rid of Karin’s body by dropping it down a chute in the radioactive pits beneath the ship. The next time she would dig the axe head out with her grippers first. She would save it, stashing it somewhere, and later try to build a better handle for it. That way, if she ran out of axes, she could at least build a new one. The idea was comforting.

She had another problem to consider. Namely, that problem was Rem-9, the mech captain. He was always looking at her, watching her. He didn’t suspect yet, but eventually he would. He was a suspicious bastard.

Her last problem was perhaps the most serious of all. They had taken away her easy victims. Only combat mechs were left in the pits, digging. Her supply of human-robots had dried up. Soon, she had overheard, another whole squad of mechs would join the first. It was a horrible thought. She didn’t dare take on a combat mech. Not even one armed with only a shovel. Even if she could kill one by surprising it, which she doubted, another would certainly come running. They all had radios built into their chassis and she wouldn’t get far before the entire squad was upon her.

Frustration. The fun would end soon, no matter how she looked at it. She would be back to her bleak existence.

Zuna rattled her grippers. They clacked together very fast, like castanets. This was a nervous twitch she only displayed in private. The sight was disturbing, she knew. But no one else had ever seen it, at least no one who lived long enough to tell the tale.

She looked up the ramps, toward the upper decks. Perhaps she should expand her hunting grounds.

#

The fledgling battleship hummed with activity. Every deck was full of struggling workers, checking systems, driving streams of rivets with frictionless hand-accelerators and running cable over open decking. There was no time for finesse. Every system had been assessed and those that were close to completion would be completed immediately. They would be brought online in any fashion possible. Everything else was deemed non-essential. Many decks would not even be pressurized when they launched, if they launched. Crewmen would have to wear spacer gear at all times, as life support systems were to be minimal.

Frantic crewmen and contractors, stung into activity by their shouting superiors, worked around the clock. Beauchamp had decided to tell them all about the incoming attack, without details. It did wonders for morale and productivity. A week’s worth of work was completed in a single day. A month’s worth of work on non-essential systems was skipped. Still, the ship would only be half-functional by the time the enemy came in range.

The mechs were pulled from their duty underneath the ship’s belly. Beauchamp and his team had come up with a new, drastic plan. They would wheel one of the ships laser batteries down into the pits to slag the crater into the desirable curvature. It would be dangerous and there would be tons of deadly vapors released, but the work of thousands of  hours could be completed in one. Also, there was the secondary benefit of testing the laser weaponry and reactors under load.

Rem-9 led a column of mechs up from the lower decks. He had recalled them all, saying they were needed above. Zuna was directly behind Rem-9. Behind them the combat mechs, who used to following orders without questions, clanked in a thunderous unison.

“What are we going to do, Captain?” asked Zuna.

“Several duties are critical,” said Rem-9. “My unit is charged with moving a heavy laser down here and melting the rock of the crater down into a suitable curvature.”

“Why did the mechs get that job?”

One of Rem-9’s optics swiveled back to look at her. Both of hers stared in apparently guileless curiosity. Rem-9 was somewhat bemused. Zuna was much more human than the other mechs he knew. It was as if he spoke to a human female with a credulous personality. He noted that, strangely, she had a large sack on her back. She held the end closed with one of her grippers. Whatever was in that sack, the contents clanked and thumped against her body as she walked.

“The mechs are well-suited to such a task. The equipment is very bulky, only mechs have the strength to carry it down here without damage to the laser or ourselves. The job is also hazardous. Radioactive dust will fill the lower decks as the rock is vaporized. Only mechs can do the work and not be injured.”

“Can I help?”

Rem-9 considered the offer. “No. You have no training with weapons systems or transporting delicate equipment. May I ask what is in that sack you are carrying?”

“Fire axes,” said Zuna.

“Fire axes? Why are you carrying a bag of them?”

“I’m supposed to replace the ones people have been removing down here. Droad asked me to do it.”

“I see.”

“It’s not much of a job. Can I help in some other way, if not with your laser?”

“Possibly. The new mech squad is arriving in a few hours. It’s coming up from Nexus warehousing. The squad is foam-packed and dormant. Would you want to help with the cargo unloading?”

“I’m yours to command, Captain.”

“Negative. You are a civilian mech, Zuna.”

“It was only an expression.”

“I see. In that case, please report to cargo deck J. The new mechs will arrive there.”

“Thank you, Rem-9. Has anyone ever told you that—that they found you attractive? For a mech, I mean?”

Again, Rem-9 swung one optic back to examine Zuna. He could not tell if she were joking, or unstable. Perhaps, as a civilian mech from Neu Schweitz, her reprogramming had only been partial.

“No,” he said. “No one has ever made such an observation.”

“It’s your back,” said Zuna, “somehow, I find it attractive. The way it sways in front of me as you march... it is strangely stimulating.”

Rem-9 made no response. He could not think of one that was necessary or helpful.

#

“The patrol ships are reporting incoming missiles sir,” said an officer at the com station.

“Missiles? Are you sure, man?” said Beauchamp. “We didn’t think the Vlax had any left.”

“They’ve spotted the heat flares of their engines. They appear to be long range missiles, possibly fired from Minerva. They are continuously accelerating and are coming in at extreme velocities.”

Droad stood quietly at the back of the bridge. There were cables hanging down from the ceiling. Control equipment that had not been tested, which was not even scheduled for installation until months from now, had been shoved hastily into panels.

“How many missiles?” Droad asked quietly.

Beauchamp shot him a dark glance. “It hardly matters, Droad. We’ll burn them all down, don’t worry. I think it’s clear this is the other shoe you’ve been worrying about.”

Droad could tell that he was going to be rubbing Beauchamp raw if he hung around his bridge demanding things from the crew. It couldn’t be helped, however. He massaged his chin thoughtfully. He just hoped Beauchamp didn’t challenge him and try to throw him off the bridge. Not yet, anyway.

“How many? How far out are they?” asked Droad.

“There are about a hundred of them. They are about a million klicks from the patrol fleet, but sir—” said the com officer.

“What?” asked Beauchamp impatiently.

The com officer flicked his eyes back and forth between Beauchamp and Droad, then finally looked at Beauchamp. Droad didn’t blame him. He should listen to the Commodore first.

“They are a million klicks down, sir,” said the com officer, “they are below the plane of the ecliptic.”

“They aren’t targeting the deep patrol flotilla, then?”

“No sir.”

Beauchamp snorted. “Strange thinkers, these Vlax. They might have won the battle with our patrol boats if they had timed the whole mess to hit our ships at once. I suppose the missiles are curving upward, avoiding our patrol ships and coming at our defense bases?”

“Yes sir.”

“They are trying to knock out our lasers at the moon bases, then let their big rocks do the job on our cities. Armageddon. But they’ve thrown away their fleet. They think they can win ship-to-ship against us with their rooks? Madness. They simply don’t have the weaponry. They will lose their fleet, and those missiles will be taken out by our bases. I hope this surprise puts you at ease, Droad. The enemy has revealed his cards, and has come up short.”

“Maybe,” said Droad.

“What do you mean, maybe?”

“They may have more surprises, Commodore. In the meantime, I suggest we continue the crash program of getting this ship into action. We might yet be needed to save the day.”

Beauchamp smiled. Droad knew that he liked that idea. Droad had spent the last few days constantly bringing up the opportunity for historic valor. Whatever kept the Commodore and crew working at maximum, he would do. Even if it meant stroking the Commodore’s sizable ego.

Twenty-Two

If one remembers what one truly was—what one truly is—can that be called a form of madness? No, Zuna thought. She rejected the premise. She was what she had always been. The only difference was that now she could remember what she was. In fact, bringing her old personality back to life was an act of rebirth. It was her reincarnation. Nothing could be more pure. She was a murderess, and no one would take that away from her again. She was only being true to herself.

Zuna unpacked the cargo from the shuttle with only two crewmen. Most were busy working on the upper decks, where the weapons systems were being welded into place and tested as quickly as possible. As soon as the crew chief in cargo bay J learned a mech was going to be helping them with the job he ordered the rest of his men to follow him. There were much more critical tasks that needed doing.

She was surprised when a group of civilians walked off the shuttle. A man, a woman and a small boy carrying what looked like a fish tank. They had on vacc suits and rebreathers, but she could tell they weren’t military. There were no rank insignias on their suits.

Zuna waited until they had gone, then continued carrying item after item off the shuttle. Soon, the work crew got down to the mechs themselves. Zuna helped struggle with the huge, pod-packed mechs. She knew, inside were living things. Things that slept, and couldn’t wake up.

A thrill ran through her. The sensation, the excitement, was familiar but it was still a surprise. It was the thrill she felt when a potential victim was near. After thinking about it, she realized part of her mind, the murdering part, had divined an opportunity. These mechs were a problem for her. Once active, they would be unstoppable. But now, in their layers of foam wrapping, in their sleeping state, she had the advantage.

Zuna smiled as she continued helping the men with the lifting machines and the rest of the cargo. She hummed a tune, one she had picked up from the first man she’d killed in decades. The humming man.

She was going to kill one of the new combat mechs. She was going to kill him while he slept.

#

In the silence of deep space, two groups of small ships sped closer to one another. The ships were not arranged into lines, as two-dimensional thinking was pointless in space, but rather into two flat disks. The formations approached one another like two cymbals being brought together for a crashing crescendo. These disks were not tight formations. Both groups were widely spread apart so a single missile could not take out more than one ship at a time, not even a nuclear-tipped weapon. Each ship was several kilometers from the next vessel in its disk.

Nuclear weapons—all explosives in fact—worked differently in space. There was no blasting cloud of high-pressure air, just the initial shockwave and that was it. In order for even a one megaton device to be effective, it had to be within about a kilometer of an enemy ship at the point of detonation.

Both the Vlax and the Nexus used Grimmel-8 kinetic force missiles for long range attacks. The Grimmel-8s had no need to be nuclear-tipped to be effective if they achieved a direct hit. The kinetic energy released when a missile struck while moving at a rate of only three kilometers per second faster than its target, for example, was equivalent to its weight in TNT. The Grimmel-8 was drive-based, like a miniature robot ram-ship. Given time to build up enough velocity, and accurate guidance, they simply smashed themselves into enemies at high speed. No warhead was required.

The main problem with the missiles was their extremely slow speed when compared to lasers and their vulnerability to defensive systems. Missiles might move at fifty klicks per second, given enough time to get up to speed, but light traveled at 300,000 kilometers per second from a cold start.

Lasers, however, had their own problems. While effectively infinite in range, they were not infinite in effective range. In order to damage an enemy vessel the beam had to focus its energy as tightly as possible upon a given spot on the enemy hull. In order to strike with enough energy to burn through metal, even the best chemical lasers in the Nexus patrol fleet had to be within half a million kilometers.

It was with utter shock and dismay the first of the patrol ships discovered it was under attack, nearly a million klicks from the enemy line. At first, the licking beams of heat were not strong enough to do real damage. A few pilots had their retinas burned out of their heads and were permanently blinded. Quickly, as the reports of effective strikes came in, the orders went out to lower blast shields and begin countermeasures. Panicked, the captains reported their situation back to Nexus Command.

Droad and Commodore Beauchamp viewed the data relayed up to them from Nexus. They were grim-faced.

“This is unbelievable,” said Beauchamp. “How could the Vlax have managed a breakthrough in optics? They have twice our effective range.”

“How long until we can shoot back?” asked Droad.

Beauchamp stared at him for a moment. “You’re not even surprised, are you?”

“Of course I am.”

“No, no. You think these are your crazy aliens and their super-science. When you faced them, they never came at you with a fleet, did they?”

“No sir.”

“Then why aren’t you surprised?”

“Commodore,” said Droad slowly. He looked at the man. He could see a very different look in his eye now. The man was scared. Good, thought Droad. That’s the only way we have a chance. “Okay, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. I didn’t expect this, exactly. I expected something. I’m not even sure whether we are fighting the Vlax or aliens or something else entirely. But neither the Vlax nor the Skaintz are in the habit of throwing away fleets. They had to have a way of killing our ships. It makes perfect sense if they outrange us. What difference will our numbers make if we can’t get close enough to fire a shot before they burn us out of the sky?”

Beauchamp chewed on his thumb. “Let’s work on this together then. We’ll run some numbers, as I’m sure they are doing down at Nexus. Combined, the enemy and our fleet are moving toward one another at a rate of about fifty klicks a second. At that speed, it will take our ships over two hours to get close enough to fire back.”

“What kind of defensive measures do they have?”

“We have the usual, chaff, aerogels, reflective surfaces. We can spin the super structures, like a twirling umbrella. But nothing solid. The vessels don’t have any mass shields. Just their hulls. Nothing that can stop thirty incoming beams. That’s what they’ll do, you know. Whoever they are. They will all fire on one of our ships until its dust, then go to the next.”

Several of the bridge crew, eyes round, listened closely. They were no more sure what to do than were their commanders.

“Can we recall them?” asked Droad gently.

“Negative. They are moving too fast. They rushed out there, to meet the enemy and destroy them before they got in close. We figured we had the advantage. Ships don’t just pivot, you know.”

“Yes, of course they can’t. I’ve spent the last two years coming into the Kale system decelerating. You would think I would know what it takes to turn around in space. They are committed to this battle, then.”

“There’s nothing anyone can do but fight it out. By the time either side reduced their speed significantly, they’ll be on top of each other. Like two bullets fired on a collision course. There is no turning back.”

“What will they do?”

The Commodore squirmed in his command chair. “They’ll probably speed up. The faster they get into range the sooner they can fire back.”

“Sir,” said the com officer. Everyone looked at him. “We have vid feed now.”

The big domed roof of the bridge lit up like an old-fashioned holographic planetarium. Two groups of tiny flares moved toward one another in the ocean of nothingness between Neu Schweitz and asteroid belt Alpha.

“Zoom us in on their fleet,” ordered Beauchamp.

The enemy line grew into a line of almond-shapes. They were metal rooks—but something was strange about them.

“What the hell is all that crap on their hulls?” asked Beauchamp aloud.

Droad took a step toward the raised foredeck, then another. He climbed a set of steel stairs and reached up. The image wavered at his touch. He squinted at the substance covering the rook ships. The ships looked, indeed, like almonds. Not just in shape, but in texture. There were faint traceries, like veins, growing over the vessels.

“These ships have a living covering of some kind.”

“Your aliens?”

Droad shook his head. “Could be. We never really got the chance to see how they operated in space.”

“How the hell could they come here with a fleet? Answer me that, Droad. How did they field a fleet of crusted-over rooks so quickly?”

“They are nothing if not fast, tactically and strategically. If I had to guess, I would say they took over the Vlax habitats some time ago and built up this fleet with hybrid technologies. And, yes, the more I think about it, the more certain I am that they are the same aliens that struck Garm. Their tech is largely organic in nature.”

“Besides,” mused Beauchamp, “what are the odds we’ve run into another race of hostile aliens in just a few years?”

“The question is, what are we going to do about it?” asked Droad.

“Do? We’re going to watch the battle. We’ll watch good men die while our hearts pound and our stomachs churn. And will get this ship ready for fighting as fast as possible. Does that make you happy, Droad?”

“No sir. Not really. Honestly, I wish I had been wrong. Totally wrong.”

The alien ships came on. They fired in focused bursts now, targeting single ships as Beauchamp had predicted. After about an hour, the two groups of ships were close enough for the enemy lasers to be deadly. The first human patrol ship burnt up and flashed into nothingness. The reactor had ruptured.

“How long?”

“Our ships will be in range for some revenge in less than an hour now.”

Droad shook his head. “Tell them to fire every missile they have.”

Beauchamp snorted. “Missiles? If they fire them this far out they won’t hit the enemy until hours after this is over.”

“Better than getting them destroyed.”

“Well, I’m not in charge of this battle,” said the Commodore.

Droad walked over to the com officer. He contacted Brigadier Druzman and relayed his suggestion. Nodding, he headed back to the center of the bridge.

“Well, what did he say.”

“They’ve already fired them. All of them.”

Beauchamp stared at him. “Do you know what that means?”

“I can guess. Nexus Command has calculated that none of the patrol ships are going to make it into laser range with the enemy.”

They watched over the next hour as ship after ship blew up.

#

Nicu was sick of his spacesuit. He had been sick of his old one, but things had gone beyond the point of endurance with this new one. The problem was, he couldn’t afford to vent it, to clean it, to allow it to dump out his waste. The suit was like a mini-spaceship in many ways, self-sufficient. It recycled everything he gave off into some form of useable material. His carbon-dioxide exhalations were scrubbed and recycled into breathable oxygen, a technology that had been known to divers on Old Earth centuries ago. His urine was distilled to warm water. However, there were certain wastes that were stubborn. Without true bio-mass recycling tanks, they could not be broken down. In short, after a week inside his suit the paste that the suit fed him began to taste like sludge. He knew even his air and water supplies would soon turn toxic.

Under normal circumstances, it would be a simple thing to evacuate the suit and the waste system and refill the reservoirs. But he couldn’t do it, not even though the facilities were available aboard the refurbished rook he rode upon. He knew if he showed his nose or even made an odd smell, the aliens onboard would detect him. And then it would be all over.

Nicu had stowed away on one of the rooks before the aliens had taken off on this insane attack of theirs. He had waited until their guard was down. They had thought him tame. Nicu smiled at the thought. He knew very well, as had his long-suffering mother and his third grade teacher, both of whom had finally given up on him and abandoned him long ago—there was no taming Nicu.

He had come to regret his hiding place. Possibly, he would have fared better hiding back on the Tyrolia and letting most of the aliens take off on this crusade against the Nexus. It had never been his intention to be caught up in a battle. Quite the opposite. His hope had been he could commandeer the rook and escape Minerva entirely.

The aliens had taken every last rook that could operate and turned them all into flying pumpkins of some kind. In the main cabin up forward, ropy veins grew across the floor, pulsating with liquids or nerve impulses. Possibly both. The ship was half-alive and completely terrifying. He was sure some of the floating things that hung, rooted in the fleshy walls with curved swaying stalks, were optical organs. Perhaps some of them could hear, taste or otherwise sense his presence if he went up there.

So he stayed in an unused tool compartment. Inside this box, little more than a cubic meter of space, he had spent uncountable hours. His stolen supplies had run out, and his suit was overflowing with waste products. Something had to be done.

Nicu sighed. His greatest regret was the aliens had taken his knife from him. He had come to trust his blade and felt even more helpless without it. He decided, after much pondering, to wait another day.

The battle awoke him. The ship shuddered under him, rocking with impacts. Were they under fire?

He waited tensely. Every minute or so, the ship shuddered and rocked. It was very rhythmic. He thought about that. It seemed to him that the ship was firing its main weapons systems, which had been altered by the aliens. It was not taking fire, it was firing at something. But what?

Another hour went by. The firing continued. Nicu decided it was time to peek out of his hole. Perhaps he could use the waste removal system in the next compartment without being noticed. The battle should be distracting the aliens, whatever they were shooting at.

So he crept out of his cube. He had kept his muscles ready for this. He had stretched and exercised isometrically in any way he could. Still, when he stood in the narrow corridor, his back was bent and his legs ached. Eyeing the waste removal station enviously, he decided to take a chance. He entered and plugged in plastic hoses.

Pumps gurgled. He wondered if he would be caught. It would almost be worth it.

The ship took another shock then. This was a different sensation. Instead of firing, they had been hit. He threw up his arms, bracing them against the close, curving walls.

Another shock followed the first, this one hit harder. Finally, whoever they had been shooting at was shooting back. Damn the luck!

The waste system finished the final cleanse. The nano-cloth began working furiously to transport all the final wastes, the ones that had overflowed into his suit, into the now empty receptacles. The nano efforts made his skin crawl and itch, but it was more than worth it.

Nicu’s plan was simple. He would fill up on fresh water, steal a bit of foodstuffs from the galley, and then pop back into his hiding spot. He had stowed away for a long time, and when something had worked for him, Nicu was not the kind who tried to fix it.

The next strike changed his mind, however. It was the hardest yet. A screaming sound reached his ears immediately after this impact. The sound was that of escaping gas. The ship was depressurizing.

He ran his fingers over his faceplate in a panic. It was closed and sealed. What were these crazy aliens up to? They were going to get him killed, after all this suffering. The unfairness of that thought was more than he could bear.

Nicu crept out of his hiding place and stood on the decking. He walked forward, into the front of the ship where the waving fronds and rippling flesh walls were.

The flesh he found there had darkened. In spots it was dead, gray. A dozen stalks sagged, their orbs hanging from fluttering cusps. The living portion of the ship was dying. Flesh had grown over the rips in the ship’s skin, but the wound appeared fatal.

Nicu frowned. He crouched in a ball at the back of the main cabin. Where were the aliens? Was this thing independently piloted by whatever tissues they’d grown over it? Did it have a brain somewhere, attached to the controls? What if they had taken out the manual systems? If the ship died, he could be trapped here, floating in space.

He crawled over flaccid, quivering veins as thick as fire hoses. He slapped away sensory fronds that brushed against him, shuddering in their death throes. Finally, he made his way up to the front of the ship, to the pilot’s chair.

Something sat there. Nicu had never seen an arl before, the Imperium pilot-being. It was vaguely man-shaped, but with a head like an octopus and hands like two smaller octopi. The arl worked the controls with skillful precision. Nicu saw with relief the control systems were still recognizable. The normal switches, sliding levers and buttons were still there, but beside them, sometimes overlapping, were a dozen growths. Things that resembled—nipples? Or perhaps boneless pink toes.

The arl pilot was distracted. The alien battled the controls with intensity. The ship still fired every so often.

Nicu tiptoed up behind the arl. He quietly detached the fire extinguisher that was still clipped to the back of the pilot’s chair. That sound must have alerted the arl who straightened. One cusp on a roving stalk swiveled away from the flashing displays. The cusp opened widely, spotting Nicu. The orb bulged and the stalk retracted in shock.

Before the alien could get up or draw a weapon, Nicu brought the extinguisher down upon the orb and followed through. He smashed it into the soft skull beneath. He lifted the metal cylinder and he did it again. He kept on pumping his makeshift weapon up and down until the alien in the chair was a slimy pulp.

Still, Nicu kept methodically slamming the cylinder up and down. He suspected the thing might have more brains, hidden inside its anatomy somewhere.

He wanted to make sure.

Twenty-Three

The Savant shivered and hissed in vexation. Her modified rooks had destroyed the enemy ships with their long range lasers, but they hadn’t anticipated their counterstroke with missiles. The rooks had little in the way of defenses. It was galling to watch her ships trying to target incoming missiles with long-range heavy lasers. Most of them missed the tiny, fast-moving targets and were battered into debris. She watched as one of her last ships flickered and went dead, tumbling through space.

She rearranged her tentacles in a resolute pattern. She had plenty of forces left, and the rooks had completed their task of destroying the enemy fleet. Now, all that stood between her invasion forces and the planet surface was a battery of laser bases on the various moons.

Even now, the invasion pods were landing on the moons and her killbeasts were bounding over the airless rocks on suicide missions. They could not survive long, exposed on the moons. But hopefully, they would live long enough.

#

“Sir? I have some strange distress calls coming in,” said the com officer.

“What? Did one of our ships live out there? Poor bastards. We can’t even catch them. They’ll be out of the system and dying in open space before—”

“No sir, it’s not from the deep patrol. It’s from the defense station here on Crom.”

“Put it through,” said Droad.

Beauchamp threw him another reproachful glare. Droad met the glance with a bland expression.

The com officer brought up a strange scene. It took a few moments for them to understand what they were looking at. The camera angle was canted badly, about thirty-degrees off center. Dust dribbled down from the ceiling. Men circled around, they held weapons and were putting on vacc suits as fast as they could.

“The video pickup has been knocked off its mount,” said the com officer.

The ceiling ruptured then. A screaming sound erupted. Gas was leaking out. The sudden depressurization sucked a few men into the void. Others died with their blood boiling in their suits, as they had not yet sealed them properly. The base was on the sun-side of the moon now and the surface temperature was well over one hundred degrees Celsius. The surviving half of the gunner crew began firing up into the breach.

“What the hell are they shooting at? Wasn’t that a missile strike? Tell them to get out of there.”

“That wasn’t a missile strike,” Droad said. “They are under assault. Someone set a charge off on top of the complex.”

Beauchamp stared at him in clear disbelief. They all looked back at the vid display and watched as the men proceeded to die in a firestorm of laser bolts. When it was over, men in spacer suits bounded down into the complex. Droplets of boiling blood vaporized as they struck the walls.

“There, see? Those are Vlax spacers!” shouted Beauchamp triumphantly.

The vid feed was cut off moments later.

“Could you play back that last thirty seconds in slow-motion?” Droad asked the com-officer.

The officer glanced at Commodore Beauchamp, who nodded his approval. The vid played back.

“See that man? Look inside the helmet, there’s not face there. Notice, the length of arm and the manner in which he holds his laser carbine?”

“What are you on about, Droad? So what if that Vlax was injured. Maybe he even has a few prosthetic limbs—”

“No sir,” answered Droad, cutting him off. With sweeping strides he walked up close to the screen. “Freeze the vid, please. Look at the feet, sir.”

They all stared at what had to be feet, but there were no boots, and no feet. There were instead claw-like brown chunks of carapace. Gray moon dust coated the blade-like tip where the toes should be.

“You’re saying there is an alien inside that vacc suit? Are you insane, man?”

“I’m saying we’ve just lost a moon base, and I’d be surprised if the rest aren’t lost within the hour. Without those heavy laser bases, we can’t take out those asteroids, Commodore.”

Beauchamp gaped like a cooked fish. “We’ve got to take those bases back. Get Rem-9 out there and retake that base, Droad.”

Droad shook his head. “The Crom base is small, just meant for local defense of this installation. There’s no point.”

“Droad, I order you to take your mechs out there and destroy those creatures.”

“Commodore, the mechs will all be needed to protect this ship.”

“This ship isn’t even operational. You are refusing to follow my orders? Then I will have to call Nexus Command and get the mech command switched over to me.”

Droad shook his head. “No sir. It is I who will be assuming command here.”

He drew out a blue envelope of soft, flexible nano-cloth. “I have here orders from the civilian oversight committee of Nexus Command. If aliens attack, I’m to oversee the defense coordination of the Nexus forces.”

Beauchamp did his fish impression again. “What is this blather, man? Give me that.”

Droad surrendered the envelope. Beauchamp read it. The letter was short and to the point.

“It’s signed by a dead senator?” Beauchamp asked. He threw back his head and laughed unpleasantly. “I demand that we contact Nexus Command. I’ll have you thrown off my bridge for this.”

The com officer flashed up the Nexus Command. After a moment or two, they manage to get Brigadier Druzman on the screen.

“What is it? We’re under attack you know.”

“Yes sir,” said Beauchamp, “and we’ve lost our defensive installation here on Crom.”

“Well, take it back, I’m busy. All the moon bases are reporting assaults of some kind. The Vlax must have moles working in every construction crew in the system.”

“Excuse me, Brigadier,” said Droad, stepping into range of the vid pickup. “I’m assuming overall command of this operation.”

“What? What are you doing on the bridge of a ship in a battle, Droad? You are a civilian.”

Droad quickly presented his orders.

“These orders appear to be genuine. But you are not here, Droad. You can’t command the battle remotely from the Zürich. Check your regulations, man. Besides, I’ll get the Senate to strike this down within a few hours.”

“I don’t need to run the battle. You can do that, sir. But I am taking command of the Zürich.”

“You want to coordinate the defense of Crom from that ship? Do you even have active weaponry yet? Well, it doesn’t matter. Fine. Until you are relieved—which will be very soon, I promise you—you can have fun with your glory-hunt, Droad. End transmission.”

Droad turned toward Beauchamp, who gave him a strange look.

“What exactly are you planning?” asked Beauchamp.

“Assemble your crew, Commodore. Sound general quarters. Load the Orion chutes with live charges. We are launching this ship within the hour.”

#

Zuna twitched her grippers when the warning flashers went off all over the ship. The men who she had been helping unload the mechs looked up in surprise and rushed off. Yellow lights and sirens made an awful racket. She watched everyone run off, and was left alone with a pile of huge crates. As she was not an official crew member, she had no battle station she was required to go to.

She swiveled her optics as the last man left the cargo bay. She swiveled them from the exits, to the crates, and back again.

When the last man had left her behind, alone, she took a few steps one way, then another.

“Hello?”

No one answered. First she looked for the vid pickups she had seen. She had been scanning for them carefully the entire time she worked here. There were relatively few, this being a cargo bay and usually unmanned. When she did find them, he grippers made very quick work of them. They popped at her slightest touch, like tiny light bulbs.

She dug out her bag full of red axes. She selected one that she’d been saving for something special. This one had streaks of black paint on the handle and the blade. She didn’t know why, but she thought it made the weapon look—almost pretty.

Zuna tore apart the packing materials covering the first combat mech. On this one, she made the mistake of opening up the front first. She made a rattling sound when she saw the optics, lifeless and asleep though they were.

Trying to be quiet, yet working fast, a task that was really beyond someone of her size and composition, she dug into the back of the packing materials. She had to be careful not to trip any of the emergency switches that might power-up the mech.

The first one was by far the hardest. Not only had she opened the casing from the front, but she had a devil of a time getting to the braincase. She broke her pretty axe, and almost had a fit of emotion. The second axe did the trick, however. She slammed it home at just the right angle. Syrupy liquid fountained over her, the mix of light oils and biological liquids that served mechs for blood.

Waking up at the final moment, the mech’s grippers extended and spread. But they never closed on Zuna. The brain died as the bubbling liquids surrounding it flowed out onto the floor of the cargo bay. Zuna was vaguely disappointed. The liquids weren’t even red. But she had to congratulate herself in any case. She had killed her first sleeping mech. She had graduated into an entirely new level of murderess now.

Zuna quickly went to work on the other packed mechs. They were easier to kill once you got the hang of it. She had learned much from the first botched effort. She opened each crate from behind and knew exactly where to chop.

As she worked, she began to hum. It took her a moment to identify the tune—then she had it. The tune was the same thing the irritating human robot had hummed. The tune was catchy, and it had caromed about in her mind for days. She hummed it loudly, wildly. With her amped voice it was the loudest humming any person had ever produced.

And she enjoyed herself. This, she thought, was the pinnacle of her existence. Fire axes snapped and she dug new ones out of her bag. Artificial gore coated her plating, from her optics down to her titanium walker-pads.

Zuna had never been happier.

#

Droad ordered Rem-9 and his active mech team to carry the heavy laser up to put it back on the surface batteries. The smoking crater under the ship was melted to a roughly curved dish-shape. It wasn’t perfectly rounded, but it only mattered for the first bomb. When it popped beneath the oblation shield, it would shove them upward away from Crom’s surface, with tremendous force. It was critical that the force be properly spread over the belly of the ship. If too much pressure hit all at once on a single point, the ship would fold and tear apart.

The battleship had nearly a gigaton of displacement. Even when fighting only Crom’s weak gravitational force, it was very heavy. The Orion system had to work, or they could not lift off.

“It’s not ready, Droad,” said Beauchamp. “Sheer willpower can’t change physics.”

“I’ve been going over the design work on this vessel for weeks now. It’s overbuilt, as it should be. I think it will tolerate the stresses when we lift off.”

“You think?”

“Yes.”

“Are you mad? This is the last real defensive asset the Nexus has. I’m going to call command and get Druzman to relieve you now. If he has to get a cabal of Senators out of bed, he’ll do it.”

Droad stepped close to Beauchamp. “Let’s talk in your office. Give me one minute.”

Beauchamp eyed him with hostility. He finally nodded.

When they were behind closed doors and beyond the prying eyes of the bridge crew, the two men faced off.

“I know you resent my presence here now, at the moment of action,” said Droad.

“More than you know.”

“So let’s get down to business. You admit aliens are hitting us, not just Vlax, right?”

“I’m willing to accept the possibility. But don’t try to throw your orders around again, Droad, I don’t care—”

“I’m not going that route. I want to appeal to your military sense. This ship has to get into the fight. Maybe we blow up when we launch, but what’s the point of waiting until Neu Schweitz is a mass of glowing craters?”

“We can shoot back from here. We can fire our main batteries on the asteroids and whatever else they throw at us from this crater on Crom.”

Droad shook his head. “We have a very limited field of fire. We could get a few shots. But we can’t get them all. And we can’t maneuver. A beached whale, that’s what we are.”

“Okay, so what’s your point?”

“I’ll leave you in tactical command. It’s your ship. If we live, you get the glory. I just want us to lift off now.”

At last, Beauchamp nodded. “This has been a difficult day for everyone. I’ll accept your terms, however.”

The two men walked out together. Beauchamp touched Droad’s shoulder. They faced each other in the hallway.

“What’s that in your hand?” asked Beauchamp.

Droad showed him. It was an egg-shaped device.

“That’s a stunner,” said Beauchamp. “You would have tried to take me out if I didn’t agree?”

Droad nodded.

“I’m combat trained. What if I got it away from you?”

“Then I would have called Rem-9 and his team. We would have stormed the bridge and launched the ship anyway.”

“So, no matter what, you were going to launch the Zürich? No way to stop you, eh?”

Droad tilted his head speculatively and smiled. “I suppose you could have killed me.”

Beauchamp smiled at him then. “You know what? You are as crazy as I am, Droad.”

The two men returned to the bridge. Commodore Beauchamp ordered the ship’s Orion system activated.

A small tactical nuclear charge, the very smallest they carried and which measured in the kilotons dropped down into the crater below the ship’s belly. When it reached a central point in the parabolic pit they had dug out beneath the ship, it went off.

Bam!

A tremendous blast shook the entire vessel and rammed them into their seats with three gees of brutal force. The oblation shield and the massive aero-foam shock-absorption layers of the ship above it survived the fantastic pressures. Warps in the surface were measured and deemed to be within operational tolerances.

Bam!

Bam!

Bam!

The Zürich was thrown into orbit over Neu Schweitz. Already she had nearly reached escape-velocity. Using heavy attitude-jets, she swung ponderously around to face the stream of incoming missiles, asteroids and Imperium invasion pods.

#

The Savant shook with horror. The enemy had surprised her with a huge vessel! A true fighting monstrosity. Most amazing of all, the ship was built almost entirely of metals. Such a strange race, these humans. Growing a ship, to the Savant, seemed like so much easier. One just designed the required seeds, planted them, and soon after harvested the ship. These humans went to tremendous efforts to construct astounding structures. The base floating over Minerva had already impressed her. Such a huge assemblage, built piece by piece, was unknown to her species. The Savant wondered if these aliens built their fruit orchards out of metal, meticulously milling each leaf.

Still, their engineering and their amazing expertise was impressive. Even with their overly complex approach to large structures they were able to make uncounted small parts work together to form an effective whole. She had no doubt, looking through her optical enhancers at this new menace, that the ship would be effective in combat. Her modified rooks were completely outclassed by it, and most of them had been destroyed anyway.

Now she was faced with some grim decisions. She had neutralized their laser bases, but this ship had not been included in her plans. No Imperium forces were heading for it. Nothing could easily be diverted to stop it, either. The asteroids that wheeled through space had no drive systems. The rest of the invasion ships, such as the one she rode in, were intended to seed the planet surface with her species.

The Savant was torn between unpleasant options. Her invasion ships needed to reach the planet surface to dig new nests. She desperately needed new bio-mass as raw materials to keep fighting. The Skaintz Imperium always had this weakness. They fought powerfully and geared up quickly, but they burned through their raw bio-mass with equal speed. Like a wildfire, her species required a steady stream of fuel or their campaigns would gutter and burn out.

How to win this war? She had to get rid of that battleship, she knew. That was imperative. Given enough time, it would destroy her fleet and the asteroids. It would hunt down every last representative of the Skaintz Imperium in the Kale system. Even if the invading ships did get past it and landed upon the planet, it would burn down through the atmosphere and dig them out of their holes.

She eyed the ship with growing hostility. There was only one way out. She would have to board that abomination. She would redirect her invasion forces, in their quiet ships, to take the battleship and make it their own. Then, even if only a handful of her kind survived, they would still have the upper hand. She could burn the humans into submission from space, if required.

The Savant was a thinker, however. She now had to seriously contemplate the possibility of defeat. Rather than risk everything on a single throw of the dice, she decided to hedge her bets. She ordered one ship in ten of her invasion fleet to aim at other, secondary targets.

Twenty-Four

Droad stood on the bridge of the Zürich, but he had not usurped Commodore Beauchamp’s chair. He knew that sometimes such small gestures kept a strained relationship sufferable for both parties.

“We’ll be in range in less than an hour,” said Beauchamp.

“In range of what?”

“Why, the first of the rook ships, of course. The Vlax will be burned from the sky. The last of their kind will be erased from the Kale system, and their victory over our fleet will be short-lived.”

“We are not fighting the Vlax, Commodore,” said Droad, “but in any case, don’t you think the asteroids are the highest priority target? We must protect Neu Schweitz.”

“We will destroy them, Droad. There is plenty of time.”

Droad considered, thinking carefully. He didn’t want to cause any more tension between himself and Beauchamp unnecessarily. But he was worried there were more shoes yet to drop. What if the aliens somehow took out this ship in the next few hours? What if there were more hidden legs to this attack? He had to make sure millions were not killed on the planet below.

“Better a few alien ships slip by now than a single city be taken out,” Droad said.

“I can assure you, Droad, we’ve done our math. We can do both.”

Droad sighed. “I’m afraid that’s not good enough. I hereby order you to fire on the asteroids until all are gone or knocked off course. We can’t take the chance. What if we have a reactor failure on this new vessel? A city could be wiped out.”

With obvious animosity, Beauchamp gave the orders.

The bridge crew went into action. Turrets swung up, tracked floating rocks a million klicks out. The reactors throbbed, building up capacitance. Most of the laser systems on the Zürich were hydrogen-fluoride lasers, otherwise known as chemical lasers. The lasers operated by filling a tank with the gas at a very low pressure, typically about one percent of a standard atmosphere. Low pressure was typically easy to maintain in space, but a huge cloud of released gas flowed out of the tanks after each firing. The lasers also generated a great deal of heat. After each firing period, which lasted approximately eight seconds, the lasers had to be given time to cool down and vent gas. Then there was a delay for retargeting. Essentially, the big beams could only fire every two minutes or so.

Within a few minutes, they began targeting the first asteroids. Droad reviewed the priorities. How long it would take to destroy any given asteroid was a matter of conjecture. They were all of varied sized, shapes and compositions. Some were more or less reflective in nature. The more reflective, faster spinning rocks would be harder to destroy. The composition internally mattered as well. They might dig deeply into a rock, discover it was soft rock inside and easily shatter it. Or they might find it had a solid iron core, and had to be chewed on with many repeated firings.

Droad reviewed the target priority list. Each sighted asteroid was listed, along with its time until impact and kinetic force. The list was alarming. There were thousands of megatons of explosive damage sailing toward the planet.

Droad walked over to the station of the ship’s chief gunnery officer. “I see the largest rocks are listed first, but have the shortest planned firing times. Could you explain that to me?”

“Sir,” said the gunnery officer, glancing over at Beauchamp, who frowned at the big overhead screen ignoring them both. “The big ones we are going to try to nudge. If we can push them off course, we’ll waste less time and energy on them. The smaller ones we can completely blast down to marbles. The atmosphere will take care of the rest after that.”

Droad nodded. “I see. I’m sorry if I seem overbearing. I’m not a micromanager by nature. But we are talking about whole cities here.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Proceed with the firing schedule. Asteroids first.”

“Yes sir.”

At a range of approximately one million klicks, the firing began. It took a few more minutes, but they finally got the optics right. A few smaller, targeting lasers fired jolts at the target, lighting it up. About seven seconds later, the beams the targeting lasers had fired bounced back. Three seconds out, three back. They had hit the target.

The great gas tanks filled with hydrogen-fluoride. The deck crew had been issued black-out goggles, in case there was a light leak. Command didn’t want their men blinded by accident.

The crewmen began to shout their orders to one another now, following their procedures.

“Optical tracking.”

“Check.”

“Main tanks register optimal pressure.”

“Check.”

A siren went off. An electronic feminine voice which sounded overly calm told everyone near the bridge or any observation port to don their black-out goggles and stop walking, lest they bump into something.

Droad already had his goggles on. He tugged at them until satisfied.

“Capacitors fully charged. Release charge.”

“Relays locked.”

“Fire!”

Unexpectedly, Droad felt a mild jolt of recoil. He pursed his lips and nodded, impressed. These were indeed powerful lasers. Their transference of energy was so intense that it caused a mild vibration through the steel hull. The light hit him as well. A greenish flare gushed up, then dimmed to a steady glow for several long seconds. The bridge crew continued their dialog.

“Maintaining beam.”

“Heat level 70%.”

“Maintain.”

“Heat level 90%.”

“Reduce emission. Initiate shutdown and venting.”

More noticeable than the recoil or the light was the resulting sound, which was a very high-pitched, singing noise. Droad wished they’d passed out earplugs to go with the blinding goggles, but he supposed making your crew deaf and blind for comfort wasn’t a great policy.

Due to the distance out to the incoming rocks, it took a while to get reports back concerning the effectiveness of the strike.

“Target hit.”

A ragged cheer went up from the crew. Droad lifted his goggles. Everyone was smiling. He realized this was the first time the Zürich had actually blasted anything.

“Target obscured due to dust burn-off. No report from optics, other than it was a hit.”

“Radar shows course fractionally changed. Retargeting.”

About two minutes after the first shot, the lasers flared again. After nine firings, the asteroid broke up and after analysis, one of the larger chunks had to be burned down further.

Another cheer went up. There would be many that day, but they had hours of long work ahead.

Droad was almost ready to retire after three hours. Fully thirty percent of the asteroids had been destroyed or diverted. Most of the major cities of Neu Schweitz no longer had death spinning down from the heavens toward them. Droad felt with each rock they eliminated that he could breathe more deeply, that his chest would allow in more air. He tried to force himself to relax, and it worked—partly.

His com beeped then, and he activated it. Rem-9 was calling him.

“Report, Captain.”

“Sir, we have a problem.”

“What? Where?”

“Cargo deck J, sir. The new squad of mechs. They have been destroyed.”

Droad blinked in thought. His tension returned with a jolt. All over his body, muscles that had been slowly relaxing tightened up painfully. “All of them?”

“Yes sir.”

“What the hell is—”

“Sir, I sent the activation code to the squad members, none responded. None began to unpack themselves. I requested information from several dockworkers, they checked and said the packaging is destroyed, and the mechs inside them.”

“Sabotage.”

“It appears so, sir. I’m heading up to investigate. I’m taking my squad with me.”

“No. I want you to order your squad to the armory. Tell them to fully arm and equip themselves. Every mech is to proceed from now on with an armed partner. All eight of them. Then post them at the critical systems locations we discussed earlier. The reactor, the main turrets, bridge and crew quarters. I’m not going to have this ship disabled by saboteurs or whatever they are.”

“Yes sir. Relaying orders. Where should I post myself?”

“Investigate the scene, then head up here to the bridge. You are my bodyguard again.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Droad smiled. Rem-9 had never been happy with any other duty.

“There’s one more thing, sir.”

“Talk.”

“Zuna is missing.”

“Zuna? Then someone is out to destroy all the mechs aboard? All right, execute your orders. Report anything significant.”

Droad broke the connection.

“Trouble?” asked Beauchamp, coming near.

Droad filled him in.

“Who is aboard my ship doing this?”

“I really don’t know. Not yet.”

“I was sure you were going to blame aliens,” said Beauchamp, sneering. “But I’ll tell you who it was. We’ve got a few Vlax aboard, as contractors. We never planned for them to launch with us, but you insisted we go immediately. I’ll take care of this.”

Droad opened his mouth to stop him, but the words froze in his throat. He didn’t want Beauchamp indulging himself with a witch-hunt. But he couldn’t bring himself to stop the Commodore. The man could be right. Who knew? Maybe some Vlax had heard of the big wave of incoming rooks. Maybe they were the saboteurs. He couldn’t take chances with this ship. Millions of lives were at stake.

Droad shut his mouth and nodded to the Commodore. Beauchamp went about his task with gusto. His teeth were clenched and a fanatical light played in his eyes. Droad watched with distaste. Quite possibly, innocent people were about to be abused. But he couldn’t think of any way around it. He wasn’t going to risk the Zürich.

A klaxon warned him it was time to put his goggles on again. The ship quivered. Another bolt of light stabbed out into the ether and burned a cold stone that whirled toward them, toward the planet. Droad thought, what if they kept throwing stones? How long could they stand out here and play goalie?

#

Zuna was too big to hide in any normal sense of the word. She could, however, do some things that humans could not. She did not show up as living flesh on sensors, and she had no heartbeat. She did not breathe. Only a tiny, gurgling pump churned in her brain case, keeping nutrients flowing and oxygenating her cells. When she froze in place, she was nearly silent. In a ship full of thick steel modules, she was almost undetectable.

She had found an open container compartment near cargo bay J. She hid inside, putting her sensory array against the metal walls of the compartment. Listening carefully, she could hear anyone entering the cargo bay. But unless the crew searched all of the containers, she could not be detected in her motionless, silent state.

Outside the container was a scene of wanton destruction. She’d dug down into the packing of eight dormant mechs, chopping their brains to death before they could activate and defend themselves. Two dock workers unfortunate enough to discover her crimes had lost their lives as well. The hunting had been good. Each human who came to see what had befallen the last was easy prey.

Like a spider in a hole, Zuna waited. Her bio-chemistry was very pleased. She should have thought of this before. She had been overly cautious. Why hunt humans when it was so much easier and more fruitful to lay a trap for them?

#

Droad was summoned back to the bridge. Beauchamp said they had something else incoming, ghostly traces on their long-range sensors.

“What do we have, Commodore?” asked Droad.

Beauchamp gave Droad a sour look. “Bogies. Unknown contacts about half a million klicks out.”

“Well within range then. What do they look like?”

“I’m not completely sure. They have a signature like—like blocks of wood. Or chunks of ice.”

“Organic materials, then?”

Beauchamp made a snorting noise. “Don’t get too excited. I doubt very much these are your aliens. Most likely, they are chunks of something from the Oort cloud. Ice, I’d bet. They have a considerable water content.”

“And on the spectrometer? How dark are they?”

Beauchamp shrugged. “They are indeed dark, pretty much black. But ice gets dirty out here, you know.”

“And they have tails, I presume? You have satellites to get a good side-view. I’m sure mini-comets, this close to the Kale star, would have large plumes of melting vapor streaming out...”’

“No, they don’t have any tails. Look, Droad, I don’t know what you are trying to say—”

“Nothing at all, Commodore. But I want to see one of these things. Get me a visual up on the big screen, would you?”

There wasn’t much to see. Black objects, noticeable mostly because they blocked out the star canopy behind them, hung like advancing shadows.

Droad addressed the officer in charge of the sensory equipment. “How fast are they coming in?”

“These things are coming in at about 100,000 klicks an hour, sir.”

“Relative dimensions?”

“What sir?”

“Are they all the same size, Ensign?”

“Ah, yes sir. About the same size.”

“And how many are there?”

“Over a hundred, sir.”

Droad nodded, rubbing his face and eyeing Beauchamp, who glowered.

“Oh, all right,” said Beauchamp. “They look like ships of some kind. Maybe the Vlax built something new.”

“Possibly.”

“Sir,” said the sensory Ensign. “The contacts are—they are changing course. They have fired jets.”

“New heading?”

“They are coming directly at us now, sir. At least most of them are.”

“What?” squawked Commodore Beauchamp. “Plot firing solutions.”

He turned to Droad and marched up to him. “Okay. You were right. I’m a big enough man to admit it. They are ships of some kind. They are some kind of stealth effort. I just didn’t believe the Vlax were capable of constructing such a fleet, you have to understand. I’ve greatly underestimated them, a terrible flaw in a commander, I know.”

“Recriminations are hardly necessary, Commodore.”

“No, no,” interrupted Beauchamp. “I don’t know how you knew, but maybe a fresh perspective is helpful. I still say they are crazy, these Vlax, but I’ve begun to comprehend their plan. If they have improved their rooks and built a new design of stealth vessel, they figured they would take out our fleet and make their killing move now. In fact, their actions against the asteroid belt make more sense now. They were probing our defenses, and found them weak.”

“The question is, what are we going to do now?”

“Hmm? We are going to blast them back into space, that’s what.”

“There are over a hundred of them, Commodore.”

“So what?”

“At two minutes minimum cycling time on the primary lasers—that’s assuming no malfunctions—it will take several hours to destroy them all even if we do it in a single shot. Once we start firing at them they will begin evasive action.”

In space battles at long range, small ships had one great advantage over large vessels—they could dodge out of the way. Radar took several seconds to reach out, locate an enemy and bounce back with the targeting information. Simply using passive optical sighting was faster, exactly twice as fast, but less accurate. Once the lasers fired, the beam took several seconds to travel the distance to the enemy vessels at this range. All together, small ships had about ten seconds to get out of the way. If a small ship used thrusters to dance about, they could easily cause enemy fire to miss.

“What are you suggesting, Droad?” demanded Beauchamp. “This ship must survive the battle. We are all that stands in the way of the enemy fleet.”

“A fleet that I’ve suspected all along.”

“Self-aggrandizement is not becoming of you, Droad.”

“I only wish to point out, that I now suspect we will lose this battle, somehow. I suspect this ship may well be lost in the fight. If that’s the case, we have to give the people of Neu Schweitz as much time as possible to evacuate the cities, to get to high ground.”

“And your proposal is?”

“Keep firing at the asteroids. We must destroy them first. When the unknown ships get close, perhaps we can take them out with our point-defense systems.”

Beauchamp stared at him as if he had gone mad. His eyes bulged unpleasantly.

“You suggest we don’t defend ourselves? You suggest we endanger this vessel, this last hope for the Nexus? Well, I won’t have it, Droad. I refuse to follow your advice in this instance. Now, kindly leave the bridge and leave the battle to professionals.”

Droad stared at him for a heartbeat. Every ear on the bridge listened closely.

“You have your orders, Commodore. Continue firing at the incoming asteroids. Do not deviate from the prioritized firing order.”

Beauchamp sputtered, but Droad cut him off.

“Further, I want you to ready every crewman for a possible ship-boarding attempt. If I know this enemy, they will attempt to take the Zürich, engaging us in close combat.”

Breathing hard, Beauchamp marched off the bridge. Droad suspected he would be communicating loudly with Nexus Command. Let him, thought Droad. For now, he was in command and he wasn’t going to lose half the population of another world today.

The big lasers sang again. Another blinding bolt of power streaked out, drawing a line through space to an incoming asteroid. The surface of the rock heated fantastically in each fraction of a second, causing it to fracture, vaporize and blast apart.

The weaponeers reported a direct hit. They had blown the killer rock to rubble. A cheer went up from the crewmen. Droad allowed himself a small, tight smile.

Internally, he wondered how Rem-9 was coming along with his investigation.

Twenty-Five

Loiza watched the battle between the Imperium and the Nexus with interest. Using passive sensors from her team of rooks, she had spent a long time decelerating behind a flock of asteroids. They were coming in on a base in the Alpha Belt, an area lightly defended. She had no doubt that if there had been even a single patrol ship in the area, it must have been called off to help with the battle back home. Her optical sensory officers saw flares from all over the Kale system, as the Nexus called for every ship to reinforce the homeworld.

She watched the battle with moments of grim pleasure, but also with growing unease. The Imperium had clearly been winning at first. The Nexus patrol craft had all been destroyed by the altered rooks—that alone was amazing. But then the battleship appeared. Everyone on her com system gasped when they saw it. There was no way all the Vlax put together could ever have stopped such a monstrosity. If the Nexus won, she knew they would turn the vessel on her outposts. The conclusion was forgone. The Vlax were to be subjugated no matter who triumphed.

Worse, she now came to doubt her assumptions. She had been wrong. The Nexus hadn’t sent these monsters to Minerva or Garm. These were a greater enemy than that. They were true aliens, and they were clearly out to destroy her species.

She put her faceplate against a bulkhead and closed her eyes. Hard plastic cut into her forehead, but she stayed that way. Individuals questioned her, she ignored them. Inside her spacer suit, she sweated and thought hard for minutes.

Finally, she ordered her people to connect her with the battleship, with the Nexus. She had to do what she could.

“This is Loiza, leader of the Vlax Romani of Minerva,” she said officially when the connection was open. They had managed to get through to the bridge of the ugly battleship. “Who speaks for the Nexus?”

“I do,” said Droad, coming into view on their screens. “I’m Lucas Droad, operational commander of the Nexus space defenses.”

He was not in military dress, but Loiza shrugged. The Nexus chose their own leaders. “I wish to tell you what you face.”

She heard Droad order his com officers to record her transmission and relay it to Nexus Command. She did not care. The Vlax could only hope diplomacy would save them. She proceeded to inform Droad of the enemy, their position in Minerva and everything else they knew of the aliens.

“I thank you for the intel,” said Droad sincerely. “Can we call a truce of sorts—for the good of our species?”

Loiza smiled, for the first time. This was exactly what she had been hoping for. She had given him no details concerning her own strength, only the position of the enemy. The Nexus was hurting now, and they would be interested in alliances from any source.

“Granted,” she said. “I’ll send you our data files now—everything we’ve got on these aliens. This new enemy trumps any misunderstandings between us.”

“I agree,” said Droad.

Loiza proceeded to request permission to land and resupply at the asteroid base she had planned to take for her own. Droad gave her the permission without hesitation. She was surprised, just how far up did this man’s authority go?

When the connection broke, Loiza felt very relieved. Her tiny armada landed on a large, pear-shaped asteroid and met with the surprised, apprehensive crew. There were no weapons discharged, they had gotten the message to comply.

Loiza’s relief was short-lived, however. Missiles were spotted now, incoming from Minerva. They had been following them for days, possibly weeks, as they headed out to the Alpha Belt. The Imperium hadn’t forgotten about them. Each powered by a tiny engine that provided constant acceleration, the missiles were going incredibly fast. They had no need to decelerate, and had caught up with Vlax when they slowed and landed.

Every rook was targeted, as was the base. She ordered her people out onto the surface. Everyone had to run. It was every man for himself.

Behind her, as her breath blew in her rebreather, the explosions blossomed. They had come so far, all for this?

She was knocked spinning out into space. The force of an explosion had caused her to reach escape velocity. She worked her attitude jets, but more explosions came. They were silent, beautiful.

One more went off. Quite close. She didn’t have time to admire the silent beauty of it before she was engulfed in a shower of molten rock, expanding gases and bits of jagged metal that ripped their way through her suit.

#

Droad thumbed his way through reports on a computer scroll. The Vlax had been wiped out. He ordered a patrol vessel to go out there on a rescue mission. No, he didn’t care if it took two weeks. Yes, he would take full responsibility for reversing a Nexus ordered retreat to Neu Schweitz.

That finished, Droad stepped into an echoing steel hallway to talk to Rem-9. He wanted to know how that investigation was going. Had he found the saboteurs yet?

But Rem-9 didn’t answer the com link. Droad stared down the corridor, eyes unfocussed. Zuna had vanished. Rem-9 wasn’t answering. Eight mechs, all part of his personal command group, had been destroyed in their packaging.

He felt a trickle of sweat under his arm. The aliens couldn’t be behind this. He didn’t think they knew who he was. They didn’t work this way either, to the best of his knowledge. They would have just killed him.

The Vlax? It was possible some Vlax sympathizers were behind all this. But he had to admit to himself the most likely culprit was Commodore Beauchamp himself. He was working hard to retake his command. Droad was in the way, and had driven him to drastic action. Who else better than the Commodore would have the freedom of action to get away with such things and have them all go mysteriously unnoticed on a battleship? Perhaps, he had a death squad of loyal Fleet personnel aboard, working to make sure Droad could be taken out when the time came.

Who could he trust aboard this vessel, besides the mechs themselves? He could only think of a few people. He contacted Aldo.

“Droad?”

“Listen,” Droad said, almost whispering. “I need some help.”

There was a momentary pause. “Talk,” Aldo said.

“I’m not sure who to trust.”

Aldo chuckled at that.

“This is serious,” Droad said. “Someone is taking out all the mechs onboard. I just lost contact with Rem-9.”

“What do you need from me?”

“Could you have a look around? I know you can handle yourself. Something very strange is going on.”

“Okay, I’ll do it,” said Aldo.

That was good enough for Droad. He knew Aldo was a man who meant what he said. Droad broke off the communication and summoned the two combat mechs Rem-9 had sent to the bridge. He quietly ordered them to keep him under guard. They weren’t to get out of his sight, and he wasn’t to get out of theirs.

Stepping back onto the bridge, every head swiveled as his two new aides clanked behind him. They each carried a laser carbine and a full kit of explosives.

“Sir?” asked the com officer, his voice cracking high.

“Just keep firing at those rocks,” Droad said.

“The stealth ships are getting very close, sir. They are decelerating. I—I think they mean to dock.”

“Weaponeer? Fire a volley of missiles at the incoming ships. They are close enough now.”

“The racks are not yet operational, sir.”

“Secondary laser batteries?”

“Not yet, sir. The main batteries are all we have.”

Droad chewed his lower lip. “How close are they?”

“About fifty thousand klicks. Sir, if we fired the main batteries at them, they are too close to dodge now. We would burn them down in one certain shot per ship.”

“The main batteries are for the asteroids. There are still seven left. Let’s make it five or six. When these ships get close enough, open up with point-defense. You do have active point-defense, don’t you?”

“Yes sir!”

Droad looked around. Beauchamp was nowhere to be found. What was that man up to? He punched up a tracker on his command console. A flashing green dot moved down the corridor toward the bridge. It moved faster than a walk. What would cause Beauchamp to trot back to the bridge?

Alarmed, Droad got up and walked toward the corridor. “Everyone stay on the bridge. I want my command staff at the ready. This is a real battle, people. Look sharp.”

He left the bridge and his two mech bodyguards followed him, wordlessly.

In the corridor, he met up with Beauchamp. He was indeed trotting, and grinning, too.

“Ah, Droad, just the man I wanted to come and relieve.”

Droad took a deep breath. Things had gone against him back at Nexus. It had just been a matter of time, he supposed.

“Troops,” said Droad, turning to his mech guards. “Arrest this man. He is to be bound, gagged and placed in—that fire equipment closet, just off the corridor to the left.”

Stunned, Beauchamp hardly had time to shout in alarm. The mechs moved so quickly, they had him in their unstoppable grippers in seconds. Beauchamp’s eyes bulged in rage at Droad as his mouth was clamped closed.

“I’m sorry Commodore,” said Droad. “Your complaints will be logged and scrutinized carefully when this battle has concluded. Perhaps, we will both be lucky enough to survive it.”

#

Aldo, Sarah and Bili went looking for Rem-9. His last reported position was in cargo bay J. Aldo wore his sword. Sarah glanced at it, but said nothing. Aldo offered her no explanation. None was needed.

They found Rem-9 and a pile of other bodies in the cargo hold. They immediately alerted emergency personnel. Within minutes a team of medics and armed personnel descended on the cargo bay. They took away the dead men, and told Aldo and Sarah to get out of here.

“Are you going to mount a guard here?” asked Aldo.

The team leader shook his head. “We are in the middle of a battle. We’re not posting anyone in an empty hold. In fact, you’d better get out. If we take a hit on those big doors, this room will depressurize and suck you right out into open space.”

After the emergency team left, the group sadly examined Rem-9. The mech’s braincase had been cracked open. Sarah and Bili worked to close it with emergency spacer suit patches from their own kits. All of them wore spacer gear now.

Aldo drew his sword and thumbed the kinetic field into life. It crackled and sizzled with energy. When it moved through the air, it seemed to burn it, leaving behind an odd scent.

“The techs didn’t even try to do anything for him,” complained Bili. “Do you think he’ll live, Mom?”

“I don’t know if he’s alive normally,” said Sarah, patching up the leak. “But Rem-9 is very tough.”

They checked the others, but everyone else had been dead for hours. There was no hope for them. They got Rem-9’s braincase pump working again, but it gurgled and bubbled with audible popping sounds. There wasn’t really enough liquid in the encasement to cover the biomass.

“I think this is just saline,” said Bili, “like the stuff in Fryx’s tank. I think I can get some and add in more.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Bili.”

“Let me at least try, Mom. Rem-9 is my friend.”

“All right. We’ll all go back together and get it.”

Aldo stood with his blade out, eyeing their surroundings. His eyes were intense. He didn’t like this place.

Together, the three of them left the cargo bay and headed back to their quarters. Along the way, the battle began in earnest. The entire ship shook, as a thousand guns began firing. It felt like impacts were answering. They all looked at each other as the impacts grew in frequency. Klaxons sounded. They were taking incoming fire.

They all fastened their faceplates down, even Bili, without having to be told. They moved through the corridors as rapidly as they could in the lessening gravity. The ship was no longer accelerating, and they were beginning to float.

When they reached their quarters, Bili bounded in the low gravity to Fryx’s tank. He grabbed it up and turned around. His mother stopped him.

“Honey, Rem-9 will have to wait. We are in the middle of a battle now.”

“Who do you think is going to save us if those aliens get in here, Mom? We need Rem-9.”

Aldo and Sarah looked at one another. Aldo shrugged. To him, it was better to do something rather than nothing. Sitting in a steel room waiting for enemies to come was harder on the mind than engaging in a rescue mission, useless or not.

So they began the trip back. People occasionally rushed past them. Aldo contacted Droad and told him what had happened to Rem-9.

“Thanks for helping out with the mech,” Droad told him. “He might be ninety percent machine, but he’s a better man than most of the Nexus Fleet.”

Aldo snorted. “I can agree with you on that point.”

When they reached the cargo bay, Aldo was still nervous. He didn’t like this place. He sensed, with the finely tuned senses of a man who had faced death on a regular basis that it was not a good place to be.

Sarah and Bili worked to pump saline directly from Fryx’s tank into the mech’s braincase. They hooked a tube from the fish tank to the carefully resealed braincase and used a small, automated pump. Spacers always had pumps handy. In order to move about liquids in low or null gravity environments, you had to have them. You couldn’t “pour” a weightless liquid. It just went everywhere.

Fryx swam away from the plastic tube that invaded his tank. His spines fluttered. Aldo wondered if the little monster was angry.

When they’d finished, they left the cargo bay together and headed back to their quarters. Then the battle really got going. Sarah and Aldo had a quiet talk while Bili talked to Fryx, apologizing for pumping half his saline out.

“We can’t just sit in here,” said Sarah, “but I don’t want to leave Bili, either.”

The ship shuddered again. It was the new kind of shudder, one that indicated they had taken a hit of some kind. Laserfire was incoming, that or missiles were making it through. Fortunately, they were not nuclear-tipped so far. They were only kinetic missiles, striking with the tremendous force of an object traveling at extreme speeds. Each hit indicated a new rip in the upper steel shielding. There were sheets of rock up there, too, layered in-between the steel. Aldo wondered how long that armor would last.

“You stay with the boy.”

“Where are you going?”

“We need supplies, if we are going to ride things out here, in this room. If things will get as bad as you say, we need food, water—a medical kit.”

“What about weapons?”

“In these corridors and rooms? All I need is my blade.”

“All right,” said Sarah. He could tell that she wanted to be doing something. “I’ll go by the armory anyway. Bili and I could use weapons. I’m not going to face these things unarmed again.”

“Bili?” asked Aldo.

“Yes. He’s going to have a weapon too.”

#

The invasion pods were only a few thousand klicks out now. Each one resembled a raindrop in shape. They approached point-first so the sharp, conical tips of exceedingly hard horn-like material aimed toward the Zürich.

Thousands of depleted uranium projectiles sprayed out in computer-controlled bursts at the incoming invasion pods. In a planetary atmosphere, the railguns would never reach so far, but in space they could be effective if the cone of fire and the angle of incoming attack was narrow enough. The enemy ships used side-thrusters, firing jets of gas to dodge, but with a massive cloud of pellets to run into, they could not all avoid the hailstorm.

“They are stacking up, sir,” said the defensive weaponeer.

“Stacking up?” asked Droad.

“They are each pairing up, one behind another. The ship in front will absorb the damage letting the second one through.”

“Keep firing,” said Droad. “I want every centimeter of vacuum full of flying metal. And order everyone aboard to prepare to repel invaders.”

“Invaders, sir? Are we sure they won’t just blow up when they get close enough?”

“Arm everyone. I mean everyone. Even the cooks.”

The com officer relayed the appropriate orders.

“They are almost here, sir,” said the weapons officer, speaking up with a shaking voice. “We’ve destroyed twenty-one percent of them. If we employed the main batteries now, with a wide-dispersion beam, we could take out two or three enemy ships with each shot.”

“We’ve only got time for one shot, and retargeting back on an asteroid would take longer. Keep firing on the asteroids. Each rock we take out saves an entire city.”

“Yes sir.”

The ship shuddered again. Another impact. Missiles from the invasion pods, hammering at the point-defense railguns, were coming through in swarms now. Along with the missiles was small, cutting laser fire. Craters had been torn through in the Zürich’s armor, but none yet had penetrated the inner hull. Droad studied the enemy vessels. They had cone-shaped tips. They would ram into the hull in weakened spots. They would break the skin, and like an infection, the aliens would spread inside the battleship.

Droad didn’t think like to think about their chances after that. He’d seen the aliens in close combat too many times. His crew was professional, but green. Their war with the Vlax had always been at long distance. Most of them had never had to face another human in a death fight. None of them had ever had to face anything like a killbeast.

#

“Things are going bad here, Fryx. My family never seems to get a break.”

The ship was moving again, and there was at least a fraction of gravity. Bili took the opportunity to feed Fryx. He felt sorry for his pet, who had been caught up in these events due to no fault of his own. They’d even stolen half his saline out of his tank. Poor Fryx.

Bili opened the top hatch on Fryx’s sloshing tank and tried to shake a fish out the bag, but it wasn’t cooperating. This fish had prickly things on it, and was blue in color. It had gotten caught up in the bag. The pet people on the net whom he had ordered the fish from had assured Bili this species was the standard feeder fish on Neu Schweitz. Bili wasn’t happy with it, but they’d run out of the stock of wriggle-fish they’d brought from Garm.

“I hope this doesn’t give you indigestion, boy,” Bili said to Fryx. “It’s the best I can do. I hope it tastes good.”

Growing frustrated with the reluctant fish, which now flipped around in the waterless bag, he pushed the torn end of the bag into the open hatch of the tank. Fryx floated inside, waiting.

Bili turned the bag inside out. It was like pulling a sock off that didn’t want to let go. He shook the bag, frowning.

Suddenly, he yelped. He had felt something. A stabbing sensation. Had that blue fish stung him somehow? He dropped the fish into the tank, still in its bag. The fish swam free in the tank and the bag floated to the top.

“Damn,” said Bili, looking at his finger. A single, tiny droplet of blood welled up from the tip.

Suddenly, Bili felt a little sick. His vision dimmed, and his hand went numb.

He turned, took one step toward the door, then his legs went dead and he slid down onto the floor soundlessly. His eyes were still open, staring up at the fish tank.

He was able to watch, but not move a muscle, as Fryx climbed slowly out of the open hatch and plopped on the floor in front of his face. In the light gravity, the Tulk was able to walk. Laboriously working his spines like tiny, thin legs, Fryx crawled his way toward Bili’s face.

Bili knew the truth then. Fryx had stung him, not the feeder fish. No one sold feeder fish that poisoned people.

Utterly helpless, Bili watched as his pet betrayed him.

Twenty-Six

Bili’s eyes snapped closed then opened again. This process repeated several times, as his young brain was reconfigured and rebooted. His mouth sagged wide, and a long hoarse scream came out. The sound was continuous, raspy. When his lungs were empty, his mouth still hung open. His throat rattled dryly, still trying to scream, but there was nothing left to exhale.

Fryx mounted the back of Bili’s neck. His spines dug in and extruded white tendrils, nerve receptors. They sank into the spinal cord. From the back of the neck the bundled nerves were close to the surface and easily accessible. Fryx had considered entering the child’s mouth, and digging his way up into the sinuses, the only available cavity. But the skull was simply too small. He didn’t even bother to try it. He would have to cling to the back of the neck. He hated being exposed, but at least he had escaped his humiliating glass prison.

He calculated that the mother of this young beast would destroy him if she caught him, so this was a one-way trip. There was no retreat possible now, no possibility of continuing to act the part of a docile pet. It was the nearness of the Skaintz had driven Fryx to such drastic action. He hated exposure, danger—risk of personal injury of any kind. But the Imperium forces were coming, and he was the only Tulk aboard. He would be captured and exquisitely tortured by the ancient enemy of his people. These foolish humans could not protect him, and he would not stand by and allow himself to be taken by his greatest enemy while floating in a tank like a goldfish. He had made his move, and there was no turning back now.

Fryx forced the locked throat and lungs to relax. Bili’s body sucked in air in desperate, strangled gasps. Fryx released calming chemicals, soothing his new mount. Once the autonomic systems were functioning, he reached deeper still into the nervous system. He made his first attempts at large-muscle motor control.

Bili lurched, hands twitching. One shoulder raised from the ground, then slumped down again. Fryx dug more deeply into the spinal cord. The boy spasmed and shook—bucking as many new mounts do when first taken by a rider. Fryx had control difficulties. It was always easier when inside the host, nestled up against the brain itself. His controlling tendrils had to extrude themselves to their limits to reach the required nerve-centers. If he hadn’t had so much experience with humans as hosts, he might have failed.

But as an expert rider, Fryx soon had the boy up and on his knees. The first effort at real dexterity came when he picked up the helmet and lowered it over the boy’s head. A slight miscalculation here could actually damage Fryx, as he clung to the back of the boy’s neck and skull. Trying not to shiver and dislodge his own nerve-needles like an incompetent firstling, Fryx held the reins tightly.

Bili’s hands lowered the helmet and clicked it into place. The helmet pressurized with a hiss. The faceplate was lowered as well.

Fryx allowed himself his first self-congratulatory emotion. Now, at least, he was out of sight inside the spacer suit and safe from depressurization. Any moment, according to the speech he had overheard in his tank, the human ship would be invaded by the Imperium forces. Fryx knew he had very little time.

The great ship shuddered. An impact. More strikes, dozens of them, shook the steel walls. Fryx’s tank crashed onto its side. Saline leaked slowly over the floor. Every droplet beaded up almost into a sphere due to surface-tension in the low-gravity.

Fryx drove the boy onto his feet and out into the hallways. The legs swung mechanically at first, then more fluidly, as he got the hang of the nervous system.

Panicked humans ran every direction. Klaxons sounded. Multi-hued lights flashed, dazzling the eye. The ship had been breached.

The second step in Fryx’s plan was to mount a superior host. He had already chosen his new mount, and he knew exactly where it was. He walked down corridors into increasingly quiet, lonelier parts of the great ship.

#

The invasion pods slammed into the hull one after another. Only a few managed to penetrate deeply enough to break through the outer skin. Droad and the rest of the bridge crew watched with grim tension as their final few point-defense railguns tilted downward and chattered thousands of rounds into the invasion pods. Gunners worked the joysticks directly now, not trusting the ship’s AI to run fire control. Each time an invasion pod popped in a pulpy explosion the bridge crew made a roaring sound of triumph.

Droad thanked whatever design team had put together the point-defense railguns. The systems were deceptively simple, and very functional. Mounted on swiveling ball-joints on top of squat, steel towers, the railguns had an incredible field of fire. They could shoot at practically any angle. There was very little cover from them whether the enemy were approaching from space or trotting over the surface of the vessel.

The killbeasts appeared on the torn surface of the hull very fast, popping out of the pods and moving with alarming rapidity. Many carried shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. Sparks leapt up from the launchers, trailing spiraling vapor behind. The rocket trails expanded quickly in the vacuum to join the general haze of dust that now enshrouded the ship. Unerringly, these rockets slammed into the last of the point-defense towers, knocking them out.

“They’re men!” shouted one of the pilots, his voice sounding relieved.

Droad looked at the screens. He did not see men, he saw killbeasts, but he didn’t bother to correct the pilots. Let them feel secure for now. Killbeasts now boiled atop his ship. There must have been hundreds of them. They did indeed look human at first glance. They wore spacer suits and rebreathers. They were generally shaped like men, with two upper and lower appendages. But Droad had already picked out the variances. Men did not move like that. Their knees did not bend backward. Their feet were not blades of horn. Most obviously of all, men didn’t move so fast.

The killbeasts gathered around the few invasion pods that had managed to punch deeply enough into the Zürich to allow entry.

“How many breaches?” asked Droad.

“Six found so far, sir,” reported the Marine Commander Zeist.

“We must seal the breaches, Commander. Use charges. Detach ship modules if you have to, anything non-vital can go. I want these aliens off my ship.”

“Yes sir!” shouted the Marine Commander. “Request permission to join the defense teams, sir!”

Droad looked at him. He carried a laser carbine and a power sword, the kind Aldo used, hung at his belt. He looked eager and capable.

“Commander,” Droad said, “take these two mechs with you.”

“Yes sir! Thank you sir, but what about bridge defense, sir?”

“We’ve done all we can. The bridge is non-essential now. The main batteries will continue to fire in sequence to knock out every incoming asteroid. As long as the reactors and the batteries themselves remain in our control, they will keep firing.”

“What if the aliens blow up the main batteries?”

“They may,” said Droad, shrugging, “but I suspect they want this ship intact. If they take control of those guns, they will not need anything else. I’m placing you in command of the ship’s internal defense effort, Commander Zeist.”

“Thank you sir,” said the Marine Commander. He stood at attention, waiting to be dismissed.

“One more thing, Commander,” said Droad, stepping closer to the man. “If your initial push fails, don’t underestimate them. Assume the worst at every single step. Assume disaster will befall you. Don’t put everything you have into any one fight. There are only so many of them. Possibly, we can win this battle through attrition.”

Zeist looked confused, then grim. “Yes sir. Anything else, sir?”

Droad looked around at the silent bridge-crew. “No. Godspeed, Commander.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Droad watched Zeist run out into the passages, doubting he would ever see the man again.

#

Zuna witnessed the initial breach near the aft cargo section. A large section of the ceiling poked down, stretching the metal to a blue-white. Soon, a grinding noise began, and something spun heavily. The ceiling of the passage tore apart, three centimeter-thick steel twisting away from the invasion pod’s nosecone in shavings. When it broke open, a gush of sifting rock came down. Her external sensors could feel the cold of space. A light cloud of fog flowed from the region and frost grew rapidly on the walls as the moisture was leached from the air and frozen on the walls.

Zuna watched by leaning out into the corridor from a side passage. She thought about running, but this was too interesting. Next, the ceiling popped, like a canister of self-cooking soup. A half-dozen man-shaped beings in spacer suits dropped into the corridor, snapping off laser bolts in every direction. Zuna pulled her head back just in time.

She heard the approach of the killbeasts as they bounded down the corridor toward her. They had spotted her. She should have run, she admonished herself. Now it was too late. If she left now they would run her down and shoot her in the back.

She lifted her red axe with her gripper whining slightly. This kill would not be from behind. A pity.

But a wild crackling, sizzling series of sounds broke out from the corridor. She listened, but didn’t hear the invaders come closer.

Zuna trembled with indecision. If they had turned away from her, it was a golden opportunity.

She finally poked her head out again. Why had the humans not rebuilt her with her sensory organs in more sensible locations? She could have used a gripper with an embedded camera right then.

There they were, toeing a group of dead humans. Only two of the killbeasts remained standing. They looked at one another as if conversing. Perhaps they talked with suit transmissions she couldn’t hear.

Zuna could not contain her exuberance. Here were two easy targets. She waited until they turned away from her and then sprang out behind the last two killbeasts. She managed to take one by surprise, smashing her fine-bladed fire axe down through its carapace. Split in two like a standing piece of cordwood, the alien fell apart in a spray of ichor. The second killbeast turned, raised its weapon and fired. Zuna took the shot in her weapon arm, which lost hold of her fire axe.

She snapped out with her left gripper, and seized what appeared to be the killbeast’s neck. She squeezed until it popped off. Headless or not, however, the killbeast kept fighting. It lost its laser carbine as it fell, but sprang back up, kicking with horned blades. The blades gouged her metal casing, but did no serious damage.

Zuna was alarmed by the creature’s vitality. She snatched up her axe again and chopped it to flopping bits. When she was done, her axe was a stump and the blade had broken.

What were these things? she thought as she dug a fresh fire axe out of her bag. She had only thirteen axes left. She doubted it would be enough. Her most significant emotion, besides surprise, was indignation. These monsters were killing everyone aboard the ship. How was she to enjoy any more satisfying murders if all the humans were slaughtered by aliens? Victims were disappearing faster than her supply of axes.

Troubled, she clanked off in the direction of more combat sounds. As she went, she determined she should strike sooner next time and help the humans win. That way, she would win their confidence and could save them for her own pleasures later.

Zuna cast aside the laser carbines, having no use for them. Raising her new axe in her off-gripper, she set her internal nanos to work repairing the damage to her primary gripper. Maybe, if she was left alone long enough, she could get it operating again.

Behind her, she could hear more killbeasts dropping down. They were coming in real numbers now. She clanked along with greater speed, rounding a corner and heading toward the reactors. Laser bolts snapped and burnt black scorch marks on the walls behind her.

#

Droad had the sensory people patch live vid from Marine Commander Zeist’s helmet into the dome screens.

The camera lurched. They could see the enemy had been at work as they got closer. Bodies of crew members lay strewn over the decking, many in pieces. One mechanic dragged himself aimlessly about by the arms. Only half his body remained, the lower half having been removed somehow. His spacer suit had kept him alive, pumping in drugs, sealing the horrible wound with nano-cloth and preventing further blood loss. Still, it was a miracle he had survived at all. Mad with pain and confusion, he climbed the handholds on the walls and ceiling and clung there, unresponsive to the troops who tried to help him. He would not let go of the ceiling.

Marine Commander Zeist ordered his troops to continue forward, calling a corpsman for the wounded mechanic. He ordered his mechs to take the point and they charged forward, heartening the other men, who sped up in their wake.

Droad sat in the command chair and leaned on his elbow. He pressed his fist into his cheek. He did nothing to interfere with the Marine Commander’s leadership. The man clearly knew what he was doing.

Rounding a bend, they came to a darker section of the ship. The lights had been shot out. Suit lamps went on all along the column. Droad tensed in his chair. They should make contact with the aliens trying to take the reactor section now.

Even as the thought passed his mind, all hell broke loose on the vid feed. Droad leaned forward. The rest of the bridge crew craned their necks as well.

First, there was a blinding flash. Then several more. Fire erupted, seemingly in every direction. Screeches and screams began, often quickly cut short.

The camera view was bowled over, knocked down. For a second, seeing the chaotic corridor from a fallen side view, Droad believed Marine Commander Zeist had already been taken out. But then he got to his feet.

An ensign tugged at Droad’s sleeve.

“What is it woman?” Droad demanded.

“Sir, there’s an awful racket coming from the closet down the corridor. Could the aliens be here?”

Droad stared at her for a second. “Oh,” he said. “That’s just Commodore Beauchamp. Let him out, will you?”

Droad turned away from the ensign and forgot about her. The shocked young woman hurried to obey him.

The camera swept the scene. The ceiling, walls, and even the flooring had been ruptured and curled back by tactical charges.

“They’re coming out of the walls, sir!” shouted an unseen grunt.

Marine Commander Zeist shouted for his troops to circle up in the middle of the room. As the bridge crew watched, an alarming variety of enemies filled the machine shop. Killbeasts, in and out of vacc suits, poured out of the walls. Snake-like shrades dropped from the ceiling and boiled out of the floor, looping themselves around men’s legs, chests and necks. The room was full of struggling forms. Aliens kicked and fired point-blank. The marines, initially surprised, lost a third of their force in less than a minute. Once they formed a circle in the room, however, they fought back to good effect. The two combat mechs ran back to the column and joined into the fray, turning the tide.

“DROAD!” roared a voice behind him.

Droad winced, but did not bother to turn around. He touched the master volume control for the vid screen. He turned it up.

On the screen, a new squad of killbeasts appeared in the twisted holes torn out of the walls. These had rocket launchers.

“No!” shouted Droad, hammering a fist down upon the arm of his command chair. Moments later, one mech was down, two rockets having slammed into his chassis. The other fired and charged the rocket team. A savage fight ensued, but the mech quickly overcame them, tearing the killbeasts to thrashing piles of limbs.

“What the hell is this?” asked Commodore Beauchamp. “What are these things?”

“The man-like ones are called killbeasts. The snakes with suction-cups are called shrades.”

“Where are they?”

“They are trying to reach the reactors, no doubt to shut off all our power. I would secure your faceplate, Commodore.”

“Where are you going, Droad? I’m having you arrested.”

“Gaston Beauchamp,” said Droad, not without sympathy in his voice. “We are all about to die. I suggest you wait to see if we survive the next hour, then arrest me.”

Commodore Beauchamp gaped up at the vid screens in horror. “These are your aliens, aren’t they?”

“Indeed they are, sir. I relinquish command to you, Commodore.”

“What do I do, Droad?” asked the Commodore, aghast.

“Fight your ship, sir. Isn’t that what you always wanted to do?”

“Right,” said the Commodore, regaining his composure. He began shouting orders, demanding reports.

Droad slipped away, and down the hallway toward the crew quarters. Things looked very bad to him. He couldn’t do much more here, but maybe, just maybe, he could see Sarah and Bili one more time.

Twenty-Seven

When Sarah returned with weapons and food she found Fryx’s tank empty and Bili gone—and she freaked.

“That little slimy bastard!”

She grabbed the bedding and tore it apart, looking everywhere. Bili was not under the bed or in the closet. Neither was the Tulk.

Aldo watched her from the safety of the doorway, eyebrows raised high. He was surprised by her intensity, even though he reminded himself he should have been used to it by now.

Sarah unloaded her pistol into the empty fish tank. Glass spit and the pump gurgled its last.

“The tank might have just fallen over,” said Aldo, “we are in the middle of a violent battle. Maybe Bili just went out to get more water for it.”

“No. It was Fryx. I should have killed him back on the Gladius. I thought about it, you know. I had dreams like this. I was an idiot!”

Aldo kept his face neutral. He checked the hallway frequently. They had been trying the boy’s com link, but there was nothing. Even the transponder had been turned off. The computer didn’t show him as being on the ship. Either he had removed his spacer suit or he’d turned off the com system.

Sarah came close to him. “We have to find him. Now.”

Aldo nodded. “I’ll do it,” he said.

She searched his face. “No, I’m coming.”

“What if Bili comes back?”

“I’ll leave him a note.”

“Will he see it?”

“I don’t know, dammit.”

“Have you ever lost anyone? I have, in the middle of fifty snowcapped mountain peaks. One person stays put, the rest search. Often times, the one sitting still is the lucky one, even if there are fifty searchers.”

Sarah did a lot of hard breathing. She finally nodded, and kissed him goodbye. He tasted tears.

Aldo pushed away from her gently and stepped out into the endless, echoing corridors. Everything was going dark now. There were power lines down, and cuts in the lighting strips. He pulled out his sword and kept his thumb over the kill switch. The moment he saw anything, he told himself, he would touch it and thrust. The dial was preset for maximum killing power.

Along the way he retraced their steps toward the cargo bay area. The Tulk, if he had control of Bili, would be most likely to have retreated toward an area of the ship he had seen. It was a hunch, but it was all he had to go on.

He let the idea play out in his mind that the boy had been taken by the aliens. Sarah had said they did that sometimes, taking humans to feed upon them. But he didn’t think that was the case. If it was, the boy was gone anyway. The third, happiest possibility was that the boy had just spilled the tank and gone to find some more liquid to fill it. In that case, the boy would turn up and Aldo knew Sarah would call him back. Maybe, if he lived, he would be a hero in her eyes. Aldo was not accustomed to be looked upon as a hero.

Aldo smiled at himself. It wasn’t like him to worry about what women thought of him—not after he’d made the conquest, anyway. But with Sarah it had been different. She was different.

And so he found himself trotting quietly down blackened corridors in a dying battleship full of aliens. He thought to himself he must be mad.

His first encounter with the enemy was at an intersection surrounded by automated ammunition storage facilities. Robots rolled around the floors, seeking spilled pellets. The battle had knocked things around down here pretty badly, and many rounds had fallen, ringing onto the deck plates. The specialized robots didn’t know, of course, that all the point-defense systems had been knocked out. They kept finding rounds, putting them into bins, checking the stocks and magazines and exchanging them for fresh ones, even though the existing rounds were unspent.

Aldo shook his head, watching them. Such a frenzy of activity for no purpose. It was just like a machine to do that. They did make a nice level of cover noise, at least.

The first killbeast almost got him. It stepped around a steel wall and aimed a kick at his neck. Aldo had no option but to parry in quinte. The move was so automatic, so ingrained, that despite the surprise of the attack and the blinding speed of it, he managed to lop off fully a third of the killbeast’s leg, which sailed harmlessly by his head.

The riposte came just as fast, before the one-legged killbeast, now off-balance, could recover and bring his laser carbine into line. The thorax exploded with ichor. Still, it was not dead. With three deft slashes, Aldo removed its remaining limbs and left it thrashing, alive.

He wanted it alive. Because he had seen the shadows. There was another one, moving on the far side of the same wall, in the munitions room with the very busy, very useless robots. These things used built-in radio for communications. Surely, this injured one would call to its comrades.

Aldo eyed the walls. Two centimeters of steel, maybe three. He thumbed his sword into kinetic life. Purple waves of force ran the length of it. He thrust it, hard, through the steel wall. The shadow on the other side shivered, it began firing its carbine, firing over and over into the steel wall. Aldo kept his weapon sunk deeply into the wall, wiggling his end of it, hoping it would make whatever horrible wound the alien had suffered all the wider, all the worst.

The steel almost shorted it, but his sword kept humming and crackling with energy. He could not believe, as the firing continued. Whatever was on the far side should die due to the jolting power of his blade alone.

But the firing continued, until there was only a dry clicking that the shuffling robots quickly drown out with the pointless noises. Rattlers and laser carbines had large magazines, but they did run out eventually.

Aldo withdrew his sword. Something heavy slumped down on the far side. He frowned as he scrutinized the tip. Was it his imagination, or had the tip been bent, just a fraction?

Irritably, Aldo slashed the still living killbeast at his feet twice more, silencing it. He needed to attract no more enemies.

He never did look into the munitions room to see what it was that he’d killed in there, through that wall. There was no need. If it had been a man, it would have died far faster. Since it wasn’t a man, he didn’t care what it was, only that it was dead.

He proceeded with even greater caution as he approached cargo deck J. There, on the floor with the carnage of slain mechs no one had bothered to clean up, he found Bili’s small form.

Aldo stalked in, and finally stood over the boy. He eyed every shadow carefully, but nothing moved. The boy, he quickly discovered, was alive. He was hot, according to his suit readout, with a fever several degrees above normal. His faceplate was open, too. Could he have been overheating in there?

Then, in a bolt of thought, Aldo realized something. This was the spot where Rem-9 had been standing. This was the exact spot. But the mech wasn’t here. Aldo and the others had left him, calling in technicians to help. Had they come and taken the mech captain away to some lab for the care he needed? Looking at state of the rest of the place, he doubted it. There hadn’t been time in the middle of the battle.

“Rem-9?” he called out, straightening. He kept his sword up.

He heard something then. Not a crash, exactly, but a metallic squeal.

Carefully, blade upraised, he crept forward to investigate. Had the mech somehow recovered after they refilled and sealed his braincase? Did he, perhaps, require aid? Was he mentally damaged? Aldo didn’t like the idea of a huge combat mech with brain damage running around down here. But if he could recover Rem-9 and take him back to the crew quarters, they would all be a lot safer in his presence.

It was when he crept up to the mouth of one of the vast, open cargo containers that the metallic sound was repeated. But it was different this time, more of a scrabbling sound. He peered inside, and saw a flash of silver as a single optic looked back at him.

“Rem-9? Come out of there. What’s wrong with you? You are a Captain. You should be in this fight.”

Rem-9 reached out a trembling gripper and tore another strip of metal from the walls. That’s what he had been doing. Aldo sucked in his breath. “I don’t need a mental mech. But if you want some help, come along with me.”

Aldo walked away then, snapping off his sword. He felt the back of his neck tingle as he did it. Turning away from an enemy was a great way to engage them, but it also was a great way to get killed.

Clanking, slow at first, then gaining speed, the mech followed him out of the container. Aldo headed over to Bili and picked him up. He slung the unconscious boy over his left shoulder, keeping his right arm free to swing his sword. He thought about asking Rem-9 to do it, but he didn’t want to trust the mech to carry the kid. He might accidently squeeze too hard with those grippers of his. He was acting very oddly, and had yet to say a word.

Aldo headed out of the cargo bay. Rem-9 followed slowly, cautiously. With each corner they rounded, the big mech hung back, craning his head from side to side and swiveling his optics in every direction. Aldo squinted at him.

“What’s gotten into you, big guy? I think that knock on the head has addled your wits. You’re acting like your own shadow is going to jump you.”

Rem-9 stopped marching and his optics swung down, scanning the decking.

Aldo blinked. Was the mech actually checking out his shadow? Great. He was mental. This was going to be a long trip back to the crew quarters.

#

Droad bounced, rather than ran through the darkening ship alone. The gravity was dimming, along with the power. Could they have taken the engine room? Without a continuous level of thrust, the ship would soon drift and they would be weightless. In such an environment, even though the crew was comprised of experienced spacers, he thought the aliens would have the advantage with their greater natural agility. He tried to put such matters out of his mind now, he had relinquished command to Beauchamp, it was his problem. Droad’s mind was on one thing: survival. He wanted to live through this day along with Sarah and Bili, if at all possible. He grudgingly added Aldo to the list, and Rem-9. They were all aboard this ship due to Droad’s influence. He felt responsible for all of their lives.

When he reached the crew quarters, things were eerily quiet. A few bodies slid about on the deck plates, mostly humans. He saw a shrade and two killbeasts, however, among the corpses. He slowed down and peeked around a corner with his suit lamps turned off.

A sizzling blade arced down from above. Droad had time to see it aim for his neck. In a quarter second, he had time to realize, his head would be off and drifting to the decking.

But it didn’t happen. Instead, the sword turned at the last possible moment and chopped into the welded steel corner he had been peeking around. The sword sparked and hissed and burned its way ten centimeters deep into the steel.

“Identify yourself when you sneak around here, crewman,” Aldo said. He grunted as he pulled his blade from the wall.

“Good to see you too, Aldo,” Droad said.

“Ah! Lucas Droad, is it? Good to see you alive, man.”

Droad smiled inside his helmet. Aldo sounded honestly pleased. There was nothing like an apocalyptic war to bring men together.

“How are Sarah and Bili?” Droad asked, but Aldo was distracted.

“Would you get back here?” Aldo said, irritably to someone else. He turned to Droad. “Just a second, I have to go chase down Rem-9. He’ll be hiding in a closet by now.”

“What?” asked Droad. He drifted after Aldo, following the rippling, ethereal light of his power sword, which seemed to be the only source of illumination in the dark corridor.

“Come on, you’ll see.”

They did indeed find Rem-9, but he wasn’t in a closet. He was simply too big to fit. Crouched down in a sitting position, almost a fetal ball, the mech was behind a hastily thrown up barricade of furniture.

“Rem-9?” called Droad, snapping on his helmet lamps. As he approached, a gripper shot out. Droad danced back. Yes, Rem-9 was hiding behind a pile of furniture. And by the looks of it, he didn’t want anyone to come near.

“He’s been traumatized, or something,” said Aldo disgustedly. “The civilian contractors are deeper inside the crew section, barricading themselves in. That’s where Sarah and Bili are. I volunteered us to hold this entrance into the area. Not too many aliens have shown up, they are assaulting the reactors and the weapons section primarily. I thought Rem-9 would help me hold this passage, but he’s been worse that useless.”

“I see,” said Droad, puzzling over Rem-9’s condition. Could the aliens have cooked up some kind of virus that would turn even a combat mech into an abject coward? It was a disturbing idea.

“Rem-9—Captain,” Droad said officially. “I command you to come out of there.”

The pile of furniture wobbled slightly, but there was no other response.

“He doesn’t talk much, either,” Aldo said. He explained Rem-9’s injuries, and the axe-blow to the braincase.

Droad nodded. “Perhaps he will fight when the time comes, in self-defense if nothing else. He needs a full lab of techs, and we just don’t have it. Pity.”

Aldo sniffed and went back to stealthily patrolling the hallways for passing aliens.

“I’m going to go check on Sarah and Bili, if you don’t mind, Aldo.”

“Understandable.”

Droad left them and headed into the central zone of the crew quarters. He indeed met many armed men there and barricades. He identified himself and was allowed to pass. Soon, he found Sarah, who was fussing over Bili. Droad smiled, pleased to find them both still breathing.

Sarah embraced him when he came in. One hard hug, then she let him go, before he could even wrap his arms around her. He let his hands drift back down to his sides.

Bili had gotten up off the bed in the meantime.

“Lay back down,” said Sarah.

“I’m fine, Mom,” complained Bili. “Give me a pistol or something. Fryx is gone.”

“Fryx?” asked Droad.

She explained that the Tulk had taken Bili over temporarily and driven him down to the cargo bays.

“Wasn’t that where the mechs were slaughtered?” Droad asked. “Strange.”

Bili was up and out the door by now. They followed him. He had a pistol in his hand, and neither adult objected. He’d earned the right to a weapon, the same as every other human aboard the dying Zürich.

#

Zuna found another group of humans deep in the ship, near the reactors. She hailed them. Cautiously, they allowed her to approach. Realizing she was a friendly mech, they allowed her to join their company.

“We’ve lost all our combat mechs, but we’ve killed a lot of aliens,” said the battle-scarred Marine Commander Zeist. “They come from that portal over there, in rushes. We’re gearing up now for a final push inside. It’s good to see some reinforcements, Zuna. I can see by the gore on that axe of yours, you’ve been busy.”

“What’s down there?” asked Zuna curiously, pointing a gripper at the portal.

“It’s the contractor’s quarters. We had hundreds of them aboard. I’m not sure what happened to them.”

“Hundreds?” said Zuna. She tried not to let a hungry tone enter her voice.

The Marine Commander looked at her strangely for a moment. “Yes... Zuna, maybe you’d like to fight up front? You have a close combat weapon.”

“Oh no,” said Zuna. “I hope you’ll understand—I’m not trained for combat. I’m really a civilian mech. How about I just—cover your back?”

“Okay,” said Zeist. “Take the rear guard.”

Zuna’s grippers clicked like castanets. She squeezed them shut, fighting to control them. It was difficult to contain herself, however, as she was very happy indeed.

“I’ve got your back,” she said.

Twenty-Eight

Droad took stock of things ship-wide, holding a hushed conversation with Commodore Beauchamp. The main laser batteries had stopped firing, and power had been lost over most of the vessel. Life support was still operating, but reports indicated in some areas the oxygen levels were dropping. The areas where the initial invasion pods had entered were all sealed off now, behind heavy bulkheads. But the enemy had a foothold aboard, and the carnage had been extreme.

“We’ve suffered a few attacks on the bridge,” said Beauchamp, “but we survived them. We lost perhaps half our bridge crew. The attacks, fortunately, are becoming weaker and less frequent.”

“What do we still hold and what have we lost?” asked Droad. Around him, a cluster of wide-eyed crewmen listened. The ships communications systems were out, but some carried com links that still operated.

“We hold the bridge, you are holding in the crew quarters. The gun turrets are still in our control, but we’ve lost reactor power so they can’t fire.”

“What about the rocks heading for the planet? Did we get them all?”

“Ninety percent.”

Droad was silent. That wasn’t good enough. But they had done their best.

Beauchamp continued reporting, as if he sensed Droad’s mood. “Marine Commander Zeist has a force still moving down in the lower decks. He’s trying to make contact with the enemy strongholds and take them out.”

“That’s good, this is the time to hit them back. They will grow exponentially in strength if you let them, Commodore.”

“How the hell will they do that?”

“They use our bodies as raw materials. Every kill they make can be turned into more aliens, given a day or two.”

It was Beauchamp’s turn to fall silent for a moment. “Disgusting beasts,” he said at last. “I want them off my ship.”

“What are overall casualties like?”

“Very high. I’d say we’ve lost eighty percent of onboard personnel. Maybe more. But we’ve killed most of them, too.”

“What they will do now is hide and fall quiet. We will naturally want to lick our wounds and build defenses, taking the lull in fighting as a good sign. In truth, they will be rapidly building up their army again to wipe us out.”

“What do we do, Droad?”

“We have to carry the attack to them. Do or die.”

“All right. Find an officer—whoever is still breathing—and send everyone you can down to the reactors. We have to have power, or our life support will fail in a day or two.”

“I’ll lead that force personally,” Droad said.

“Whatever,” snapped Beauchamp. “If you can spare anyone else, please send them to help Zeist. He’s up against some kind of alien strongpoint.”

“Will do, sir,” said Droad, breaking off the contact.

Droad quickly began marshalling up the scared crewmen behind their flimsy barricades. Most had only pistols and few had any combat experience. They were about to get a crash course, he thought grimly.

Aldo came up to him. “Droad?”

“Yes, Aldo?”

“There’s something strange going on over here, I think you should be in on this.”

Droad followed Aldo, trusting his judgment. The man always seemed to know what he was doing. Aldo led him to a room where he found Rem-9, once again, hiding behind a huge pile of crates. They were in the ship’s pantry.

“Now he’s hiding behind our foodstuffs?” snorted Droad.

Then he caught sight of who knelt in front of the mech, talking to him. It was Bili. Frowning, Droad quietly walked up to listen.

“Look,” said Bili. “I know you’re scared. We all are. But we have to fight together. We have to do things we don’t want to do sometimes, things that don’t always help ourselves. Otherwise we all die.”

Droad put his hands on his hips. Was the kid giving Rem-9 a morality speech? A pep talk?

Rem-9 squirmed, tugging crates of foodstuffs to cover himself more completely.

“Good work, Bili. I’m disgusted by Rem-9’s lack of bravery. But I think he’s suffered some damage to his mind.”

Bili glanced over at him. “He’s not Rem-9,” he said.

Droad frowned. He opened his mouth to ask just what the hell the boy was saying, then he had it. He strode to stand in front of the mech.

“Fryx?” he demanded. “Are you in there? I demand you come out this instant.”

One optic swung over to watch him warily.

“Activate some speech centers, dammit. Talk to me, you Tulk coward, or I’ll make sure the aliens get your for their lab experiments.”

Both optics rotated in his direction. For a moment, Droad wondered if he had pushed things too far. Rem-9 could no doubt kill him very quickly, whether or not the mech was driven by a Tulk rider. Before he could take a step backward, however, Aldo appeared behind Droad. His sword was out, as usual. If Fryx tried something, Droad suspected he would lose a gripper.

One optic stayed on Droad, the other zoomed in on the sword in Aldo’s hand.

“Is difficult,” said Rem-9. The voice warbled oddly.

“So, you are in there,” said Droad, crossing his arms and taking a deep breath. “Are you going to fight for us, or what?”

“I wish to exit this ship,” said Rem-9, each word spat out separately.

“Yeah, we all do. But we have to kill all the aliens to do that. The ship is dying. So far as I know, you are the last mech around, and that makes you important to our forces. I’m leading a force down to the reactors. Will you fight at my side, Tulk?”

“No.”

“Your people once fought and defeated the Skaintz. Have you no pride, creature?”

“Those that did not fight... survived.”

“Ah, so you have become a race of cowards? Fine,” said Droad walking out. He turned to Aldo. “I’m pulling out of here. We’re going to fight our way down to the reactors. But Beauchamp asked me to send someone down to see how Zeist is doing. Do you want the job?”

Aldo nodded seriously. “No. But I’ll do it. What about Rem-9?”

“He’s all yours. Take him, leave him, I don’t care. I don’t think we have the time or equipment to dig the Tulk out of his braincase right now. I’m sure he’ll use his grippers to stop that, if nothing else.”

Aldo clasped his arm. “I hope this assignment is not something meant to remove me from the—situation.”

Droad looked at him seriously. “Not at all. I hadn’t even thought of it. All I want is for this ship and every human aboard to survive. We can’t let the aliens take the Zürich. They would lay waste to Neu Schweitz. If we fail, the entire Kale system is lost.”

Aldo studied his eyes for a moment, then nodded.

#

After Droad and his ragtag army of crewmen left, Aldo listened to the ship for a minute or so. It had become strangely quiet. The thruster engines were barely operating, slowly pushing them farther out into space. He wondered if anyone was steering. Maybe they were losing the bridge right now. Perhaps they were close to crashing into a moon. Most of the crew was dead. Their bodies lay strewn everywhere, mixed with the strange bodies of the alien troops.

Sarah, Bili—everyone had left with Droad. This did not bother Aldo much. He was completely at home with a big quiet space. He had always been a lone wolf, a shadow moving in a forest or a city.

He thought about the big, cowardly mech sitting in the pantry. After a moment, he had an idea.

Aldo leaned his head into the pantry. “All clear!” he shouted. “Everyone’s pulled out, we’ll leave this section to the aliens, then. Full retreat to the lower decks.”

Then he walked out into corridor and leaned against a wall in a pool of deep shadow. He held very still, and waited.

The ship was very quiet. In less than a minute, he heard boxes moving about. A head poked out into the corridor, optics swiveling in every direction.

Without addressing the mech, he simply began walking down a corridor. After a few moments, he heard clanking footsteps behind him. He smiled.

Most creatures didn’t like to be left alone in the dark.

#

Zuna watched the marines perform a flawless tactical approach to the portal. She gripped and regripped her axe handle, telling herself to be careful not to squeeze too hard in her excitement. She had broken far too many axes. She counted less than seven left. With so many vulnerable human backs facing her, however, it was hard to control herself.

The marines threw in grenades, ran up to each side of the damaged opening and then charged in, firing into the smoky interior. Answering fire erupted.

Zuna waited until she heard the unmistakable sounds of aliens and humans in combat, dying. Then she charged in, bringing up the rear.

Inside the contractor’s quarters, things were wild, confusing, smoke-filled. Red lights dimly lit the interior. She had good night vision, but not true infrared. When something came at her, she chopped it down. Three were aliens, but the fourth, she could tell by the way the skull crunched under the helmet, was a man. Perhaps he had come to her for aid. She swept her optics, but no one seemed to have noticed. They were all too busy firing at aliens in every direction.

A swarm of them came in now. Huge things. She’d not seen this type before, and had no idea they were called juggers. Like the dinosaurs she vaguely recalled having seen in pictures from zoos on Old Earth, these monsters stooped to crush men with their massive jaws. They had horns, too, on their heads. They gored men, crushed them down. It took dozens of snapping laser bolts to bring one down.

As she watched, Marine Commander Zeist was chomped upon, lifted up in the mouth of a giant. The monster threw up its head as if to swallow the man whole, but then its head blew apart. Zeist must have released a grenade in his final moments, killing the jugger and himself.

Zuna held back, excited, as a jugger cornered a group of men, advanced. She charged when its back was turned. It took a dozen blows and she broke her axe, but she brought the jugger down, clinging to its back, riding it. After it fell, she kept squeezing with her grippers in a frenzy, severing the spinal cord. The thrashing monster stilled.

Zuna looked around for fresh game, but all the others aliens appeared to be dead. And the humans were facing her.

“Thanks, Zuna,” said one of the surviving marines.

She clattered her dripping grippers at them. “Any time,” she said.

They looked at one another. Zuna ignored them, fishing a fresh red axe out of her bag.

Zuna waited, without speaking. Soon, the last knot of marines, marshaled by a sergeant, advanced into the next chamber. There were things in that room that none of them had ever imagined.

Dozens of bloated creatures lay like swollen blisters on the deck plates. Zuna realized after a few seconds of scrutiny they were human women, blown up like balloons of skin. Small aliens were everywhere, squirming like white worms.

Getting over their initial shock, the marines began firing. The Sergeant tried to communicate with the women who hissed in return.

“Kill them all,” he said in grim disgust. “Kill everything.”

Zuna had never heard sweeter words. She went wild, chopping with abandon. Things fled from her in every direction, but she ran them down. The marines walked among the alien breeding creatures and shot them point-blank. It was obvious to any observer they were no longer human.

The worm-like, segmented young managed to overwhelm one man. His comrades rushed to his defense, but were unable to fire into the wriggling pile of white bodies for fear of hitting the thrashing, screaming marine. They kicked at the pile of hungry larvae, grabbed them, wrestled with them. When the first marine stopped struggling, the pile of larvae moved onto the next man.

Suddenly, Zuna was in the middle of the melee. She chopped wildly and made an odd, whooping sound as she did so. Men and aliens fell. The axe head bit into helmets and flesh, mixing human and alien gore in fountains.

“Stop, stop, STOP!” shouted the Marine Sergeant, raising his laser carbine to sight upon Zuna.

She finally stopped chopping. A pile of flesh, over a meter high, surrounded her splattered legs. A few of the bodies around her still flopped and heaved.

“Sorry,” she said, rotating to face the sergeant. “Did I get carried away?”

“She killed Rizzo. And Degrace, too, I think.”

The last marines stared up at her.

“Whose side are you on?” asked the Marine Sergeant.

“It was an accident. The bodies were stacked up—I thought I was hitting aliens. I told you, I’m not a combat mech.”

The Marine Sergeant lowered his weapon. “Well, you did kill a ton of them. Only swing at aliens from now on, okay? We can’t take any more casualties. I’m down to a squad, here.”

“Of course. There will not be any more mistakes. I’ll stay right behind you.”

#

Droad reached the reactors and met with relatively light resistance. He found this both encouraging and worrisome. Working with the techs among his band of crewmen, they managed to get the liquid-fusion reactors gurgling back into life. The dark ship lit up in many regions. Oxygen began to flow again.

Searching the area, they found evidence of strange occurrences. Murdered personnel stuffed into lockers. Axe heads were stuck in some of the bodies, wedged into spines and femurs. Someone or something had chopped them in half. Droad viewed the gory evidence with concern. Had the aliens planted a traitor among the crew? He recalled the talk of sabotage before the ship had even lifted off. What was going on?

Droad reviewed the situation. Aliens, even if they had killed all these crewmen down here with axes for some reason, would not have bothered to hide the evidence. They would have eaten the people or dragged them to their nest or just left them where they lie. Why bother hiding bodies? This was a fight between two species, everyone knew which side was which... Or did they?

Droad recalled Aldo having said something about the mechs having been killed with axes. He called him on his com link, which was working properly again now that power had been restored in much of the battleship.

“Aldo? What do you have to report?”

“A lot of dead marines, so far,” whispered Aldo in return. “I’m heading into the contractors’ quarters. Looks like a real bloodbath in there.”

“Aldo, I’ve found a lot of dead people. With axe heads buried in their bodies. They were hit hard Aldo. Harder than a normal human could manage. Like those mechs in the hold, remember?”

Aldo was quiet for a second. “Yes, I remember. What do you want me to do about it?”

“Just keep it in mind. We have an alien among us, I think. Something isn’t right.”

“Thanks for the information. I’ll keep it in mind. I’m going offline now, turning off everything before I scout this slaughterhouse.”

#

Aldo crept up beside the blast-scarred portal that was the entrance to the biggest mess of body parts he’d ever seen. He’d never been a squeamish man, but he’d never been faced with quite the carnage he glided around now. Wet lumps of hair, ripped out organs and rubbery tubes of flesh slished under his feet as he went. It was hard to tell alien from human.

He followed the darkest walls around the outer edge of the room. Who knew if any of these things were playing dead? He kept his blade up and ready.

A clanking sound grew behind him. First a glinting griper, then a pair of wildly swiveling optics appeared at the portal. The optics scanned the mess on the floor with great interest.

“Aldo?” said a warbling voice.

Aldo waved at Fryx, wanting to shush him without making a sound.

The optics kept swiveling about, taking it all in. The sound of the artificial muscles and clicking optics seemed loud in the deathly quiet chamber.

“Aldo, I do not wish to enter this place.”

“Then stay out,” Aldo hissed back at Fryx. “Just shut up.”

Deciding his cover had been blown anyway, Aldo moved to the next portal and entered quickly. More death and destruction. Huge bodies, aliens like dinosaurs, lay blown apart on the decking. Aldo raised his brow, impressed by these. He wondered if he would have a chance against them. Maybe, if he side-stepped a charge and managed to take out a leg. But if they simply dipped those big heads down, he doubted he would survive. The monstrous jaws were too big, too thick. His sword might run through the brain, but he would still be crushed and chewed.

Aldo kept going. Up ahead, he heard something. A clanking, that sounded like a mech moving around. He looked back over his shoulder, puzzled. There was Fryx, driving Rem-9 gingerly around the piled bodies.

If Rem-9 was behind him, what mech could be up ahead?

#

Zuna killed the last of the marines in the service rooms. She was proud of her final deception. Claiming she’d seen survivors, she followed them into the laundry chambers. She had just come from there, but had spent her time knocking out lights, not finding survivors or aliens. If she had found either, she would have axed them to death as well.

It took her two more axes, and a laser bolt to the hip region, but she finished the lot of them. The last was the Marine Sergeant, whose final expression of shock was priceless. She kept the image in her bio-ram for later review. She might even make a hard copy when she got home to Neu Schweitz. She’d have to hide it, of course. Perhaps she’d put it in the Senator’s closet full of cleaning products. No one ever looked in there except for Zuna herself.

Zuna heard footsteps then, coming distantly down the corridors. The footsteps were quiet, as if the owner were trying to sneak closer. She looked around, and found an appropriate spot behind the doors, which had been torn off their hinges and lay on the grooved steel flooring of the laundry room. She waited there, with her axe held high.

“Zuna, isn’t it?” said a voice.

She startled. Someone stood at the far side of the room. There was a second door there, but she didn’t know where it led. Had this man somehow circled around?

“Yes,” she said, lowering her axe. “I’m sorry. I thought perhaps you were an alien.”

“No reason to apologize,” the man said, “understandable mistake. There are aliens everywhere. I’m Aldo, by the way.”

Aldo was a shadowy figure. He had something in his hand. Was that a sword?

“How did you know my name?” asked Zuna.

“There are only so many mechs around. And you are a famous one.”

“Famous?” Zuna took a step forward. She stepped on the broken steel door and it creaked under her weight.

“Yes. You are a famous murderess. I remember, you see. I remember you from the papers, years back. I think I was a boy still, when you killed everyone at your bed-and-breakfast.”

Zuna took another step closer. “I think—I think I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Aldo was putting on a pair of black gloves. He fitted them carefully over each finger.

“I think that you do. You are Zuna Bisch, or you once were, long ago. Instead of the death penalty, they sentenced you to be made into a mech. They scrubbed your mind. Don’t you remember? Senator Fouty must have taken you in, he was always a bleeding heart.”

Zuna decided to stop lying. Clearly, this man was never going to turn his back to her.

“I do remember! At least I remember the murders. It was the best night of my life.”

“I’ve been counting, Zuna,” said Aldo. “And I think you must have killed more aliens than humans. A lot more.”

“Well,” she said. “There were more of them about.”

“Yes, any target of opportunity, is that it? Well, without your help, strangely enough, we might not have survived this far. For that, I’m going to offer you a fair death.”

“What?”

“It’s more than you deserve. En garde.”

Aldo raised his sword with a flourish. He thumbed the power up to full and it blazed into sizzling lavender luminescence.

Zuna charged him then, axe upraised, her off-gripper clacking loudly, excitedly. She crashed down the axe. The handle struck the man’s arm, but the head of the axe was off by that time, flying across the room. The man had slashed off the axe head with his flashing sword.

Aldo deftly tossed his sword from his broken arm to his whole one, caught it, and slashed away Zuna’s gripper as it came for his throat.

Zuna swung an optic down to look at the gripper, which clanked on the floor. She had barely seen the blade flicker. She reached for him again with her remaining gripper, swiveling up her optics to watch him. But her optics went dark. He had cut them both off.

Then he proceeded, as she warbled and hummed loudly, to cut her body of metal and polymers apart. She stopped humming only when he sank that flashing sword into her braincase and she finally died.

#

“You can come out now,” said Aldo in a disgusted voice.

Fryx drove Rem-9 into the laundry room from the shadowy corridor.

“She’s dead?” asked Fryx.

“Yes. Now, let’s make sure all the aliens are. Then we can both get off this damned battleship.”

Aldo cut strips of cloth to form a sling for his broken arm. Carrying his sword in his left and wincing, he walked out of the laundry room. Fryx drove his mech after him.

After half an hour, Aldo was about to give up searching the area and leave this mess behind.

Fryx stopped him, however.

“I’ve found her,” said the Tulk.

Aldo flashed him a look. “Found what?”

Fryx drove the mech to a hidden spot. Up, underneath a row of heavy pipes, hidden in a recess that none would normally think to look, there was a bulbous growth. It was brown, with a mottled surface. Vaguely translucent, the blister-like object was perhaps the size of a child curled up into a ball.

“It looks like some kind of tumor. Is it alive?”’

“It is— a Savant. She has formed a cocoon, a blister to protect herself.”

“From what?”

“From decompression, I suspect.”

Also looked at the mech in alarm. He flipped down his faceplate. He contacted Droad.

The thing on the wall looked like a sac of liquid. Something moved inside there. Aldo held his sword up. Should he thrust and end this thing?

Droad told him to wait. They wanted to study it. Unless it attacked, they should capture it.

Aldo signaled Fryx. The Tulk reached up with his gripper and pulled the shivering egg-shaped sac of jelly from the wall. It came away with a sound like tape being ripped away from flesh.

Then the battleship shook.

“She’s transmitted a signal,” said Fryx.

“Stop, or I kill you now!” Aldo threatened the creature.

“It’s too late,” said Fryx.

Then the ceiling opened up with a flash. Aldo, stunned, felt himself lift upward. The pressure had been ripped from the room. He was about to float out into space. He cursed himself, as he’d forgotten to turn on his magnetic boots.

A gripper reached up and grabbed his foot. It crushed painfully, even through the boot.

Carrying both the squirming sac with the Savant inside and Aldo in his space suit, Fryx marched out the door.

“Why are you helping suddenly?” Aldo asked Fryx.

One optic swung to look at him. “The enemy is gone, for now. I want to make friends.”

Aldo snorted.

Twenty-Nine

The battle was over. They had searched every corner of the Zürich, multiple times with a battery of sensors, and come up with nothing alien to report. It would take a long time to make sure they were not still hiding in the duct systems somewhere. To make sure, they flushed the vessel with radioactive gas then vented it all out into space.

The Zürich had been saved, that was the good news. Unfortunately, the Gladius was gone. It had been taken by the skalds, who triggered its prelaid course for Ignis Glace. Everyone figured that they had somehow convinced the Captain to fly out early, escaping what the Tulk probably thought was a lost system.

The truly bad news came when they carefully reviewed vid data from the orbital station where the Gladius had been docked. Alien invasion pods had reached the ship before they took off. They had no reports on how the humans and the Tulk inside had done with the invaders. During the confusion of the battle, no one had bothered to worry much about the Gladius, other than to note that some sort of disturbance was going on aboard.

Droad would have tried to get the Zürich to fire on the Gladius, but it was already far beyond their range. If they tried to pursue, they would fail. The Gladius had large engines that produced continuous thrust. They were not as fast as the Zurich’s Orion system, but far more steady. They simply had too great of a head start. They were already out of the Kale system. If they did try to chase them down with their Orion-based battleship, they would run out of bombs and have no way to turn around and go back to the Kale system. There would be no way to reduce their velocity so they could dock at Ignis Glace if they arrived there years later. They would be forced to smash into something, or coast forever at great speed into the endless void of space.

Still, Droad thought it might be worth it. To finish the Skaintz was imperative. They were like a cancer that must be cut out at all cost. But Nexus Command would not hear of it. They valued the Zürich very highly now. It had saved their world.

The decision was not his to make, so he did what he could. He returned to Neu Schweitz.

Two of the great rolling rocks from space had made it down to the planet surface. One, pushed off course, struck a mountain overlooking New Geneva. Unfortunately, such was the impact of the strike that the city was greatly damaged. Thousands of citizens who’d opted to ride out the war at home perished.

The second asteroid caused significantly more damage. It struck the great central ocean, causing a tsunami of unprecedented proportions. A string of coastal towns were swept away. Causalities numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

Still, Droad considered the entire affair a victory. So did the Nexus Command people, who had stared directly into the abyss of extinction. The population at large, however, was not happy. Elections were coming in a day or two, and incumbency was a death warrant for every politician.

Droad met with Sarah on the Nexus Capitol steps. Aldo waited in the flitter, pointedly looking away at Capitol Park. Bili sat in the back, staring at them.

“What will you do now?” asked Sarah.

“I’m running for office,” said Droad, smiling. “As a write-in candidate.”

She smiled at the quaintness of the idea. “You don’t give up easily, do you? What will do if you win?”

“I’m going to win, eventually. When I do, I’ll build up this world for the war.”

“We just won the war.”

“I don’t think so. Recall those messages? They went out to many worlds, awakening things we won’t even hear about for years. And when we got to Minerva, the aliens had pulled out.”

“And the Gladius escaped, possibly with aliens aboard. Yes, I know,” she said. “But people here want to think it’s all over.”

“I have a Tulk witness, and a living Savant to push into their faces. I won’t let them forget.”

“There’s no place in all of that for Bili and I, is there?”

“Are you offering?”

“Not this time.”

“Aldo is a good man. I approve.”

She laughed. “I approve of you and Ensign Tolbert, as well.”

“Oh. You heard about that, did you? You aren’t upset?”

“How could I be? I’m with Aldo. So what if you impressed a younger woman by out bluffing the Brigadier?”

Droad frowned. “Nothing goes unnoticed on this world. It’s like a giant beehive of gossips.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not telling the press any secrets. Just do what you always do, Lucas.”

She gave him a light kiss then, and was gone.

He missed her immediately.

Thirty

It took six men in haz-mat suits to dig their way into the rook containing Nicu. The vessel had spun away from the battle where it had been severely damaged and was left in a decaying orbit around Neu Schweitz. Nexus Command probably would have let it burn up or smash into one of the many circling moons if they had not received a tiny, beeping distress signal.

They found Nicu inside the bathroom, or rather, inside the waste compartment. He was curled up in a ball, playing vids on his goggles. He was thin, almost emaciated. But he had somehow managed to survive against all odds.

Due to the hideous nature of his ordeal, and the fact that nearly everyone else involved in the rebellion of the Vlax Romani of Minerva had apparently died, the Nexus courts took pity on Nicu. They released him into the general population of Neu Schweitz two months later, where he promptly vanished.

Nicu later took up residence in a low rent district of the city, working as a sanitation engineer. Various items began to vanish while others mysteriously appeared in the apartment complex where he lived. Nicu was often looked upon with suspicion. The abundance of vid pickups in the women’s gymnasium, for example, was problematic. But after a thorough investigation, it was determined that no human being could have gotten to the spot where the pickups had been placed without having alerted the security systems. That put the police on the trail of the security installers themselves, who were the only men capable of turning off the security system and thus achieving the installation of the spy devices.

In the end, the matter was thrown out of court for lack of evidence, and remains a mystery to this day.

End of MECH 2

The Future of the Series: The planned next book, Mech 3, will involve the return of Droad to his strange homeworld, Ignis Glace. Many years have passed since his departure, and the monarchy that rules the planet is in a state of upheaval due to the extermination of the royal family. Can Droad reach his homeworld before the alien invaders arrive? Will anyone listen to him if he does? The Skalds seem strangely resigned to an Imperium victory… have they come to some kind of arrangement with the enemy? Read it all in Mech 3!

Note from the Author: Thanks Reader! You have joined the thousands who have finished the Imperium Series as it stands. If you enjoyed the books and possibly want to see more, please write a review for the first book (MECH) and let new people know what is in store for them.

Books by B. V. Larson:

IMPERIUM SERIES

Mech: Garm

Mech 2: Neu Schweitz

Mech 3:Ignis Glace

HAVEN SERIES

Amber Magic

Sky Magic

Shadow Magic

Dragon Magic

Blood Magic

Death Magic

Other Books by B. V. Larson

Swarm

Velocity

Shifting

Spyware

For more information go to: BVLarson.com