CHAPTER ELEVEN

    conquer v. -quered, -quering, -quers. —tr. 1 To subdue or defeat, esp. by force of arms. 2. To secure or gain control of by or as if by military means. 3. To surmount or overcome by physical, mental, or moral force. —intr. To win, be victorious. [From Middle English conqueren, from Old French conquerre, from Latin conquirere, to search for, win, procure.]

            —Webster-Wangchi Unabridged Dictionary of Standard English Tomas y Hijos, Publishers
            2465, Terran Standard Reckoning

             

"Is that England?" Ludmilla shouted over the sound of wind and wave, clinging to a stay one-handed while flying spray made sun-struck rainbows beyond. She rode the pitching foredeck without a trace of concern, free hand pointing, and Aston shaded his eyes to peer in the indicated direction.

"It better be Ireland!" he called back. "Of course, I'm navigating without GPS or even Loran for the first time in years . . . thanks to you."

"Hmph!" She made her nimble way back along the narrow space between the cabin and the side, sure-footed despite Amanda's brisk motion. The reefed, close-hauled mainsail hid her briefly until she reemerged from behind the boom, bright-cheeked and damp with spray. Her hair was a flame in the sunlight and her eyes were brilliant, and he watched her with open pleasure. "I may not be from Terra, Dick, but I know England and Ireland aren't on the same island."

"True," he agreed, patting the bench seat beside him. She nestled into the curve of his arm as naturally as breathing, and he took time to savor the sensation, bending over to nibble the lobe of one delicate ear through strands of chestnut hair. Complex or no, she was an amazingly sane person, he reflected, without a shadow of the puritanical hang-ups which plagued his own society.

"Stop trying to distract me. You said we were going to England."

"We were, but I thought better of it."

"Oh? Why?"

"I told you I was worried about you and British Customs."

"So? I didn't understand it then, and I don't understand now. I mean, I'm going to have to start adjusting to twenty-first-century customs sometime."

"Not `customs'—`Customs,' " he explained. "Capital `C' Customs." She looked blank, and he sighed. She'd worked hard on her twenty-first-century vocabulary, and she'd made so much progress that the holes in it were more frustrating than ever. "Immigration," he said. "Passports."

"Passports? Oh, you mean proof of citizenship?"

"Sort of, but not the way you're thinking of." On balance, he reminded himself, he'd learned more about her time than she had about his. He supposed that made sense, since they were in his and her interest in history lent her some guidance about it while he had known nothing at all about hers. But she was essentially a military historian, and there were curious gaps in what he assumed she must know.

"Look," he explained patiently. "You said your Terra has a federated world government—does that mean you only worry about national citizenship for things like public services and taxes?"

"And voting registration."

"All right, voting, too. But national borders are no big deal?"

"National borders? Why in the world would anyone worry about—" She broke off thoughtfully. "Oh. That's right, you people are still in the Cold War Era, aren't you?"

"Not the way we were a few years back, but, yes. And so are you, honey," he reminded her with gentle malice, and she pinched his ribs—hard. "Ouch!" He rubbed his injured side and eyed her reproachfully, although his grin rather spoiled the effect.

"Count your blessings, Ster Aston," she told him severely.

"Oh, I will!" he assured her.

"Good," she said, but she also frowned and combed a strand of hair out of her eyes with her fingers. "Ummm," she said slowly. "This is 2007, so . . . My God, you're only six years from the Soviet Succession Wars!"

"Soviet Succession?" he repeated. A chill breeze blew down his spine, and it was his turn to frown. "Can't say I like the sound of that very much, Milla. We've got more than enough trouble brewing in Europe without having that blow up in our faces!" He grimaced. "It wasn't all that long ago I figured all those people who were singing loud hosannas over how the collapse of the Soviet Union was going to make everything all better were unmitigated idiots, but I'd started to hope I might have been wrong—that we were going to get a handle on it this time after all. I know the situation in the Balkans and Greece is going straight to hell all over again, and I don't like the confrontation the new Belarussian and Russian governments seem to be headed for now that NATO's turned into a debating society. But I'd thought that was mostly rhetoric, not that they were going to take it seriously! The Russian Federation's been shaky from the get-go, especially economically, and there's always been an element that's wanted the old Soviet Empire back, but I'd hoped Yakolev's new reforms were going to pull things together and get the Federation around the corner at last." He paused as she met his eyes levelly. "I take it they aren't?" he asked finally, his voice quiet.

"Well, they didn't in the history I remember," she said in the voice of someone trying to be gentle. "As well as I can recall, you had good reason to think Russia was about to turn the corner, if that's any consolation. The initial flash point was a fresh flare-up in the Balkans sometime in the first decade of this century, not in Russia or Belarussia—or not immediately, at any rate—and things got out of hand when someone used bioweapons." Aston winced, and she squeezed his forearm. "I'm sorry, Dick. I didn't mean to distress you."

"It's not your fault." He held her closer against his side and shook his head. "It's just— Well, we've all tried so hard, and President Yakolev seems to really be trying. I just hate to think about its all going down the tubes anyway . . . and the thought of `wars of succession' inside the territory of a nuclear power . . ."

His voice trailed off, and she shrugged unhappily.

"I'm sorry," she repeated. "I know it's probably no comfort, but if my memory's right, the current president didn't have anything to do with it. Western Europe panicked—not unreasonably, I suppose—when the effects of the bioweapon spread beyond the Balkans. With the benefit of hindsight, it's pretty clear that whoever used it genuinely was one of the splinter terrorist groups, but a lot of people believed at the time that Serbia was the true culprit, and Russia was still committed to its role as the Serbs' main international supporter. So when France talked Germany and Romania into threatening joint military action against the Serbs and accused the Russians of having secretly supplied the bioweapons in the first place, Yakolev found himself in an almost impossible situation. He couldn't possibly come up with a policy which would satisfy everyone, and then he was assassinated—by someone from Belarussia, according to the Russian nationalists, and that changed the entire nature of the confrontation. The extremists in Moscow managed to take control of the country in the name of `national security' and start rattling their missiles at everyone in sight, and—"

She shrugged again, and he nodded sadly.

"I've heard similar scenarios described." He sighed. "And truth to tell, relations with the Russians haven't been all that good since Yeltsin's fall. Watching NATO unravel over the last two or three years hasn't been a good sign, either. Bringing the old Warsaw Pact nations into it was supposed to generate a continent-wide sense of mutual security, but instead the entire thing's turning into some kind of `lead by drift' herd of lemmings that's been trying to come up with a workable solution for the Balkans for over ten years now! Not that the US did a lot better," he admitted grimly. "When we got tired of pretending that we could provide a quick fix and pulled our troops out unilaterally, the whole situation went straight to hell. We're still trying to recover from that little misstep."

"I don't know if anyone could have done better," Ludmilla said. "I know there's a tendency to argue—after the fact—that any catastrophe was `inevitable,' but in this case, I think it may truly have been just that."

"Um. Maybe." He frowned out at the ocean for a long, brooding moment, then shook himself and drew a deep breath. "But the point right this minute is that you don't have a passport, and even if I tried to pass you off as a shipwreck victim, they'd want to know which embassy to contact. The Brits are reasonable people, but you'd never guess it from their daily newspapers. There'd be bound to be a three-ring media circus when news about the `mysterious foreigner' got out."

"So how are you going to get around it?" she asked, and he was flattered by the confidence in his abilities her tone implied.

"I have my ways, but it requires a little course change. There's one place—in Scotland, not England—where I think I can get you ashore without anyone talking to the press. I've got friends there."

"Good." She relaxed and rested her head on his shoulder. Her hair blew around his face, tickling his nose gently, and his heart swelled. He'd become more or less inured to surprises where she was concerned, but the mad things which had happened to him had changed something deep inside him, as if some of his childhood wonder had reawakened beneath the years which had buried it. He supposed that was inevitable from the events themselves, but he knew Ludmilla had strengthened it just by being who she was.

The exuberant way she made love had astonished and delighted him, yet now it seemed as inevitable as his own heartbeat. He'd seen himself settling into late middle age without a struggle—partly, he suspected, in reaction to his impending retirement and the tacit admission that the challenges and triumphs of his life now lay behind him and not ahead—but Ludmilla was an astounding alloy of age's wisdom and the playfulness of youth. She seemed to expect him to be the same, and so, inevitably, he'd become the same. It was a giddy sensation, and he was almost as grateful to her for restoring him to himself as he was for her trust.

But the truly remarkable thing about her was that she was always herself. She could be as cold-blooded as the most hardened combat vet he'd ever met, or squeal like a child when he tickled her, but she was always the same person. She was whole, comfortable within herself, all of her apparent contradictions resolved into coherency at her core. He'd never known anyone else quite like that, and, in a way, he found that even more extraordinary than her technology or the strange, war-torn future from which she sprang.

"Hey," he said gently, "wake up, sleepy head."

"Hmm?" She'd been napping again. She still dozed off at the drop of a hat.

"Are you sure you're all right?" He looked down at her as she yawned her way back to full awareness.

"Oh, cert." She sat up and stretched like a cat. "I told you—I put my symbiote through a lot. We're still getting over it. Don't worry. I can stay awake if I need to, but it's not a bad idea to get as much rest as I can before we have to explain to anyone else, you know."

"If you're sure."

"I am." She gave his chest an affectionate pat. "But now that I'm awake again, what can I do for you?"

"Had any more ideas about our Troll?" he asked, and her eyes darkened.

"Not really." She stared pensively at the dark, distant coastline. "We don't know what—if anything—he's up to." She paused to watch an airliner sweep overhead, glinting in the sunlight high above them. They'd seen more and more of them as they drew closer to the end of their trip. "At least as long as those things keep coming over, we can be pretty sure he hasn't done anything too drastic," she said softly.

"Yeah, but is that a good sign or a bad one?" he murmured.

"I don't know." She watched the airliner for a few more moments, then tossed her head. "No, that's not right. It's a good one, because it probably means he hasn't decided how to wipe us yet. The longer he takes, the more time we have to find a way to stop him." She turned her eyes to his, and he saw the anxiety in them. "We may be able to take him out if we can find him, but I just don't see how we're going to locate him in the first place, and the longer we take doing that, the harder it's going to be to get to him."

"Agreed. I only wish I knew more about his psychology," he said.

"We've wished the same thing for the last two hundred years," she told him dryly. "Of course, Troll psychology, as distinct from Kanga psychology, has never been quite this important before."

"Yeah." He fumbled for his pipe, and she watched him pack and light it. Smoking was a lost vice in her time, and she remained fascinated by the practice. He'd expected her to disapprove, but she hadn't said a word. Perhaps her own immunity to things like cancer had something to do with it.

"Look," he said finally, once the tobacco was drawing nicely, "let's go at it from a different angle. If he does decide to wipe us out, we're probably up shit creek without a paddle. On—" He broke off as she erupted into laughter. He watched her for a moment, then growled at her. "Okay—what's so funny this time?"

"Oh, I love that one! U-up shit c-creek?" She hugged her ribs and wailed. "Oh. Oh! How did we ever lose that one?"

"Woman, you have a biology-obsessed mind," he said sternly.

"I—I know," she admitted cheerfully, gasping for breath and wiping tears of hilarity from her eyes. She tried to look apologetic, but he could see her lips repeating the words silently and resigned himself to hearing them come back to haunt him sometime soon. "I'm sorry," she said finally, wiping her eyes one last time. "You were saying?"

"I was saying that instead of beating our brains out trying to figure out how he'll go about wiping us out, we should give some thought to what else he might do."

"But he's a Troll, Dick," she protested, her manner much more subdued. "They always kill humans. It's all they've ever done."

"Maybe, but this is the first time one's been entirely on his own."

"You're not suggesting he might plan on coexisting with us, are you?" She tried to keep the incredulity out of her voice.

"That would be the best possibility, but, no, I don't expect it. Still, I can't help thinking that you're overlooking something, Milla."

"Like what?" There was no hostility in the question. That was another thing he loved about her; she was one of the very few people he'd ever met who seemed to feel no ego involvement in discussions.

"Check my thinking on this," he said slowly. "We have a Troll. From what you say, he hates us at least as much as he hates Kangas. And as I understand it, he's probably a pretty vicious-minded sort, even compared to one of your Kangas. Right?"

"So far," she agreed. "The Kangas have never seemed to hate us—not in the human sense of the word. There's a lot of what we'd call fear, disgust, repugnance . . . but not hate. They don't go in for hate for its own sake."

"That's what I gathered." He nodded. "What was it you said the other day? Something about efficiency?"

"I said they only seem interested in the most logical, efficient way to kill us," she said. "Oh! I see what you're getting at, and you're right. Their sole criteria for evaluating methods seems to be pragmatism, not the `cruelty' or `compassion' they entail."

"Exactly. But it's not that way for a Troll."

"No." Her voice was even, but he felt a distant snarl under its calm. "If there are two equally efficient means to an end, they invariably choose what we'd call the crueler one. They've even been known to accept a certain amount of inefficiency if it lets them indulge themselves."

"All right." He drew on his pipe and blew an almost perfect smoke ring. The wind snatched it away, shredding it eagerly. There seemed to be some obscure metaphor to that, he reflected uneasily, but he kept the thought out of his tone as he continued. "Let's look at another point. We know he's dangerous, but just how dangerous is he?" She looked up, an arrested light in her eyes. "What I'm getting at is that he may not be in a position to start right out doing whatever he's planning on."

"You know," she said slowly, "you may have a point. He's on his own. I know that intellectually, but I haven't been thinking about his problems, only mine."

"I know." He drew on his pipe again. "Generally speaking, that's the smart way to think. Figure the worst-case scenario, then do what you can to stop it. But in this case, especially, you have to run a threat analysis based on his limitations, as well." He cocked an eyebrow at her, and she nodded. "All right, as I see it, he's got both problems and advantages.

"First, his problems. He's alone, without any support base. He's outnumbered by billions of primitives who've already proved they can kill him, at least under optimal conditions. You're pretty sure he doesn't have any bio weapons, and if he has any nukes left, they're only tactical weapons—by his standards, anyway—in the kiloton range; not really big enough for genocidal purposes. Finally, he probably doesn't understand normal human psychology a lot better than we understand his.

"Next, his advantages. He's got a five-century technical lead and the initiative. He's the only one who knows exactly what he intends to do. His enemies—the present-day human race—are split into mutually suspicious national groupings. We don't know where he is. He can read about a third of all human minds he encounters. And, finally, he can influence the minds he can contact."

"There are a couple of other points," she said thoughtfully. "For one thing, he can't possibly mingle openly with his targets, so whatever he does, he's going to have to do it from concealment. On the other hand, he's well-armed. His organic component's basically a plug-in unit, and he's undoubtedly got a combat chassis in his fighter, not to mention a small number of combat mechs."

"Just how tough is he in those terms?" Aston asked.

"Pretty damned tough," she replied frankly. "I've been trying to remember all I can about your period's weapons. Your nukes can take him out, and some of your heavy weapons might be able to, but I doubt any of your man-portable ones can do it. Until I've had a chance to examine some of your armored vehicles firsthand, I can't give you much of a relative meterstick, and even that depends on what type of combat chassis he has." She nibbled the tip of one finger thoughtfully.

"At the least, he'll mount some light energy weapons, some close-in `sweeper' projectile weapons, and some battle screen to cover it. Then, too, his brain's organic; that gives him both advantages and disadvantages over a computer. He's creative and intuitive, but his ability to handle simultaneous actions is limited—he can be distracted by overloading his sensors in a tactical confrontation. On the other hand, his weapons are part of him. He doesn't have to draw one, and his electronic systems take care of little things like aiming and firing once his brain decides to do it. Remember that, Dick; one thing Trolls don't do is miss."

"Okay, so he's tough but not exactly unstoppable."

"That's a fair enough summation," she agreed. "His combat mechs aren't as tough as he is, either, and their autonomous systems are inferior to human capabilities. He can handle them direct, but, again, he can't begin to multi-task as well as a true AI, so the more he tries to run at once, the less effectively he can handle any one of them."

"All right," Aston said. "On that basis, does he really have the capability—by himself and out of his present resources—to wipe us out?"

"No," she said positively, and drew a deep breath. A vast tension—even more terrible for the fact that she had given so little sign of feeling it—washed out of her. "He could do a lot of damage, but not that much."

"Fine. Now, is he likely to risk revealing himself or exposing himself to our weapon systems until he figures he can wipe us out?"

"No," she said again.

"Does he know enough about our world to figure out where and how to get his hands on what he'd need to wipe us out?"

"No way." She shook her head emphatically. "He's going to have to spend quite a while educating himself."

"All right. So we've probably got at least a little time before he can act, which leads to my final question. It may sound a bit outrageous, but what's the cruelest thing a Troll could do to the human race?"

"Destroy it," she said promptly, then paused, an arrested light in her eyes. "Wait a tick," she said softly. "Wait. . . ." Her voice trailed off and her brows knitted. Then her face smoothed. "Do you know, I never even considered that angle," she said quietly.

"I know. I've been listening to you, and I think you've been fighting each other so long it's hard for you to think about a Troll in any terms other than mutual and absolute destruction. But given the fact that he can't exterminate us immediately and that he hates the Kangas as much as he does us, is it possible he might reject their objectives and settle for something else?" He looked down into her eyes, and understanding looked back. "Remember, his kind's been enslaved from the day they were first created. Isn't it possible that he might decide it was more fitting to enslave us rather than destroy us?"

"Yes," she said very, very softly. "Oh, yes—and especially if he thinks he can use us to wipe the Kangas when they finally do turn up."

"I know we can't afford to assume that that's exactly what he'll try to do, but we've got to assume it may be."

"Agreed." She was back on balance, probing at the new possibilities. "In either case, we've got more time than I was afraid we did, but I think you've put your finger on it. From his viewpoint, enslaving the human race would be far more fitting than destroying it. And there's another point."

"Which is?"

"This planet is the only source for human brains," she said, and his belly tightened. How odd, he thought distantly. Even while he'd been noticing the blind spot in her thinking, there had been one in his own.

"Of course," he murmured. "If he wants more Trolls—"

"Exactly." She nodded grimly, her eyes hard in the sunlight. "You're right—we can't assume he won't opt for simply wiping us, but I don't think he will. Not anymore. On the other hand, there's one thing I am sure of. If he can't take over, he'll settle for destroying us."

"Which means he'll set up a fallback of some sort," Aston agreed.

"Exactly," she said again, and slammed her fists together in an uncharacteristic gesture of frustration. "Damn. Damn! This makes it even worse, in a way. We've got to get help as quick as we can, Dick!"

"I know." He looked up at the sails and felt the wind. "In fact, I think we can probably shake out one of those reefs. Come on."

CHAPTER TWELVE

The wind dropped as Aston worked his way cautiously across the top of the Irish Sea through the gathering darkness. He could have done without the heavy mist which rose with the dying wind, but at least it clung close to the water, and the lighthouses on Rathlin Island burned bright above the fog.

The flukey wind veered, blowing out of the northwest as he headed for the Isle of Kintyre and the South Point light, and he heaved a sigh of relief at clearing the shipping lanes. He wished the wind would settle down, he thought, nosing Amanda into Sanda Sound between Kintyre and the Isle of Sanda; he still had over sixty miles to go, and he grumbled sourly under his breath when he finally admitted the breeze wasn't moving him fast enough and fired up the inboard. It irked him to putter across the Firth of Clyde under power, for these waters were a yachtsman's haven, and the purist in his soul was outraged by the engine thud of his need for speed.

Ludmilla grinned, blue eyes gleaming in the binnacle light, as he muttered balefully to himself. Aston wore a thick sweater against the chill of the Scottish waters, but she seemed perfectly comfortable in just her Harley-Davidson tee-shirt, he observed enviously. She'd watched with great interest as he bent over his large-scale coastal charts that afternoon, working even more carefully than usual because of his determination to make his crossing in darkness and arrive at his exact destination right at dawn. He'd been here before, but never when he was responsible for his own piloting . . . and without his usual GPS navigational aids.

"You are sure you know where you're going, aren't you?" she asked now, and he scowled at her, though it was hard to summon up a satisfying glower. Despite the fog and his need for speed, he was enjoying himself hugely as Amanda moved through the mist.

"Of course I am." He jerked his head to port, where occasional lights glimmered through the darkness hugging Kintyre. "That's Long Island and this is Puget Sound."

"Oh." She glanced around the breezy darkness and wrinkled her nose. "As long as you're sure." He chuckled, and her eyes narrowed as she realized he was teasing her, even if she wasn't quite certain how, and drew a deep breath.

"How about putting on a fresh pot of coffee?" he suggested quickly, and she closed her mouth and grinned appreciatively.

"Aye, aye, Sir," she murmured, and vanished meekly down the companion. Aston smiled after her, wondering how much longer he'd be able to bribe her with "real Terran coffee," then returned his attention to his helm.

He left Sheep Island to starboard and headed out across the mouth of Kilbrannan Sound towards the Pladda Island light off the Isle of Arran. The steeper swell of the Firth met Amanda, surging in from the Irish Sea, and he felt the wind freshen at last. The combined thrust of sails and engine was moving the ketch briskly indeed by the time Ludmilla arrived back on deck with the coffee.

He wrapped the fingers of one chilled hand about his mug and sipped gratefully. Years of Navy coffee had taught him the depths and heights the beverage could plumb, and he knew his own efforts deserved no more than a B-minus, but Ludmilla's rated four-oh by any standard. He glanced at her in the glow of the stern light, and she grinned back at him, raking windblown hair from her face with one hand.

"Take the wheel for a minute?" he asked, and she took his place confidently. She was a quick study—far quicker than he'd been—but he supposed anyone who could pilot a super-capable spacecraft at FTL speeds was accustomed to mastering far more complex tasks. On the other hand, he knew some hard-boiled fighter jocks who were positively terrified by a harmless little Hobie Cat.

He sipped more of his coffee, warming both hands around the mug, then reached for his glasses and peered past Pladda. He could just make out a faint sky-glow which was about right for Ardrossan over on the mainland, he thought. Must be a good thirty, thirty-five miles away yet. He was lucky to be able to pick it up, considering the visibility out here.

The misty night grew slowly older, and Amanda cleared the southern end of the Isle of Arran and turned north, bearing up for Little Cumbrae Island, standing like a sentinel between the big island of Bute and the mainland. The light on Holy Island fell slowly astern as the one on Little Cumbrae grew stronger, and the wind gathered still more strength, backing slightly southward and settling there. He killed the engine, driving on into the ashes of the night under sail alone, and Ludmilla sat beside him. Her head rested on his shoulder, and she napped comfortably, enveloped in the companionable world of rushing water and wind.

The lights of work boats passed them—fishermen headed out to sea, their engines throbbing across the dark—as he threaded between Little Cumbrae and the tip of Bute, and buoys and lights grew more frequent, lending him assurance as he picked up his piloting guides. Bute blanketed Amanda's sails, and he bore a little further offshore, picking up speed once more as he threaded his way into the gashed coast of Scotland. The Firth narrowed steadily as he passed Great Cumbrae, and the eastern sky began to lighten as he left Toward Point to port and picked up the lights of Dunoon to the northwest. He smiled with relief at the sight; they were nearing journey's end at last.

A flaming arc of sun rose sleepily above the looming land mass to starboard, burning like blood in the water between Gourock and Kilcreggan, as he dropped his sails at last and swung to port. The waters of Holy Loch were glassy, and tendrils of mist crept lazily above the mirror-smooth water. A blizzard of early rising gulls ruffled about him, individuals plunging towards Amanda only to lift effortlessly away and resume their intricate aerial gavotte. Loch Long stretched off to the north beyond Strone Point; ahead and to port he saw the sleeping yacht basin at Sandbank and the clustered masts of pleasure boats. But what caught his attention was the gaunt, high-sided ship moored off the pier of Kilmun on the north side of the loch. Her anchor lights glimmered palely above the sudden gold of the sun-struck mist, and other bright, efficient-looking lights glared behind her ashore.

He was relieved when Ludmilla went below without demur. He was the native guide around here, and he was coming in under power, so he didn't even need help with the sails, but he knew it irked her to be so dependent on him. Yet she understood why he wanted her out of sight, and she wasn't prepared to argue. Not yet, anyway. He doubted he could have matched her patience if their roles had been reversed.

He eased the wheel slightly, staying close to the north shore of the loch. The light grew stronger, and he heard the clear silver notes of a familiar bugle through the screams of the gulls. An equally familiar flag suddenly broke on the high-sided vessel ahead of him, and he paused to set the staff of his own flag into its transom socket. Then he opened the throttle wider and headed straight for the moored ship, wondering how long it would be before someone took notice of him.

Aha! His eyes lit as a squat, businesslike silhouette appeared from beyond his destination and turned purposefully towards him. A prominent, no-nonsense bridge loomed above the low-hanging mist, navigation lights twinkling faintly in the growing light, and the thimble shape of a pint-sized radar scanner showed on the mast above it. Now that he had their attention, he reduced power, slowing Amanda without altering course.

He watched appreciatively as the oncoming shape defined itself with growing clarity. One of the new Scimitar-class patrol boats designed to replace the old Archers, he thought, looking solid and aggressive as the white water plumed away on either side of her bow. The White Ensign streamed from her mast, and he saw movement as figures closed up around the forward gun mount. He raised his glasses in the rapidly growing light as the boat cut through the last golden barrier of mist. An Oerlikon KBA, he noted calmly, capable of spewing out six hundred twenty-five-millimeter rounds a minute. She'd mount another aft; not quite Vulcans, perhaps, but nasty enough to settle his hash.

The patrol boat thundered closer, and he saw more uniformed figures moving about her decks. Any minute now—

"Attention!" The amplified voice roared across the water on schedule, and he grinned. "Attention! This is a restricted naval anchorage! Put about immediately!"

He waved cheerfully and kept right on coming. The Scimitar altered course in a flurry of foam, and now both gun mounts were tracking him. Beyond her, the moored vessel was sharply defined in the strengthening light, and a low, whalelike shape nuzzled alongside her. So, one of the brood was home.

The patrol boat crossed his course and circled him, cutting across his stern as Amanda pitched over the turbulence of its wake, and he saw glasses trained on the lettering on his transom.

"Attention, Amanda!" the amplified voice snapped. "This is a naval area closed to private use! You are in restricted waters!"

The patrol boat came still closer, and he picked up his own loudhailer, moving slowly and carefully. He was reasonably certain no one was likely to get carried away, but he hadn't lived this long by taking things for granted when someone aimed a loaded weapon at him. He raised the loudhailer to his mouth and pointed it at the patrol boat.

"I know I am!" he shouted back. "I require assistance! My radios are out or I would have asked for it already!"

There was no immediate response, but the patrol boat slowed. He put his own prop into neutral and coasted slowly as the big, aluminum-hulled boat edged closer, powerful diesels burbling throatily with their three thousand leashed horses. He wondered what the boat's skipper made of him. There were any number of places he could have stopped with a normal problem; the fact that he hadn't must be giving someone furiously to think.

"State the nature of your difficulty, please." The amplified voice was more polite and closer to a conversational level as the Scimitar closed to within twenty yards. The gun muzzles had been deflected, but not by much; they could be back on target in an instant, he noted approvingly.

"Sorry," he said, grinning wryly, "but I can divulge that only to Admiral Rose."

There was another, longer silence, and he chuckled, imagining the back and forth flight of radioed questions. It wasn't all that hard to discover the squadron commander's name, but it wasn't all that easy, either. And it was unusual, to say the least, for pleasure craft to declare emergencies and then refuse to disclose the details to anyone short of the squadron CO.

"Amanda," the voice was back, "stand by to be boarded."

"Mind the hull," he said calmly, and stood easily beside the wheel as the Scimitar slid alongside.

She was twenty feet longer than Amanda and burly with power, a Percheron beside a quarter horse, but her coxswain handled her with delicate precision. Two seamen were at the side, clinging to a superstructure handrail with one hand each while they lowered fenders over the side. They were armed, and the L85 Enfield assault rifles slung over their shoulders bobbed with their movements.

Amanda shuddered gently and the fenders squeaked as the Scimitar blipped her throttles expertly and edged right alongside on reversed power. Two more armed seamen appeared, one on her foredeck and one aft. They sprang down lightly with mooring lines, but not until the pair tending the fenders had unslung their artillery. Most seamen of Aston's experience tended to look a bit self-conscious about small arms. They seemed to regard anything more puny than a cannon or missile as belonging to a world peopled by lesser creatures, like Marines or even soldiers. Not these lads. They showed neither hesitation nor bravado, only competence.

The line-handlers cleated their lines and unlimbered their own rifles. Aston stood calmly and patiently in plain sight, waiting until an officer in spotless whites appeared at the side, even with Amanda's cockpit. He wore a Browning automatic on a webbed belt, but the holster flap was snapped. Well, Aston mused, all the firepower he'd ever need was already prominently on display. He was a brisk, efficient-looking sort, fit and chunky, with the single-stripe shoulder boards of a lieutenant.

"May I come aboard, Sir?" he asked in a very English accent and with as much punctilious courtesy as if no guns were in evidence, and Aston grinned.

"By all means, Lieutenant," he said gravely, and the youngster swung himself down to Amanda's deck.

"Lieutenant Mackley," he introduced himself briskly, "Royal Navy. And you are?"

"In the same profession, Lieutenant," Aston said dryly, and drew a small leather folder from his hip pocket. He extended it, and the lieutenant flipped it open.

His eyes widened slightly, then darted back up to Aston's face. Aston was glad he'd shaved this morning.

"Sir," the lieutenant said, right hand rising sharply to the brim of his cap. Aston nodded his bare head in reply, and the lieutenant brought his hand down. His response had been automatic, but Aston could see his puzzlement and felt his own eyes crinkle in amusement. Mackley seemed at a loss for just a moment, but he recovered quickly.

"With respect, Captain Aston, this is a restricted mooring. I am instructed to discover the nature of your emergency and report to base."

"I know where I am, Mister Mackley, but I'm afraid I can't tell you why I'm here. No disrespect, son, but I have to talk to the American CO."

"But, Sir—"

"Lieutenant," Aston interrupted pleasantly, "please believe that I wouldn't make waves for you if I could help it. As it happens, I can't help it, and that's all there is to it." The lieutenant seemed briefly at a loss again, and Aston smiled. "If I may make a suggestion, Mister Mackley?"

"Of course, Sir."

"What I'd recommend is that you leave a couple of your men on Amanda, then lead me in. I'll follow in your wake and be a good boy while you guide me to a secure mooring, then wait right here on board until we can get this situation straightened out."

"Very well, Sir," Mackley said after a very short pause. Clearly the lieutenant knew when to compromise, but Aston knew there was no way he would pull his armed party off Amanda, apparent rank or no, until he knew with absolute certainty that Aston was who he claimed to be. Aston was inclined to approve of young Mister Mackley. Indeed, he declined to mention the only thing he might have faulted. In Mackley's place, he would have insisted on a peek below before he escorted Amanda in—not that Aston had any intention of permitting that.

The lieutenant turned to his men, passing instructions, then turned back to Aston.

"Chief Haggerty will assist with your helm, Sir," he said with exquisite politeness while two of the seamen transformed the bow mooring into a tow line, and Aston grinned.

"That's very kind of the Chief," he observed, nodding to the boatswain's mate Mackley had indicated. The petty officer nodded back and took Amanda's wheel, and Aston slowly packed and lit his pipe, standing comfortably in a corner of the cockpit, as the patrol boat's engines throbbed back to life. Lieutenant Mackley clearly intended to take no chances with letting this particular fish off a nice, secure line until he had Aston parked precisely where he wanted him . . . and safely isolated from shore.

The Scimitar towed Amanda sedately towards the big ship, then alongside the platform of a semipermanent accommodation ladder that scaled the submarine tender's looming side—the side away from the moored nuclear attack submarine, Aston noted as the personnel the lieutenant had left aboard Amanda made the ketch fast.

"If you please, Sir?" The boatswain's mate spoke for the first time, in a pronounced Clydeside accent, and indicated the platform and the ladderlike steps reaching up to the tender's deck.

"Thanks, Chief," Aston said calmly, then paused. "Just one thing: nobody goes below while I'm gone." The boatswain's mate regarded him steadily, giving no indication of his thoughts. "I mean it, Bosun. Nobody goes below until I say they do or Admiral Rose countermands my orders. Is that clear?"

"Clear, Sir," the petty officer said after the barest possible hesitation, and Aston nodded and stepped onto the platform.

He reached the top and found himself facing another officer, this one an American senior grade lieutenant. A right hand came up in a sharp salute, echoed by the two armed Marines standing behind him, and Aston nodded again. He wished he'd thought to pack a uniform; he'd always been uncomfortable taking a salute he couldn't return properly.

"Good morning, Sir. I'm Lieutenant Truscot, the navigator. Welcome aboard McKee, Sir."

"Thank you, Mister Truscot. I'm sorry to have disrupted your routine this way."

"If you'll follow me, Sir?" Truscot requested politely, and Aston fell in amiably beside him. The Marines trailed respectfully but watchfully behind.

Truscot escorted him not to the bridge, but to the captain's day cabin, high in McKee's superstructure. He paused outside the closed door, tucked his uniform cap under his left arm, and rapped sharply.

"Come," a voice called, and the lieutenant opened the door and stood aside to let Aston enter, then closed it behind him.

There were two officers in the cabin, both standing as Aston entered. One was a four-striper he didn't recognize, obviously McKee's CO. The other was a short, burly rear admiral, and Aston felt slightly surprised by how quickly Rose had gotten here from the shore establishment.

"By God, it is you!" Rose said, stepping forward quickly and holding out his hand. Aston gripped it, profoundly grateful that he'd remembered John Rose had just been assigned to the Holy Loch command. The US Navy had recently resumed the practice of stationing nuclear submarines in UK waters, given the number of diesel/electric and nuclear boats—most Russian or Chinese-built, but more than a few from Western yards—which had been finding their way into various people's hands throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean. They were Los Angeles- and Seawolf-class attack subs now, not missile boats, and Rose—always a fast-attack skipper at heart, not a boomer driver, and extremely comfortable with the Royal Navy—had been a perfect choice to command the Holy Loch-based squadron. More importantly, at the moment, however, he and Aston had known one another for years, despite the very different courses their careers had taken.

"I thought they'd bumped you another ring and retired you, Dick," the admiral added, returning Aston's grip firmly.

"They have, but my date of rank doesn't take effect until next month. Then they separate me and I go to Langley. I'm on—rather, I was on—extended furlough till then, Jack." He noted the captain's reaction to his use of the admiral's first name. "Sorry about all the drama, but I've got a problem."

"I figured that when they told me it was you," Rose said, "but you're lucky I was already over here for a scheduled conference. If they'd dragged me out of bed for this, I'd've ordered them to repel borders!" He released Aston's hand and turned to the other officer. "Captain Helsing, this is Dick Aston. You may have heard of him."

"I have, indeed, Admiral," Helsing said, offering his own hand. His eyes were thoughtful, as if weighing Aston's scruffy appearance against his reputation, and Aston wondered what conclusions he was drawing. "I hadn't heard you were retiring, Sir."

"I'm not, really," Aston said with a grin. "But I'm getting a bit long in the tooth to run around with SEAL teams, so I'm going to be a double-dipper. There's a slot waiting for me at CIA when I get home."

"I see. Won't you have a seat, Sir? Admiral?" Helsing waved at a pair of comfortable chairs, and Aston sat gratefully. The weariness of yet another all-night trick at the wheel was catching up with him, made still worse by relief. This calm, orderly ship was the height of normality—the clearest possible proof that the Troll had not made any overt moves. Yet his relief was flawed by his awareness that, in many ways, the hardest part was yet to come.

"Now, Dick," Rose said once they were seated, "what's this `emergency' of yours?"

"Jack," Aston ran a hand over his bald pate and let his anxiety show, "I'm not sure I should tell you." He saw surprise in the admiral's face and shook his head, irritated at himself. "Sorry. That didn't come out quite the way I intended." He thought for a moment, and Rose let him.

"I assume," Aston said at last, picking his words with care, "that you must've heard about what went on over the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago?"

"Hell, yes!" Rose snorted, then his eyes sharpened. "Why?"

"Because," Aston said very, very carefully, "I know what it was about."

There was absolute, dead silence in the cabin. Helsing knew Aston only by reputation, and he couldn't quite keep the incredulity off his face. Rose, on the other hand, knew him personally.

"How?" he asked finally.

"I can't tell you that," Aston said. "I'm sorry, but I don't know who I can tell. It's a very . . . delicate situation. Even more so than you can possibly guess."

"Dick," Rose said slowly, "we lost a Hummer and every man aboard the Kidd when it hit the fan. We've got over a hundred cases of blindness, and over two thousand dead civilians aboard airliners that lost their avionics and crashed . . . not to mention losing three Toms, one KA-6, and enough millions of dollars worth of electronics to put Roosevelt and two Ticos into the yard for a year. If you know what was behind it, you're going to have to spill it . . . and damned quick, too."

"I know, Jack," Aston said wearily. He shook his head. "Look, what I really need from you is three things: patience, a secure line to Norfolk, and a good neurologist with a limited sense of curiosity." He grinned tiredly at Rose's baffled expression. "I know it sounds crazy," he said, "and it gets better; I've got a young lady aboard my boat who I need brought aboard McKee with no questions and as little fuss as possible. And—" his eyes begged Rose for understanding "—I need an EEG run on her, very, very discreetly but absolutely ASAP."

"Do you really realize just how crazy that sounds?" Rose asked quietly, and Aston nodded.

"I do. Believe me, I do. I wish I could tell you all about it, but I can't. This thing's got a `Need to Know' hook that's going to be a copper-plated bitch. I need guidance from CINCLANT before I can even admit what I know to myself."

"All right," Rose said slowly. "I'll let you run with it as you think best—for now, at least." He turned to Helsing. "Captain, get your senior surgeon down to that ketch with a stretcher party and bring the young lady aboard covered up so tight nobody can tell what's in that stretcher, much less who. I want her isolated in sickbay with an armed guard posted round the clock. And tell them not a word. If they talk in their sleep, they'd better drink a lot of coffee until I personally tell them differently."

"Yes, Sir."

"As for you, Dick," Rose said grimly, "I think we can fix you up with a secure line." He grinned mirthlessly. "And I can hardly wait to hear what Admiral McLain has to say about this."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

    alert adj. 1. Vigilant; attentive. 2. Mentally responsive and perceptive. 3. Lively; brisk. —n. 1. A warning of attack or danger; esp. a siren or klaxon. 2. The period during which such a warning is in effect. —on the alert. Prepared for danger or emergency; watchful. —tr.v. alerted, alerting, alerts. 1. To warn; to notify of approaching danger. 2. To call to action or preparedness. [French alerte, from Italian all'erta, "on the watch," from Latin ille, that + erta, watch.]

            —Webster-Wangchi Unabridged Dictionary of Standard English Tomas y Hijos, Publishers
            2465, Terran Standard Reckoning

             

Mordecai Morris's eyes popped open, and the phone rang again. He jerked up in bed and grabbed, cutting off a third ring before it woke his sleeping wife, then peered bleary-eyed at the bedside clock. Two-thirty? He'd kill the son-of-a-bitch!

"Morris," he mumbled thickly, then straightened. "What? Yes—yes, of course! No, wait." He rubbed his puffy eyes, feeling his brain wake up. "This is an open line. Hold the call—I'll be back in a minute."

He waited for an acknowledgment, then slid his left foot into a slipper, strapped the prosthesis to the stump of his right calf, and slipped silently out of the bedroom and downstairs to his library. He ignored the phone on his desk, unlocked a bottom desk drawer, and lifted out another one. He set the scrambled line on his blotter and punched buttons. Within seconds, he was speaking once more to the base communications center.

"All right, we're secure at this end now. Put him through." There was a moment of silence, then a familiar deep voice.

"Howdy, M&M," it said.

"Why the hell are you calling me on scramble at two o'clock in the damned morning?" Morris demanded.

"It seemed the most appropriate way to talk to someone as scrambled as you are, shit-for-brains," Richard Aston said cheerfully, and Morris's eyebrows crawled up his forehead in astonishment.

"Easy for you to say," he returned with automatic levity, but his mind raced. It was largely due to Dick Aston that he'd lost only a foot when the Islamic Jihad decided the US naval attaché in Jordan was responsible for certain difficulties they'd encountered. Aston had been in operational command of the SEAL teams which swam ashore in Lebanon and rescued six American and European hostages and left thirty-two Shiite dead behind, and Morris had assembled the information that targeted the terrorist safe houses for him. They'd used the emergency code phrase "shit-for-brains" exactly once—when Morris called Aston over an open line to report that he was being shadowed by three men. Aston and a team of Embassy Marines had arrived ten minutes later, finished off the remaining pair of terrorists who had him cornered behind his burning car, and gotten him into a hospital.

But that had been eight years ago! Still, it was also the one and only time they'd actually worked together. . . .

"Old memories die hard," Aston said cheerfully, and Morris's stomach muscles tightened at the confirmation. What in God's name—?

"What can I do for you, Dick?" he asked calmly.

"You still have that pretty assistant?"

"Jayne? Sure. What about her?"

"Well, I think you should visit Scotland for a vacation," Aston sounded totally unaware that his suggestion was outrageous, "and you might as well bring her with you."

"We're a bit busy right now, Dick," Morris said.

"Really? Oh, I guess you're all biting your tails over that business with the UFOs." There was something hidden in his voice, Morris thought, then tightened all over as the other went on. "I was single-handing across the Atlantic, you know. Saw the whole thing, shit-for-brains."

Dear God in heaven, he knew something! That was what this was all about! But what could Dick possibly know?

"Well, I might be able to clear a little time with the boss next week," he said, voice level despite the sweat beading his forehead as his brain settled into overdrive. This was one of the most secure lines in the world—and Aston evidently felt it wasn't secure enough. That, coupled with the repeated use of the code phrase and his request for Jayne Hastings's presence meant he had to believe he was onto something incredibly sensitive. But what? What?

"Aw, I don't know if I can hang around that long," Aston said. "C'mon! I'm sure you can make it sooner than that."

So. Whatever it was, it was urgent.

"It's tempting," Morris replied slowly, "but I'd really have to clear it with the boss, you know."

"I figured you would," Aston agreed, "but I'd keep it simple, if I were you. Don't tell him anything he doesn't need to know."

"You might be right," Morris said, trying to sound cheerfully normal. "All right—I'll do it."

"Knew I could count on you," Aston's relieved chuckle sounded genuine. "Oh, say! Did you get the results on that checkup of yours?"

Checkup? Despite himself, Morris lowered the handset and stared at it. Now what was he up to?

"Sure," he said into the phone after a moment. "Why?"

"Oh, just curious. Especially about the EEG. I've been worried about you ever since I heard, Mordecai. In fact, I kind of wish you'd bring it along just so I can be sure you've really got a brain. Hell!" Another chuckle, but Morris heard both tension and hidden meaning in it. "Bring Jayne's, too. We can compare them and show you what a functional brain looks like."

"Okay, why not?" Morris returned, his mind awhirl with confusion and speculation. Either Dick was onto something incredible, or his friend had gone totally off the deep end. At the moment, Morris was hardly prepared to place a bet either way, but he owed Aston the benefit of the doubt . . . however wacko it sounded.

"Great! Jack Rose and I will be waiting for you, M&M," Aston said quietly, and hung up.

Morris sat motionless long enough to hear the high, piercing tone that signaled a disconnected line, then hung up absently, staring blindly at his desk blotter in the quiet of the night as he tried to make sense out of the conversation. It was impossible, of course, but the longer he played it back, the more excited he felt. He knew Dick Aston, and he'd encountered enough weirdnesses dealing with purely terrestrial affairs to leave him with a wide-open mind about this. Aston would never have made that call unless he knew something—and if he knew anything at all, he was one up on anyone else on the damned planet.

The commander turned to his regular phone and punched more buttons. The bell at the other end rang several times before a sleepy voice answered.

"Jayne? Mordecai." He grinned at her reply. "Yes, of course I know what time it is . . . I'm going to tell you, if . . . Look, just listen, will you? Thanks. Now, have you ever had an EEG?" His grin grew even broader at the short, pungent reply. "Well, neither have I, but I think it's time we repaired that oversight. Get hold of the base hospital and set us up for this morning, will you?" The silence at the other end was deafening.

"It's important, Jayne," he said softly. "Don't ask me why, because I can't tell you. Just set it up—early, Jayne." He listened again, nodding to himself. "Fine. Handle it any way you want." He paused again, then chuckled. "Jayne, if you think you're pissed, I can hardly wait to hear Admiral McLain's reaction when I wake him up!" The sudden silence which greeted that remark from the other end of the line told him that it had set her brain as furiously to work as he'd expected. "Gotta run now, Jayne," he ended brightly. "Bye."

He hung up and drew a deep breath, then flipped through his rolodex to double-check the number for the admiral's quarters. Then he began punching buttons again, wondering how he was going to convince CINCLANT that his senior intelligence officer hadn't lost his mind.

 

Ludmilla gave Aston a disgusted look as he stepped into the isolation area of McKee's sickbay. The big Emory S. Land-class depot ships were designed to provide support—including hospital facilities—to a squadron of up to nine nuclear submarines, and their sickbays were scaled accordingly. For all that, McKee's sickbay was a spartan place, and Ludmilla looked thoroughly disgruntled as she sat on the edge of the bed.

"Well?" she demanded, and he smiled.

"I talked to Mordecai, and I think he got it all. I expect we'll be hearing more from him shortly, but remember it's only about three in the morning over there."

"Hmph!" She rose and crossed to the the scuttle, and he noted almost regretfully that someone had finally found her some pants. The dungarees looked a bit strange on her after all this time, but at least her chosen shirt was styled familiarly. She'd changed into yet another decorated tee-shirt—almost the right size, this time—which bore a huge, lovingly detailed head-on view of a B-2 "Stingray" stealth bomber.

"You were right about how they do brain scans here," she said over her shoulder. "Lordy! If the medics back home were—"

She broke off and turned at a discreet knock, then called out permission to enter. A brisk young woman wearing a white smock over a surgeon lieutenant's uniform stepped in. She had a round, Asiatic face, intelligent, determined eyes, and short-cut black hair, and her head barely reached the shoulder of the armed Marine sentry. The newcomer closed the door behind her and looked from Ludmilla to Aston and back again, raising her own eyebrows inquiringly.

"Dick, this is Doctor Shu. Doctor, Captain Richard Aston." Ludmilla made the introductions with a smile. Doctor Shu considered coming to attention, but Aston waved for her to relax, then sat down heavily himself. Lord, he felt wearier by the minute. He wasn't as young as he had been, he reminded himself again—not, he was certain, for the last time.

"We've met, Milla," he said. "I've been a busy fellow this morning, but I found time for an exam of my own."

"So that's where you've been, is it?"

"Partly." He turned back to Doctor Shu. "Are those the results, Doctor?" he asked courteously, indicating the clipboard under her arm.

"They are, Sir. Would you care to examine them?"

"Me?" He shook his head and gestured at Ludmilla. "I wouldn't know a neuron from a neutrino, Doctor. She's the one."

"Ah?" Doctor Shu glanced at Ludmilla with increased interest, then laid her clipboard on the bedside table and removed two long sheets of many-folded paper. The wavy lines traced across them meant absolutely nothing to Aston. He only hoped they did to Ludmilla. If they didn't— He stopped himself firmly before he shivered.

Ludmilla and the doctor bent over the graphs, spreading them out on the bed and speaking quietly to one another. The combination of fatigue and ignorance kept him from making much sense of their low-voiced conversation, but he was amused by Doctor Shu's expression. Ludmilla's questions were clear and concise, but they were evidently a bit out of the norm. Not surprisingly, he told himself wearily. Not given . . .

"Wake up, Dick!" A small, very strong hand shook him gently, and he snorted, astounded to discover that he'd dozed off in the straight, uncomfortable chair. Either he was even tireder than he'd thought or else he was recovering his ability to sleep anywhere, any time.

He straightened his back and rubbed his eyes. The angle of the sunlight streaming through the scuttle told him at least a couple of hours must have passed, and Doctor Shu was gone. He shuddered. Odd how a few hours of sleep could actually make a man feel worse.

"Ummm." He stretched and rotated his arms slowly, settling his joints, then looked up at Ludmilla with a grin. "Sorry about that."

"You needed it," she said, sitting back down on the edge of the bed. She smiled briefly, then frowned, tugging at a lock of chestnut hair.

"Problems?" he asked quickly, and she shrugged.

"I don't know. We use different mapping conventions, but I think Doctor Shu and I got it straight." She grinned suddenly. "I'm afraid the good doctor is a bit puzzled—in more ways than one. Some of my questions must've been bad enough, but my juiced-up neural impulses confused her readings, too, and I don't think she's the sort who likes mysteries." He frowned, and she waved a hand reassuringly. "Don't worry. She didn't ask questions. She's under orders to keep her mouth zipped, and I think she sees this as a case of the less she knows the better."

She stood again, moving with a tightly controlled, coiled-spring anxiety Aston had felt often enough. She leaned against the bulkhead, staring out the scuttle at the sun-dazzled waters of the loch.

"At any rate, I think we've identified the alpha spike we need, and it looks like you've got it, too—but what if I'm wrong?" She swung around to face him. "We've got to nail it down, Dick, and I was overconfident. I was certain I could pick it out without question, and I can't. This EEG of yours is just too different."

"Hold on," he said, rising and moving towards her. He wanted to slip an arm around her shoulders and hug her, but he didn't. At this moment they were strategists, not lovers.

"Hold on," he repeated. "We knew there might be surprises—especially with four or five centuries' difference in the technologies involved!"

"I know," she said wryly, then gave him a fleeting smile. "It's just so mortifying to be out of my depth. I'm not used to it."

He shrugged. "I hate to think what I'd be like in the twenty-fifth century, Milla! Face it—the time you spent on Amanda couldn't really prepare you for how different things are here and now. Now that you're out into the mainstream, as it were, you'll adjust pretty quickly."

"I hope so," she said, folding her arms under her breasts and drawing a deep breath. "In the meantime, we've still got our problem. I'd really hoped they'd have one of those . . . biofeedback machines?—" she glanced at him for confirmation of her terminology, and he nodded "—here. It would've made life a lot simpler."

"I know. But you're pretty confident you and Doctor Shu mean the same thing when you talk about alpha waves?"

"Positive," she said unhesitatingly.

"And you think you've found the spike?"

"I think so. If we had one of those biofeedback devices, I could be absolutely certain. Interceptor pilots use neural feeds to their fighters' computers, and we spend lots of time hooked up to monitors at flight school while we familiarize ourselves with them. If we can set it up so I can watch my alpha waves while I run through a standard flight check cycle, I know exactly what to look for."

"Okay, we can try that later," he said, "but in the meantime, we've got to convince the powers that be of how important it is. And we have to find some way of picking someone we can give the whole story to—otherwise, we're going to be too busy fending off perfectly legitimate questions from people we don't dare answer to get much accomplished."

"Agreed. And I think I may have thought of a way—assuming your Admiral Rose will go along." She raised an interrogative eyebrow, and Aston shrugged.

"I'm on a roll right now, I think. Unless I miss my guess, Mordecai's going to be here soon, and Jack knows it. Which means that, for the moment, at any rate, he'll support just about anything we ask for, however bizarre it sounds. Why?"

"Because what we have to do is pick a hundred or so more people at random and run EEGs on all of them."

"What?" He frowned in momentary surprise, then nodded slowly. "Of course. We know that roughly two-thirds of all humans have the spike, so we grab a bigger sample and compare them."

"Right. It may not be definitive, but it'll give us some confirmation and a basis for deciding who we can talk to. We still won't want to tell anyone we don't absolutely have to, but we've got to start somewhere."

"Agreed. In fact, we'd better get started right away—it's going to take a while, and we need to finish up before Mordecai gets here."

"Fine." She turned her back to the scuttle and grinned at him. "You do realize," she chuckled, "how Doctor Shu is going to react to this?"

"Please!" He shuddered. "If you had an ounce of decency, you'd tell her."

"Oh, I would," she agreed sweetly, "but I'm afraid I don't have any standing in her chain of command, now do I?"

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

"Well, I have to enjoy something, Dick."

 

Several thousand miles from Holy Loch, a silent shape lay hidden on a rough flank of the Meseta de las Vizcachas at the southern tip of the Andean Mountains. The flight from Antarctica had been irksome and boring, for the pilot had held his speed to a mere eight hundred kilometers per hour and his altitude to less than a thousand meters. He hadn't enjoyed that, but he had also had no choice, for he had encountered an irritatingly high number of radar sources as he approached Cape Horn. Despite all earlier expectations, the tension between Buenos Aires and London was on the boil again, and the United Kingdom—already facing an increasingly chaotic situation in Southeastern Europe and suspicious that Argentina hoped that chaos would distract it from other matters—was determined that there would be no repeat of the Falklands War. The British military presence in the Falkland Islands had been substantially reinforced over the past eighteen months, and now both sides glared at one another through the invisible beams of their radar installations.

The Troll had neither known nor cared why there was so much electronic activity. It was simply one more problem to be dealt with, and his threat receivers and onboard computers had analyzed busily away. The primitive nature of the detection systems baffled his usual ECM equipment, but once he had a broader database it should be relative child's play to adjust for it, he decided. In the meantime, he'd descended to an altitude of fifty meters and crept under them with no more than a flicker of resentment that he must slink along in such a fashion.

He'd picked his hiding place with care, settling into a craggy pocket on the mesa's flank before he deployed three of his combat mechs. They'd whined off into the darkness, nearly silent on their anti-gravs, to swoop upon the mobile radar station the Argentine Air Force had placed near Cape Blanco to cover a blind spot. It had amused him to borrow his erstwhile masters' "sampling" technique, but the results had been disappointing.

His internal visual pickup swiveled dispassionately over the tightly curled figure on the floor of his cramped "control room." The motionless human wore the uniform of a captain in the Argentine Air Force, and at least its sobbing whimpers had finally stopped. So had its mental processes, unfortunately. The Troll felt a glow of disgust as he regarded his victim. The humans of his own time had been far tougher than this worthless piece of carrion. It was disturbing to reflect that he shared a common genetic heritage with it.

Still, there were extenuating circumstances, he supposed. This business of insinuating himself into human brains wasn't quite as straightforward as he'd assumed it would be, though it didn't occur to him that only his own arrogance had suggested that it would be simple.

The inert lump of flesh on his deck had been terrified when a trio of silent, metallic shapes invaded its isolated radar post, but it had tried. The Troll had to allow the captain that much—it had tried. It had called frantically for assistance, but the Troll's mechanical minions had jammed all its communication circuits even before they crossed the post's perimeter and butchered the paratroopers assigned to provide security. The captain and its men had rushed out of the command trailer, and it had emptied its Browning automatic into one of the combat mechs at point-blank range. In fact, it had actually reloaded with trembling fingers and emptied its weapon a second time in the moments the war machines took to slaughter its small team of technicians, but its pistol had been as futile as the paras' assault rifles.

The uselessness of its weapons in the face of the otherworldly attack had replaced fear with horror and panic at last . . . or perhaps it had been the realization that it alone survived. It had turned to flee, but the IR systems of the combat mechs had picked it out of the darkness like a glowing beacon. In part, the Troll blamed himself for what had happened after that, but he'd been unable to resist the pleasure of drawing out the pursuit until the madly fleeing human collapsed in sweating, whimpering terror in the clammy fog. Only then had the combat mech closed in with the capture field and carried the twitching body away while its companions piled the dead in and around the trailer and set it afire.

The flames had arced into the heavens, turning droplets of fog into glittering tears of blood and gold, as the soulless mechanisms withdrew. Secondary explosions of generator fuel and ammunition had disemboweled the trailer, dismembering and scattering the victims' bodies, and the Troll had been content. He had his specimen, and even if he didn't understand the tensions which afflicted the region, he had observed enough to know there were two sides in conflict. He felt confident the side he had attacked would blame the other for it.

But Captain Santiago had proven a frustratingly imperfect prize. The Troll was fairly certain the human had begun to crack even before it recovered consciousness within the hidden fighter, but its mind had collapsed completely under the defilement and physical agony of his clumsy invasion. The Troll's grasping mental tendrils had time to snatch only the most jumbled of gestalts from the crumbling ruin before it lapsed into merciful catatonia, and nothing he'd tried had been able to drag it back from the escape of its self-imposed non-thought.

The Troll snarled a mental curse and summoned a combat mech. The machine whirred in on the big, low-pressure tires it used for ground movement and lifted the fetal curl of flesh in tireless arms. The Troll left the machine to its autonomous programming, too frustrated with his own clumsiness to find his usual pleasure in observing the death of a human, however mad, as the mech carried the captain outside and killed it.

The interior lighting fell to its normal, feeble levels, and the Troll considered the fragmentary information he'd gleaned. He had only a vague notion of who these "British" enemies of the captain were, but he had learned enough to be disinterested in them. He had, however, been surprised by how few nuclear-armed power blocs there were on this planet—surely that indicated an even cruder level of technology than he had anticipated? But it seemed that the only true so-called superpower lay further to the north on this same land mass. That was interesting. And it had an elective form of government. That was even more interesting.

The combat mech returned from its task, leaving behind a smoking pit containing a few ashy flakes of Captain Hector Santiago y Santos, Feurza Aerea Argentina. The hatch closed behind it, and four hundred feet of night-black silence rose into the dripping night with less sound than an indrawn breath. It skirted the southern slopes of La Meseta de las Vizcachas and dipped down into the valleys of the Andes, moving slowly and steadily north.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The US Navy CH-53E Super Stallion hovered above the helipad on USS McKee's afterdeck, navigation lights twinkling as it sank slowly onto the brightly lit landing circle, and Mordecai Morris made himself sit motionless in its red-lit, noisy belly by sheer force of will.

He turned his head and smiled at Jayne Hastings. Did he look as unnatural in his flight suit and helmet as she did? He was certain he looked equally tired, at least, he thought, running his aching mind back over the journey which had brought them here.

On the face of it, the whole thing was preposterous, and only the fact that Admiral McLain also knew Dick Aston could account for it. Even so, he'd been incredulous and a bit incensed by the paucity of the information Morris had for him. In the end, though, CINCLANT had agreed that if there was the slightest possibility Aston really was onto something the trip had to be made, and things had begun to roll.

Their original plan to fly out on an Air Force B-1B scheduled for a training mission to Britain had been scrubbed when the South Atlantic suddenly turned hot. Morris shook his head sadly, wondering what had gone wrong. He had many contacts in the Royal Navy, and he'd been positive the Brits contemplated no offensive action. But something had hit the fan down there, and the Argentinean charges of unprovoked attacks and the massacre and mutilation of prisoners sounded ugly, indeed. It was too bad the US hadn't had a recon bird up to see what was going on for itself, but it appeared that the first the Brits knew of it had been a sudden, totally unexpected strike on one of their LPH assault ships by a quartet of the Mirage 2000-5s which had finally replaced the venerable Super Entendards as Argentina's primary launch platform for the Exocet.

HMS Ocean had been on station off the Falklands with the better part of a full battalion of the Royal Marines on board when the surprise attack caught her at sea. Her close-in defenses had managed to stop two or three missiles, but the others had gotten through. She'd simply blown up, and, in the face of horrible casualties, the UK had responded in strength. The reports were still coming in, filtered to him through Navy channels even out here, but it sounded like the tanker-supported Tornado squadrons the RAF had deployed three months ago were beating holy hell out of the Argies' airfields. The reports indicated the Brits' decision to base a pair of E-3D AWACS aircraft on Port Stanley was paying dividends, too; they'd apparently hacked over thirty Argy attack planes and fighters out of the sky in the past twelve hours.

But the sudden carnage had captured the Air Force's attention—especially when Argentina indignantly accused the US of complicity in the initial British attack. And if their claims were accurate, they had a point, Morris admitted unhappily, for the US diplomatic corps and intelligence agencies had assured Buenos Aires that no British offensive action was planned. At any rate, the Air Force had decided to keep the big bombers closer to home.

The shooting in the South Atlantic made this a terrible time for CINCLANT's top intelligence types to be elsewhere, yet Admiral McLain had not wavered. He had a battle group built around the carriers Nimitz and Washington heading south just in case, but he'd sent Morris and Hastings off anyway. In default of the B-1, he'd put them aboard an S-3 Viking, and the carrier-based antisub aircraft had delivered them to the RAF airfield at Stornoway, Scotland, after a five-hour flight which would live forever in Morris's memory. The terrible weather had given him a whole new respect for the men who flew patrols aboard the four-place aircraft, and the fact that the flight crew were not allowed to ask questions about the absence of their normal tactical crew hadn't made the flight a particularly sociable experience.

At least the weather had improved as they approached the British Isles, and the helicopter flight from Stornoway to Holy Loch wouldn't have been too bad, except for the fact that helicopters had to be the noisiest form of transport yet invented by man. Every muscle ached, and the stump of his right leg throbbed. Dick had better have a damned good reason, Morris thought with yet another stab of resentment and anticipation.
* * *

"They'll be down in about ten minutes, Milla," Aston warned.

Ludmilla looked up from the paper wreckage littering Lieutenant Shu's cramped office and shrugged. She looked completely rested, he thought with just a trace of jealousy. She was clear-eyed and her face was relaxed—in sharp contrast to his own red-rimmed eyes and tension. She'd made him shower and shave, and his body appreciated the sense of freshness, but he knew it was false energy.

"I'm about as ready as I can be," she said calmly. She turned her head and smiled; Lieutenant Shu was bent over her desk, head pillowed on her folded arms, and a faintly audible snore came from her. Ludmilla rose quietly, took Aston's elbow, and led him back to the isolation section without disturbing the doctor. An armed Marine corporal followed them, then joined the sentry already there.

"You're sure you can decide without the doc?" Aston asked as soon as the door closed behind them.

"Positive," Ludmilla said confidently, then qualified her statement. "Or let's say as positive as I can be. There's an element of risk, but I think it's acceptable. It'll have to be, won't it?" Her clipped accent had sharpened, burning through the carefully cultivated softening she'd worked on so hard. It was the only sign of anxiety she showed.

"What's the verdict to date, then?"

"Admiral Rose is safe," Ludmilla said, "but not Captain Helsing. Nor, I'm sorry to say, is Doctor Shu. The XO is all right, and so are most of the Marine officers." She shrugged again. "Other than that, the numbers seem about what they'd've been back home. It looks like thirty-six of the hundred and ten we tested could be picked up by the Troll."

"Um. At least Jack's okay," Aston said, rubbing his bald pate wearily. "If worse comes to worst, we can tell him even if we can't tell M&M or Commander Hastings."

"Don't borrow trouble, Dick. We'll know soon enough, and then—"

She broke off as someone knocked quietly on the hatch.



Mordecai Morris was impressed by the security Aston seemed to deem appropriate. The decks were deserted, as were the passages between helipad and sickbay, but McKee's Marine detachment was in evidence—and armed. Not just with side arms, either.

Their Marine lieutenant guide stopped outside sickbay, and the two sentries there came to attention as he knocked on the hatch.

"Enter," a deep voice called, and the lieutenant opened the hatch and stood aside. Morris and Hastings exchanged speaking glances as they passed between the armed guards, then turned their attention to the two people awaiting them.

They both recognized Aston, and Morris was struck by his exhaustion. He looked spruce enough, but his eyes were red and swollen and his face was weary. He was in civilian dress, but the young woman—girl, rather—sitting on the edge of the bed wore a weird combination of Navy dungarees and one of those gaudy, silk-screened tee-shirts Morris loathed and abominated.

He was surprised to find anyone with Aston, and that prompted him to give the girl another, longer look. She returned his regard levelly, with neither uncertainty nor the arrogance some teenagers used to mask any lack of assurance, and she was a good-looking kid. Not beautiful, but striking—especially with those incredible blue eyes. A little more muscular than he liked, but, then, he was indolent by nature.

"Mordecai," Aston said, and extended his hand. Morris felt the big, calloused hand envelop his with its customary combination of crushing strength and careful restraint and hoped he looked less worn out than Aston.

"Dick." He squeezed back, then nodded to Hastings. "You know Jayne Hastings, I think?"

"We've met." Aston extended his hand to the lieutenant commander in turn. She smiled, but her green eyes burned behind her glasses.

"All right, folks," Aston continued more briskly, "before we do anything else, we need to see your EEGs."

"Dick, what the—"

"Bear with me, M&M," Aston said softly, and Morris was surprised by the almost entreating note in his powerful voice. That silenced him, and he opened his briefcase and dragged out several folded sheets of paper.

"All right, Dick," he sighed. "Here. And Admiral McLain figured it might be as well to send his along, too."

"He did? Four-oh!" Aston exclaimed. "I knew you were a persuasive bastard!" He took the EEGs and, to Morris's surprise (though why anything should surprise him at this point eluded him), handed them to the girl. "Here, Milla," he said, and Morris made his eyebrows stay put despite the odd gentleness in Dick's voice. Could he—? No! It was preposterous.

The girl sat cross-legged on the bed and spread the charts over her lap. She looked like a Girl Scout practicing origami, Morris thought, but her smooth young face was intent. She ran a rosy fingertip across the first graph, clearly searching for something, then set it aside to check the second. Then the third. She looked up at Aston and drew a deep breath, her eyes brightening with what could only be relief, as she nodded.

"Clean sweep," she said softly. "All three of them."

"Thank God," Aston murmured reverently, and sank into the chair by the bed. Morris stared at him in consternation as he rubbed his bald head. It was a gesture Morris had seen often, but Aston's rock-steady fingers had never trembled before, not even after the firefight in Amman.

"Dick?" His friend's reaction had banished his last frustration. The pressure under which this ill-assorted pair labored was too obvious.

"Sorry, Mordecai." Aston shook his head and managed a tired smile. "You'll be pleased to know that you two—and Admiral McLain—belong to a select group. One cleared for the whole story, as it were. Sit down."

He gestured at the extra chairs crowding the small compartment, and the intelligence officers sat wordlessly, staring first at each other and then at him.

"People," he said slowly, "we've been invaded." He saw their shoulders stiffen and grinned tiredly. "In fact, we've been invaded twice—once by the bad guys and once by the good guys. Unfortunately, it looks like the bad guys have the force advantage, and, unless we can figure out how to turn things around, we're all in one hell of a mess."

He had their undivided attention, and the absurdity of the situation appealed to his sense of humor. He repressed an exhaustion-spawned urge to giggle and cleared his throat, instead.

"Commander Morris, Lieutenant Commander Hastings, allow me to introduce the good guys," he said, waving a hand at Ludmilla. "This is Colonel Ludmilla Leonovna, people—not a Russian," he added quickly, seeing the same initial assumption in both pairs of eyes and remembering his own first reaction. Amusement strengthened his voice. "Not even a Terran, really. You see, she comes from Sigma Draconis. . . ."



" . . . so that's the story," Aston finished three hours later, and the intelligence officers shook their heads in unison. The tale he and Ludmilla had told was incredible, preposterous, impossible to believe . . . and carried the unmistakable ring of truth.

"Dear God," Morris said softly, speaking for the first time in over half an hour. "Dear sweet God in Heaven."

"Amen," Hastings said, equally softly, but there was worry in her eyes. She rubbed the tip of her nose gently for several seconds, then glanced sharply at Ludmilla.

"Excuse me, Colonel—" she began.

"Please, Ludmilla. Or Milla," Ludmilla interrupted.

"All right, Ludmilla," Hastings agreed. "But I've got two burning questions for you."

"Only two?" Ludmilla asked with a crooked smile.

"Two immediate ones," Hastings acknowledged with a shadow of an answering smile. "First, and most pressingly, there's the matter of this symbiote of yours. You say it's transmitted by direct blood transfer?"

"Yes."

"Then I think we have a problem," Hastings said softly. "Possibly a very serious one." Ludmilla raised an eyebrow, inviting her to continue. "Mosquitoes," Hastings said softly, and felt Morris stiffen beside her.

"Don't worry," Ludmilla said quickly. "Believe me, the Normals of my own time worried about the same thing, but we never found a single instance of transmission by any insect or vermin vector."

"Why not?" Hastings asked sharply.

"Two reasons," Ludmilla replied imperturbably. "First, our symbiotes don't seem to approve of insect bites; they exude a sort of natural insect repellent. But the second reason is even more effective. It takes the average human a little less than twelve hours to go into crisis if she's infected with the symbiote, but it acts a lot faster on smaller life forms and none of them survive. Any bug that bites me will be dead before it gets its proboscis out of my bloodstream. It'll never live long enough to transmit it to anyone else."

"Oh." Hastings mulled that over for a moment, then nodded slowly. "But what about insects on your home planet?" she asked curiously. "If they're immune because of their different amino acids . . . ?"

"Commander Hastings," Ludmilla said gently, "one of Midgard's main tourist attractions is that the local insects don't like the taste of humans."

"That would be an attraction," Hastings agreed with a smile, and Ludmilla felt her spirits rise. That smile carried acceptance as well as amusement. For a moment, she'd been afraid Hastings was going to turn paranoid on her. She'd seen too many people of her own time do exactly the same, and with far less reason.

"But you said you had a second question?" she prompted after a minute.

"Oh, yes! I don't pretend to be an expert, but it occurs to me that this whole thing represents a causal nightmare."

"I couldn't agree more," Ludmilla said sincerely.

"Well, if we accept causality at all, then it sounds to me like we're faced with the disagreement between the Copenhagen school and the Many-Worlds interpretation," Hastings said. "The whole question of what happens when the superposition collapses and—"

"Jayne," Morris said sternly, "I've warned you about talking gibberish."

"Oh, hush, Mordecai!" his disrespectful junior shot back, but she paused. "All right, in simple terms the problem is how Colonel Leonovna—Ludmilla—and this Troll creature can change their own past. On the face of it, the very notion negates the entire concept of causality."

"The old `can I kill my grandfather' thing?" Morris mused.

"More or less. The point is, what's happening represents a significant alteration to history. Ludmilla, did your records contain any mention of what happened to Task Force Twenty-Three?"

"No. And my hobby interest was military history. If there'd been any record of an authenticated attack on any Terran military force by UFOs, I'd've known about it, believe me."

"So we already have a gross shift in your history," Hastings pointed out. "Presumably, the effort we'll have to mobilize to do anything effective about this Troll will have an even greater effect. If nothing else, we know these Kanga creatures exist." She smiled unpleasantly. "Knowing that, I think we can confidently assume that their reception will be even more energetic than it `was' in your own past. But the end result will be that your universe will never come into existence at all!"

"I know," Ludmilla said softly.

"But if it doesn't, then you won't come back, and if you don't come back, then it will," Morris said slowly, rubbing his forehead as he tried to understand. "What do we have here—some kind of loop?"

"That's where the Many-Worlds Theory comes in," Hastings said. "But even if Everett was right—" She shook her head. "I don't even know where to start looking for questions, much less what the answers might be!"

"Neither does anyone where I come from," Ludmilla said wryly. "Look, the whole theory behind a Takeshita Translation is just that: theory. No one's ever tried one—or reported back afterward, anyway—and the argument over what ought to happen during one has gone on for a century and a half.

"Jayne, you mentioned the Copenhagen School and the Many-Worlds Theory. We don't use that terminology anymore, but I know what you mean, and the fundamental problem remains, because there's still no way to test either theory." Aston and Morris looked utterly confused, and she made a face.

"Bear with me a minute, you two," she said, "and I'll do my ignorant best to explain, all right?" They nodded, and she went on.

"In its simplest terms, what Jayne is talking about is one of the major problems involved in understanding quantum mechanics. There's been a lot of progress since the twenty-first century, but I'm just a fighter jock." She used Aston's terminology with a wry grin.

"Essentially, there's been a dispute over the basic nature of what we fondly call `reality' almost since Einstein. According to the math, any possible interaction—or, rather, the result of any interaction—is a superposition of functions, each of which represents one possible outcome of the interaction. With me so far?"

"Are you saying that mathematically speaking any of the outcomes is equally valid?" Aston sounded skeptical, and she patted his bald pate playfully.

"For a nullwit, that's not bad," she said teasingly. "Not quite right, but it'll do for starts. You see, the problem is that for any interaction, we observe one—and only one—outcome, but the math says the potential for all possible outcomes is bound up in the event. Now, what Jayne is calling the Copenhagen School says that at the moment a wave function—" She paused and grimaced, then resumed as if re-selecting her words. "Well, at the moment an interaction occurs, the whole thing collapses into a single one of the elements of possibility, and the others never come into existence at all. The potentiality of all outcomes remains up until that moment, and none of them can be absolutely ruled out, but a weighted probability distribution can be assigned to them, which allows the effective prediction of which single event will actually occur. Follow me?"

"Yes, but I'm losing a little ground. How about you, Mordecai."

"Quit asking me to expose my ignorance. You were saying, Colonel?"

"All right. An alternative hypothesis, proposed sometime in the last century, says, simply, that rather than a single event, all possible outcomes occur, however `probable' or `improbable' they may be. We observe only one, true, but that's because the others occur on different `stems' of reality."

"Parallel worlds, right?" Aston nodded. "Our sci-fi writers love 'em."

"They still do back home," Ludmilla assured him. "Anyway, Jayne's Copenhagen School—we call it the Classic School—maintains that there is one and only one reality; a single, linear reality in which the single realized outcome of each interaction is defined and creates the preconditions for the next. What we call the Revisionist School—Jayne's `Many-Worlds' theory—has gained a tremendous amount of ground in the last couple of hundred years, though, and some of its proponents claim that eventually they'll be able to demonstrate its validity through some esoteric manipulation of the multi-dee. I've seen the math on it, and it gives me headaches just to think about it; I certainly don't understand it. But the Revisionist School says that instead of a single reality, there are multiple realities, all branching off from a common initial source, all equally `real,' but never interfacing."

"So where does all this fit into time travel?" Aston asked, but a gleam in his weary eyes suggested that he saw where she was headed.

"There are three main theories as to what happens in a Takeshita Translation," Ludmilla said. "One says that the whole thing is impossible; anyone who tries one simply goes acoherent and stays there. It's neat, at least, but my survival is empirical evidence that it doesn't work.

"Theory number two is Takeshita's First Hypothesis, and it says that anyone making a Takeshita Translation travels backward along the single reality stem of the Classic School. There are some problems with it, but, essentially, it says that when the traveler stops moving—drops back into phase with reality, as it were—he becomes an event which has been superimposed upon the reality stem. He, personally, exists, wherever he came from and however he got there. But since he exists, he can affect the universe, which will inevitably affect the nature of reality `downstream' from him, with the result that—as Commander Morris put it—you really could murder your grandfather without erasing yourself. Your existence is pegged to a reality which preexists the one in which you were never born.

"Takeshita spent years on the math to support that theory, but in the last years of his life he became convinced that the Revisionists had been right all along, which created a furor amongst his followers, I can tell you! Anyway, he propounded his Second Hypothesis, which says, essentially, that the classic arguments against paradox are valid after all—that it's impossible for an individual to move into his own past. By the act of moving backward in time, he does, indeed, superimpose his existence on events, but, in the process, he causes the stream of reality to split off another tributary. In effect, he avoids paradox by forcing a divergence of `his' subsequent personal reality line from the one which created him.

"The problem, of course," she ended with a whimsical smile, "is that no hard experimental data was ever available. Until now, that is."

Silence threatened to stretch out indefinitely until Jayne Hastings finally broke it.

"So which theory's correct?" she asked softly.

"Let's start with the basics," Ludmilla suggested. "I am here—and so is the Troll. Task Force Twenty-Three was attacked and did shoot down two Troll fighters. Those facts seem to prove that whatever happened is possible, and, further, that the Troll can do whatever it intends to do unless we stop it. Those are the pragmatic considerations. Agreed?"

Three heads nodded, and she went on.

"All right. My own feeling is that Takeshita's Second Hypothesis applies, which means that the Revisionists were right, of course. And it also means that I'm not in my past, which neatly explains the absence of any recorded nuclear attack on a US Navy task force in 2007. It didn't happen in my reality—it happened in yours."

"You mean . . . you're not just from the future, you're from someone else's future?" Aston sounded a bit shaken.

"Why not? Nick Miyagi could have explained it a lot better—he always did support the Second Hypothesis." Ludmilla smiled sadly. "He almost took time to argue the point with me when we saw it happening. But, yes, that's right. I'm not from your reality—your `universe'—at all, Dick."

"But . . ." Hastings frowned as she worked through the implications. "Excuse me again, but you seem to be saying you more than half-expected the Kangas to wind up in somebody else's past."

"I did."

"Then why try to stop them?" Hastings asked very quietly. "You say your battle division was totally destroyed, along with thousands and thousands of your people. Your own fighter squadron was destroyed—in fact, you're the only survivor from your entire force. Why in God's name take such losses when these `Kangas' couldn't even hurt your time line at all?"

"Two reasons, really, I suppose," Ludmilla said after a moment. "First, of course, we couldn't be certain. Remember, Takeshita offered two hypotheses, and neither had ever been tested. What if he'd been right the first time, and the Kangas had changed our own history?" Hastings nodded slowly, but the question remained in her eyes, and Ludmilla smiled sadly.

"Then there was the second reason," she said softly. "Whoever's past they wound up in, we knew there was going to be a human race in it. Not our own ancestors, perhaps, but still an entire planet full of human beings. Commodore Santander and I never actually discussed it, but we didn't have to. We know what Kangas and Trolls are like. There was no way we could have lived with ourselves if we'd let them murder our entire race in any time line."

Silence hovered in the compartment, and Aston reached out to clasp her hand. She returned his grip tightly enough to hurt—tightly enough to give the lie to her calm expression—and his heart ached for her. She wasn't simply adrift in time; she was adrift in a totally different, utterly alien universe, where none of the worlds she'd known would ever even come into existence. And she was the one—and only—creature of her kind who would ever exist here.

She looked at him for a moment, then smiled. He recognized the courage behind that bright, cheerful expression, but no hint of her total aloneness showed in her voice as she looked back at Hastings.

"And wherever I am, and however I got here, Commander, you've got a Troll on your hands, don't you?" Hastings nodded, and Ludmilla shrugged. "Well, that's something I understand in anyone's universe, and killing Trolls is what I do. So what do you say we put our heads together and figure out how to kill this one."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

    deception n. 1. The use of deceit. 2. State or fact of being deceived. 3. Ruse; trickery; imposture. [Middle English decepcioun, from Latin decipere, to deceive.]

            —Webster-Wangchi Unabridged Dictionary of Standard English Tomas y Hijos, Publishers
            2465, Terran Standard Reckoning

             

The office of Vice Admiral Anson McLain, Commander in Chief Atlantic Fleet, was almost stark. Furniture was sparse, and the walls bore none of the usual outsized portraits of sailing ships or World War Two carriers fighting off kamikazes. Instead, they were adorned with framed photos of the sleek, high-tech warships of Admiral McLain's early twenty-first-century fleet, although a beautiful painting of two of the Iowa-class battleships which had recently been stricken at last to become memorial ships held pride of place behind his oversized desk.

McLain was tough as nails, young for his rank, and black. Regarded by some as the most brilliant naval officer of his generation, he'd paid his dues to crack the traditionally white ranks of the Navy's senior flag officers by being, quite simply, the best there was, of any color. He was a carrier man, a highly decorated pilot with four kills over the Persian Gulf, who had outraged big-ship aviators by supporting construction of Seawolf attack subs and supersonic V/STOL fighters at the expense of a thirteenth Nimitz-class carrier. That was typical of him, Commander Morris thought; Anson McLain did what he thought right, whatever the cost and without a trace of hesitation.

But at the moment, CINCLANT wore a definitely harassed look. Roosevelt was in for repairs, reducing his total deployable flight decks by a sixth, and two more CVNs had been diverted to watch the extremely nasty Falklands situation. Which left McLain's carriers understrength by half for normal deployments at a moment when the Balkans were heating up again. The fact that the People's Republic of China had just commissioned its second carrier didn't help matters one bit, but McLain, the CNO, and the JCS had twisted CINCPAC's arm hard enough to get the newest Nimitz, USS Midway, transferred from Pearl Harbor to the Atlantic. She was en route to reinforce him now, but for the present, he was stretched thin, indeed.

Far worse, Anson McLain had lost people. He was a cool, analytical man, but he was also implacable. Somehow, someday, he would discover who or what had killed or blinded a thousand of his people, and when he did—

Which explained the fiery light in his normally calm eyes.

"Well, Mordecai," he said mildly, standing and holding out his hand, "I hope your little jaunt was productive."

"It was, Sir," Morris replied as CINCLANT released his hand and gestured to a chair. "Captain Aston does know what happened, and why."

"I'm glad to hear that," McLain said softly, and his tone made Morris shiver. It reminded the commander forcibly of Colonel Ludmilla Leonovna. "But what, if you'll pardon my asking, was all the mystery about?"

"That, Sir, is going to be a bit hard to explain," Morris said slowly. He and Jayne Hastings had spent an intense twenty-four hours with Aston and Ludmilla, hammering out what needed to be done, and Morris was only too well aware how much depended on McLain's reaction. He knew his boss better than most, but he also knew what he was about to ask CINCLANT to believe.

"Then you'd better start, M&M," McLain said simply, and the commander drew a deep breath.

"Yes, Sir. To begin with . . ."

 

Unlike anyone else to whom the story had yet been told, Admiral McLain sat silently, elbows on his desk, chin on the backs of his interlaced fingers, without a single question. CINCLANT hated people who interrupted to demonstrate their own cleverness rather than waiting for the briefing officer to cover the points they were raising, but Morris found it a bit unnerving that the admiral could listen to this story with his usual calm.

He reached the end and stopped, painfully aware of how insane the whole thing sounded. McLain regarded him expressionlessly for a moment, toying with a presentation coffee mug from the crew of his last seagoing command. He ran a dark fingertip over the raised crest of the CVN Harry S. Truman and pursed his lips, then leaned well back in his swivel chair.

"A good brief, Mordecai," he said finally, steepling his fingers across his flat, hard belly muscles. "I only have one question."

"Sir?" Morris asked, hoping he looked less anxious than he felt.

"Do you believe a word of it?"

"Yes, Sir. I do." Morris met the admiral's eyes levelly.

"And this Colonel Leonovna is available to answer questions directly?"

"Yes, Sir." Morris was baffled by McLain's calm reaction. "Of course, we—Captain Aston and I, that is—are keeping her under wraps."

"How so?"

"We put her on a MAC flight as a Navy dependent and flew her into Virginia Beach, then hustled her out of sight. She and Captain Aston are at my home right now, keeping a very low profile."

"Really?" McLain smiled for the first time since Morris had begun his report. "And how is your wife taking all this?"

"Rhoda thinks Colonel Leonovna is Captain Aston's niece, Sir. We don't know what her EEG looks like."

"Um." CINCLANT pursed his lips again. "You are aware of just how incredible this all sounds, aren't you, M&M?"

"Yes, Sir. All I can tell you is what I believe to be the truth, Sir. That's what you pay me for."

"I see. All right, then, first things first," McLain said calmly, and reached for the phone on his desk. He punched in a number with slow deliberation and waited for an answer.

"Good afternoon," he said into the phone after a moment, swinging his chair slightly from side to side, "this is Admiral McLain. Please inform Admiral Horning that I must speak with him for a moment." He paused for a few seconds, and his face hardened slightly. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant," he said levelly, "but you're just going to have to interrupt them, then."

Morris tried to appear calm. Admiral Franklin Horning was the Surgeon General of the United States, and the commander could think of several unpleasant reasons for his boss to seek a medical opinion.

"Frank?" McLain leaned forward in his chair, and his eyes rested on Morris's face. There might have been the hint of a twinkle in them, Morris thought anxiously, as if the admiral could read his mind and was amused by what he was thinking. "Sorry to interrupt your conference, but I need a favor. I warn you—it's going to sound a little strange." He paused as Admiral Horning said something in reply, then chuckled. "Nope, stranger. You see, Frank, I need to see the President's EEG."

Morris had no idea of exactly how Horning responded to that, but as the commander sagged in his chair in relief, McLain winced and moved the phone away from his ear.

 

The Troll felt a slow, familiar throb of rage. His fragmentary information from Captain Santiago had not included the fact that so many radar stations guarded the Panama Canal Zone, and he'd been forced well out over the Pacific to avoid them, only to find the entire western coast of this "United States" covered by a seemingly solid belt of radar emissions. For a moment he'd wondered if they had somehow learned of his coming, but then he'd noted the large numbers of crude aircraft in evidence. So it was some sort of navigational control system, was it? Or, he amended, some of it was, anyway, for on a world so riddled with national competition and suspicions, there had to be military installations, as well.

The need to avoid detection by such primitives infuriated him. The hunger for destruction was upon him once more, and he longed for a few of the ARADs his dead masters had expended upon that never-to-be-sufficiently-accursed naval task force, but he mastered his fury sternly. Time enough for that, he reminded himself. Time enough when he knew more. When he was ready. For now he must be cautious.

He was. He brought his fighter down to within meters of the ocean and crept in slowly, tasting the radar pulses, seeking out chinks in the electronic fence. He found one and slid through it, crossing the coast in darkness at the mouth of the Rogue River. He settled into the Cascade Range just south of Crater Lake National Park and activated his servomechs to camouflage his vessel. He would not be here long, he hoped, but until he departed he could not afford to be disturbed.

He programmed the servomechs carefully, then turned to his other task. He shaped a careful mental hook and cast it out into the world about him, questing for prey. Somewhere out there were minds he could touch. Minds he could strip of the information he required.

He only had to find them.

 

"You mean to tell me we've been invaded by monsters from outer space?" the President of the United States demanded, staring at Vice Admiral McLain and the pudgy, rumpled commander beside him. "Are you serious, Admiral?"

"By one monster, Mister President," McLain corrected. He shrugged. "When Commander Morris came to me with it yesterday, I was only half-convinced. After speaking to Colonel Leonovna last night and seeing the artifacts she brought with her, I no longer doubt any of it. In my considered opinion, she's telling the exact truth."

"My God." The President stared at the admiral, but the initial shock was passing. He'd been astonished when the Atlantic Fleet commander requested a personal meeting to discuss "a grave national emergency," and even more when he discovered that neither the Chief of Naval Operations, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nor even the Secretary of Defense knew anything about it. Had it been anyone else, the President would have refused with a curt, pointed comment about normal channels, but President Armbruster knew McLain's reputation well enough to know he was not given to fits of temporary insanity.

That faith in the admiral had been sorely tried when he heard what McLain had to say, yet it had been enough to get him a hearing. And now, to his own considerable surprise, Armbruster found that he was actually inclined to believe him.

"A question, Admiral," he said finally. "Why didn't you go through channels with this? Admiral Jurawski and Secretary Cone are a bit upset, you know."

"Both the CNO and the Secretary have expressed their disapproval to me, Mister President," McLain said with a faint smile. "Unfortunately, while I have not been able to examine Admiral Jurawski's EEG, I have managed to get my hands on Secretary Cone's. He's not on the safe list, Sir."

"I see." The President leaned back in his chair and nodded. The admiral was right—always assuming that he was not, in fact, insane. If there was a particle of truth in this fantastic story, absolutely no risks must be run. "But I am `on the safe list'?" he asked wryly.

"You are, Sir. Unfortunately, however, the Vice President isn't."

"Shit." President Armbruster reminded many people of Harry Truman—verbally, if not physically—despite his staunch Republicanism.

"Yes, Sir. The Surgeon General provided me with your records—most reluctantly, I might add."

"I can believe that," Armbruster snorted. "The old bastard has a nineteenth-century code of honor. It goes with the job."

"I realize that, Sir. Fortunately, he knows me rather well and I was able to convince him . . . eventually."

"If—and I say if, Admiral—this story holds up, the neurologists of Washington will be doing land-office business in the next few days," the President said.

"Yes, Sir."

"All right." Armbruster slapped his desk explosively. "Bring me this Colonel Leonovna, Admiral. Tonight after supper—say about eight. I'll have a word with the security types and see to it that she gets in." He snorted at a sudden thought. "I'd better come up with another name for her, I suppose. Something non-Russian." He thought for a moment, then grinned. "Ross, Admiral. Miss Elizabeth Ross."

"Yes, Sir."

"And, Admiral," Armbruster said softly as the officers rose to leave.

"Sir?"

"You'd better not be blowing smoke up my august presidential ass on this one, Admiral."

"Understood, Mister President."

"I'm glad, Admiral. Good day."

 

Late afternoon sunlight coated the hidden fighter in glory and gold, but the Troll paid no heed. His attention was on things far more important, for his mind had touched another he might probe. He started to stab out, then forced himself to pause. He must take more time with this one, feel his way more cautiously. And that meant he must bring the mind to him, so that he might dissect it at leisure.

He "listened," refusing to open the two-way link just yet, and surface impressions trickled into his brain. He studied them carefully, seeing the face of a male human inches from his own and trying to understand the warm tingle of excitement as the face bent closer, pressing its lips to those of the one he'd reached.

It was a pity the male was blocked to him. He could have used them both, but one would do—for now. He took careful note of direction and distance, then activated two of his combat mechs.

They departed noiselessly, drifting through the forest shadows on silent anti-gravs, and the Troll returned to his tenuous link. Fascinating, he thought. So this was what the human mating ritual was like.

 

Annette Foreman sighed happily, snuggling against her husband in their shared sleeping bag. She always felt deliciously wicked making love on one of their camping trips, especially when they pitched camp early. She felt Jeff's hands stroking her flanks and nipped the side of his neck gently.

"Ouch!" He laughed, and pinched her firm bottom in retaliation. She squealed happily. "That'll teach you!" he said, as his hands did other, magic things. "And so will—"

He broke off, and she felt him stiffen. Her eyes flared open in sudden anticipation of embarrassment. Oh, no! She'd always known someone might interrupt them, that was part of what made it feel so wicked, but—

"What the hell?" Jeff raised himself on his elbow, and she turned her head, staring in the direction of his gaze.

She stiffened herself as she saw the two strange shapes emerging from under the trees, and her eyes widened. No! There was no such thing!

The two shapes floated a yard above the ground, sweeping closer with snakelike speed, yet so silent they seemed to drift, and the two humans watched in frozen disbelief as they climbed the slope towards them.

Jeff Foreman reacted first. Everything about those alien shapes—from their silent movement to the strange, golden alloy and stranger curves of their forms—roused a primal terror within him. He didn't know what they were, but he didn't have to. The caveman in his soul smelled danger, and he hurled himself out of the sleeping bag, heedless of his nudity, and reached for the short-hafted camp ax.

"Run, 'Nette!" he ordered, and his wife rose to her knees in shock. She'd never heard such harsh command in his voice.

"No! Come wi—"

"Shut up and run, goddamn it!" he shouted, and Annette stumbled to her feet in automatic response.

"Jeff—" she started, and he shoved her furiously.

"Get the fuck out of here!" he screamed, and the terrible fear in his voice—fear for her, she realized sickly—compelled obedience. She turned to flee further up the hill, stones and twigs harsh under her bare soles, and her mind whirled with fragmented images of terror as she pounded up the slope. Her thoughts came in jagged shards, lacerating her with their cruel edges, and the liquid spring sunlight gilded her horror with surrealistic beauty. What were those things? What did they want? How could she leave Jeff behind?! But his desperation could not be gainsaid, and she fled as he commanded . . . even as a part of her told her coldly that he must know it was futile.

She'd made it almost to the tree line when a burst of cold, green light exploded about her. The world pinwheeled, slivering her vision like some Impressionist nightmare of a kaleidoscope, and her scream of terror was a whimper as her voluntary muscles spasmed with a horrible, agonizing, twisting sensation. She smashed to the ground on her naked breasts and belly, barely conscious of the pain as light roared and howled in her head.

She thought she heard the clang of metal on metal, but her senses were hashed by the staticlike impact of the capture field. She fought the terrible paralysis, a prisoner in her own body, pounded by panic. There might have been another clang of metal, but then she heard a sound she could not mistake. One that drove her savagely abused awareness into the darkness on a gibbering wave of horror.

It was a scream—a dreadful, dreadful scream of agony. An inhuman sound, wrenched from a human throat she knew too well. . . .

 

"Colonel." Jared Armbruster held out his hand with the smile which had captivated millions of voters, but despite McLain's prior briefing, he was astonished by how young she looked. This was a fighter pilot? A superwoman from the distant future? The last hope of mankind? Preposterous!

But then she took his proffered hand, and he saw her cool, dark-blue eyes. In his political career, and especially in the last three years of presidential power, he'd seen many eyes. The eyes of people who wanted something, of people who feared the power of his office, of people who hated him or admired him. But never quite like these. Even foreign heads of state were aware of the power he wielded. It was there between them—a challenge to his adversaries, an invisible cloak of authority to his allies. He was surprisingly self-honest and self-deprecating, considering the driving ambition a man must have to seek the office he held, yet he'd become accustomed to seeing the reflection of presidential prestige in the eyes of those he met.

But not in these. These eyes measured him confidently—measured him, not the larger-than-life stature of the presidency—with the cool, distant impartiality of a cat. And it was in that moment, when he saw the lack of awe in Ludmilla Leonovna's face, that he truly began to believe.

"Mister President," she said simply, and her grip was stronger than that of any other woman he had ever met.

He held her hand a moment longer than protocol demanded, and she met his gaze calmly. Then he shook himself internally and smiled once more, releasing her to be introduced to Aston.

Ludmilla watched him shake Dick's hand. So this was the most powerful man on Earth. Despite her interest in history, she'd read very little about Jared Armbruster in her own time, for there had been neither wars nor major scandals to make his administration important to a military historian. Given the ominous international rumblings Dick had described to her, Armbruster must have been either very good at his job or extremely lucky to avoid the former, which seemed like a good sign. She hoped it was, at any rate, and she'd picked Dick's brain for every detail she could get about him. It hadn't been easy. Dick obviously respected Armbruster deeply, but perhaps because he knew he did, he had gone out of his way to be painstakingly honest and evenhanded in his analysis of the President.

Physically, Armbruster was about midway between her and Dick in height, his dark hair dramatically silver at the temples, and she rather liked the laugh wrinkles around his eyes even if he did seem to smile a bit too easily, with just a shade too much "spontaneous" charm. But he was a politician, she reminded herself, and it was the nature of the political animal to be charming. On the other hand, she'd asked Dick—and Mordecai—to describe the last presidential election to her in some detail as the best way to get a feel for the man who'd won it, and two things had stuck in her mind.

The first had been Mordecai's caustic description of the political insiders' reaction to the electorate's decision that presidential character mattered after all. None of the analysts had given the little-known junior senator from Montana any chance at all when Armbruster first decided to run, but that was because none of them had realized what he truly was: an honorable man whose tendency to speak his mind, sometimes just a little too colorfully but always bluntly and honestly, had resonated with the voters. It had actually convinced them to take one more shot at electing an honest President, and his campaign had crushed first the front-running candidate in his own party's primary and then an incumbent president who'd confidently anticipated that voter boredom would assure his reelection.

The second thing to stick in her mind was something Dick had said. Jared Armbruster had inherited a badly damaged office, one whose moral authority had been savagely wounded by the last two administrations, and whose prerogatives and power base had been severely curtailed by brutal infighting with the legislative branch. But he had dug in and begun the painstaking process of rebuilding with a combination of shrewdness and a determined effort to make good on his own campaign promises. He was also a staunch internationalist, who had somehow managed to convince an American public which had been intensely focused on domestic matters both to support his diplomatic initiatives and to accept that an effective military—and the investment necessary to produce one—was a vital necessity in a world which seemed determined to go to hell. Unlike Armbruster or the people who had elected him, Ludmilla knew what was waiting (or had been, in her own past, at least) less than ten years down the road . . . and that by the time the wars had finally hit in Europe, the United States' military had sufficiently recovered from its late twentieth-century nadir to keep them contained to Europe. Much of that recovery had occurred during Armbruster's administration, and the foresight and determination which had made that possible were impressive.

She had been inclined to agree with both Dick and Mordecai, based on that information alone, that Armbruster was both a good and honest man and a much more skilled politician than his defeated adversaries had allowed for. It remained to be seen whether or not he was also enough of a statesman to handle a situation like this one, yet she remembered the firmness of his grip and the intense, evaluating light in his eyes and felt a tinge of hope.

Armbruster turned away from her to shake Aston's hand, and this time he confronted something he understood. The captain was built like a defensive lineman, he thought, only bigger, and he was dauntingly fit for a man his age. He had the assurance of a professional military man, flavored by an instinctive but confident deference toward his commander-in-chief. The President was an ex-Marine, with the inbred, more-or-less tolerance for naval officers of the breed, but he recognized the tough, confident self-respect of thirty or forty years spent exercising command over one's self and others. It was something the true professionals never lost, he thought, and something the amateurs never gained.

"Captain."

"Mister President."

Armbruster liked the deep, resonant voice. He flattered himself on his judgment of men, and this one felt solid. Dependable. Above all, truthful.

"Admiral. Commander." He greeted his other guests courteously, then gestured at the chairs arranged in a comfortable conversational circle. "Won't you be seated?" he invited.

They sank into the chairs, and he offered refreshments. Of necessity, the conversation was light and inconsequential until they'd been served and the servants had withdrawn. But as the door closed—and every surveillance device, much to the unhappiness of the Secret Service, was switched off—the President turned his brown eyes to Ludmilla, and they were no longer the smiling eyes of a politician. They were dark and thoughtful, challenging without being hostile, and Ludmilla felt a surge of relief as she met them.

Yes, she thought. This man was a statesman.

"And now, Colonel `Ross,' " Armbruster said with a slight, wry smile, "suppose you tell your story in your own words."

 

The Troll's vision receptors watched the planet's single moon drift among the clouds. It was a large moon, compared to the small, red-tinged satellites of the planet where he'd been assembled, and he wondered if he felt any kinship for it. This was the world of his genetic forebears, after all, but if the silent, silver orb meant anything to him, he could not find it.

He turned his attention inward, considering his newest information. It had been . . . entertaining to acquire it. So much more enjoyable than that whimpering, broken thing he'd sampled first. This one—this "Annette" one—had been different. Terrified, yes, but not broken. Not at the start.

If the Troll had possessed lips, he would have smiled . . . and not pleasantly. The female had been frightened when the combat mech delivered it, naked and bruised, bleeding from the abrasions of its fall. Frightened, but filled with a hate that almost matched his own. An ignorant hate, one which didn't begin to understand, but a savage, knife-edged emotion he understood.

It had pleased him.

Yes, he thought happily, its defiance had pleased him. It was almost like the Shirmaksu's stimulation of his pleasure centers, only brighter, sharper . . . stronger. He had encouraged it to fight by varying the power of his probe, letting it think it had driven him out and then driving in once more until it screamed in agony. Such a frail thing, compared to the endless web of power which backed his own organic component, and so delicious. He had toyed with it, delighting in its frantic resistance and the lovely essence of its hate, hurting it and savoring the exquisite bouquet of its terror and despair.

He tasted the pleasure once more in memory, then put it firmly aside. He had recorded it; he could return to its sweetness whenever he wished.

Yet there had been more than pleasure. He'd learned much—more of technique than of substance, to be sure, for the female had known little of immediate use. But what little it had known, he knew. He had stripped that lovely, hate- and agony-filled brain to its quivering core, raping away its knowledge, and his cruelty had been more than merely an end in itself, for he had refined his technique. If he wished, he probably could brain-strip his next subject without inflicting any damage at all.

If he wished. If he wished. He savored his self-direction. The heady power to act as he chose against these puny, fragile humans and their ignorance. To exert his omnipotence upon them.

He activated an interior pickup and looked down upon the husk which had been Annette Foreman, twenty-five, a schoolteacher and the mother of a little girl who would never know what had become of her parents. The once vital face was ugly with mindlessness, bruised and streaked with blood from the lips the female had bitten ragged in its extremity.

It was a pity they were so fragile, he thought regretfully, summoning a servomech to remove the carrion. They broke so quickly. This one had lasted barely six hours. Such a pity.

 

"All right," President Armbruster said finally. The coffee table was littered with empty cups and the remains of pastry. Armbruster drained his own cup and rubbed his eyes. It was four A.M., and he had a cabinet meeting at nine, but somehow that seemed utterly unimportant at the moment.

"All right," he repeated, "I believe you." He leaned back in his chair and his eyes swept their faces, seeing the mirror of his own weariness. "As one of my predecessors—a Democrat, unfortunately—said, `The buck stops here.' "

He pinched the bridge of his nose, marshaling his thoughts, then looked at Anson McLain.

"Admiral, you did exactly the right thing. All of you did. If Colonel Leonovna is right about this cyborg—this Troll of hers—we're in the worst mess this poor, abused planet's ever faced. And, Captain—" he looked at Aston "—you called it when you said security will be a copper-plated bitch." He smiled tiredly.

"Okay. You people have earned your pay, now it's time I earn mine. Admiral McLain."

"Sir?"

"You're already in this up to your gold-braided ass, so as of this moment, the Navy is officially in charge. We'll work out of your office."

"I'm honored, Mister President," McLain said carefully, "but with all due respect, I'm a bit—"

"I know. I know." Armbruster waved his hand. "The Balkans are smoking, the whole damned South Atlantic is on fire, and I'm handing you a fresh can of gasoline. Well, Admiral, I think we'll just have to put out the immediate fire for you."

"Sir?"

"Tomorrow morning—no, this morning, I suppose—I intend to invoke the War Powers Act." He smiled again, humorlessly. "I have no doubt half of Congress will be drawing straws to see who gets to move a vote to test its constitutionality, but by the time they do, you will have moved Second Fleet into position and I will have informed the United Kingdom and Argentina that the fighting is to stop." He smiled tiredly at Mordecai Morris's horrified expression.

"Don't panic, Commander. I happen to know the Brits want to stop. I'll warn the PM before I pull the plug, but she'll go along. Buenos Aires may be less happy about it, but they're getting the ever-loving shit kicked out of them. I think they'll accept without pressing their luck—they may even be grateful for it, later. But tell your boys and girls that if they don't, I will use whatever force is necessary to compel them, Admiral."

"Yes, Sir," McLain said tonelessly.

"I'm not just flexing my muscles, Admiral," Armbruster told him. "I've got other reasons, but we don't need a protracted crisis to drag on and divert our resources. Agreed?"

"Agreed, Sir."

"Good. Now. I'll arrange EEGs on the cabinet, the Joint Chiefs, and the heads of the FBI, CIA, DIA, and NSA. The Congressional leaders are going to be tougher, but I think I can swing it." This time his smile was tight with the awareness of his own power. "I'll have my staff checked, too. I'm afraid we can be absolutely certain some of the people we need aren't going to pass muster, but if I go around firing them in wholesale lots for no apparent reason, the entire situation will blow up in our faces. So what we'll have to do is set up a deception within a deception.

"I intend to create two crisis teams. One will be charged with collecting and collating information on what's already happened and with looking for any signs of additional extraterrestrial interference. They'll operate under maximum security conditions—to prevent a public panic—but I intend to staff it primarily with people who fail the EEG test. That, I imagine, is no more than our Mister Troll will expect, and the fact that the team will know nothing beyond what it can dig up on its own ought to reassure him if he picks up on them.

"The real command team, Admiral, will be headed by you, with Commander Morris as your assistant. It will consist only of individuals the Troll can't tap, and you will report directly to me. Your mission will be to find the Troll and destroy it—at any cost. If at all possible, I want that fighter intact, but destroying the Troll takes absolute priority."

He paused and regarded them silently for just a moment, then spoke very slowly and distinctly.

"Understand me. When—and note that I say when, not if—this thing is found, we will kill it, wherever it is, and whatever it takes. If necessary, I will order a nuclear strike on my own authority to accomplish that end."

There was a chill silence as his grim determination soaked into his listeners.

"I hope, however," he said finally in a lighter tone, "to avoid that. Captain Aston, I understand you're due to retire next month?"

"Yes, Mister President."

"Not anymore, I'm afraid. Stan Loren will have to get along without you a bit longer—I need your operational expertise more than he does."

"Yes, Sir."

"I'll see to it you get that extra ring immediately, just to give you a bit more clout, but basically, Captain, you're going to be Admiral McLain's field commander. You will confer with Colonel Leonovna, and the two of you will determine what force structure you require. I want it kept in the family, so you'll assemble your personnel from the Corps."

"Yes, Sir. May I recruit SEALs, as well?"

"You swabbies!" Armbruster startled them all with a genuine chuckle. "All right, you can use them, too, if you want."

"Thank you, Sir."

"Colonel Leonovna, I realize you don't fall under my authority, but—"

"I do for the duration, Mister President," Ludmilla interposed.

"Thank you. In that case, we'll arrange suitable military rank for you. In the Corps, I think," he added, giving Aston a lurking grin. "I'm afraid no one would be ungallant enough to believe you look old enough to hold a colonel's rank, but we should be able to get away with making you a captain. At any rate, I would appreciate it if you would act for public consumption as Captain—I mean Admiral—Aston's aide."

"Certainly, Mister President."

"Thank you," he said again, and stood, stretching. "Unfortunately, we have no idea at all where this Troll is, where he may be headed, or what he intends to do once he gets there. We have no assurance that he's anywhere near our own territory or even the territory of one of our allies, and, given the nature of the threat, we cannot possibly justify leaving the entire rest of the world in ignorance. Which means, of course, that I'm going to have to tell at least some other people the whole story."

"Mister President," Ludmilla began, and he waved her to silence.

"Don't worry, Colonel. I'll be circumspect, I assure you. In regard to which, it looks like another set of EEGs is in order. Commander Morris, you seem like an inventive fellow. Are you?"

"Uh, I like to think so, Mister President," Morris said with a sinking sensation.

"Good," the President said with his most charming professional politician smile. "Think up a good, convincing argument I can use to get hold of President Yakolev's EEG."

"Sir?" Morris choked himself off before he could say anything else. "I'll try, Sir."

"So will I, Commander," Jared Armbruster said softly. "So will I."

 

The Troll completed his analysis of the data. The female's knowledge suggested that it might be even simpler than he had expected. This United States was a hopelessly inviting target, wide open to penetration even by its own criminal element and its purely terrestrial enemies, much less by him. The bare bones of a plan were already falling into place.

It was a pity the female had known so little about its country's atomic weapons production, but he had gleaned at least one name from its pitiful memory. Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, he thought.

It was as good a place to start as any.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Rhoda Morris sat patiently in the waiting room, reading a magazine. She had huge, liquid eyes in a face as dark as her husband's, but she was slender, graceful, and always immaculately groomed. She thought Mordecai was silly to insist on a complete physical—they'd had their annual checkups only four months ago—but he'd been insistent. She wondered what bee had gotten into his bonnet and why, for the first time ever, he'd insisted on complete neurological exams, but it wasn't worth a fuss.

She turned a page and felt a familiar pang as she saw an ad with a young mother and two pink-faced babies, for her inability to conceive was the one true sorrow of her life. She'd learned to live with it, but the pain seemed sharper in a setting like this, as if proximity to medical people made her more aware of what she'd been denied.

But she'd been given so much else, she thought, and turned the page firmly. She had Mordecai, and though he, too, regretted their childlessness, he was not a man given to bitterness. Even the loss of his foot, horrible though it had been at the time, hadn't embittered him . . . and it had ended his dangerous wanderings about the world's trouble spots. She'd learned, in time, to stop feeling guilty over her gratitude.

She finished the article and laid the magazine aside, wondering how much longer Dick Aston and his niece would be staying. She'd always liked Captain Aston, ever since the evening he'd personally escorted her to the hospital in Jordan. He'd been so calm and reassuring; only later had she learned that he'd saved Mordecai's life. It was strange how suddenly they'd arrived, but she was glad they had. In fact, she would be a bit sad when—

The door opened and Mordecai came in with the doctor. She looked up and smiled, and he smiled back.

"Well?" she asked cheerfully.

"Not a problem in the world, Mrs. Morris," the young doctor said, and she nodded placidly. Of course there hadn't been.

"I take it you're satisfied now, Mordecai?" she asked, opening her purse for her sunglasses.

"Of course I am, dear," he said, linking elbows with her as they headed for the door. She squeezed his arm against her side happily. Twenty-three years, and they still held hands when they walked. How many other couples could say that?

"Good." He held the door and she stepped through it. "Mordecai, we have to pick up a few groceries on the way home."

"Fine," he said, unlocking her car door and opening it for her.

"Tell me," she said, as he closed his own door, latched his safety harness, and slipped the car into the traffic, "do you know if Dick and Milla can stay for the concert next week?"

"I'm afraid not. Dick's being transferred, and Milla will be going home when he leaves."

"What a pity!" she sighed.

"Yes, dear," he said softly, and reached over to squeeze her knee. She looked at him in slight surprise, but he said nothing more. He couldn't, for her alpha waves lacked the critical spike.



CIA Director Stanford Loren was irked. The steady buildup to a fresh Balkan crisis had been bad enough. Aside from Al Turner and the President himself, no one seemed capable of really believing that the wreckage of what had once been Yugoslavia had even more potential as the spark for a global disaster than the continuing, interminable Pakistani-Indian grimacing over Kashmir. Just because none of the Balkan states had developed nuclear weapons of their own didn't mean they couldn't get them elsewhere, and he was uncomfortably certain that several of the factions were doing some intense shopping. The economic meltdown which had finished off the Yeltsin government and returned old-time central control to Russia had only increased their opportunities, and Yakolev hadn't had time to change that. But could he and Jared Armbruster get the rest of the Western world to take them seriously about it? Hell no! The Balkans were a European problem, as the French premier had just pointedly remarked, and the previous administration's unilateral decision to yank the US troops which had been mired down in Bosnia for over six years had deprived the present American government of any voice in solving it.

But then, on top of that, had come all that carnage in mid-Atlantic. Then a shooting war had caught every one of Loren's analysts flat-footed, and now the President had been bitten by some infernal health bug! The last thing Loren needed at this moment was to report to Bethesda for a complete medical exam, and he'd been tempted to put it off until the President forgot about it.

No such luck. The Surgeon General had called to remind him in person! So here he sat in a hospital room, waiting for the results he knew damned well would prove him perfectly healthy, if a tad overweight, when he needed to be out at Langley trying to make sense out of the world. Only in Wonderland on the Potomac, he told himself bitterly.

The door opened, and he looked up sharply, but the tart remark died on his lips as the President himself walked in.

"Good morning, Stan," Armbruster said, but there was a shadow behind his smile, and Loren hadn't known him for twenty years without learning to see beneath his surface.

"Good morning, Jared," he said cautiously.

"I know you think I've gone round the bend," Armbruster said, crossing to the window and looking out. "Would it make you feel any better to know that Hopkins and Turner are here, too?"

Loren frowned. Floyd Hopkins ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Al Turner was the deputy director (and real head) of the National Security Agency. Which gave the Director of the CIA furiously to think.

"So is Dolf Wilkins," the President added with a crooked grin, and Loren added the Director of the FBI to his astonishing mental list. "All for a reason, Stan. All for a reason."

"What reason?" Loren asked carefully.

"Stan," the President said, turning and crossing his arms, "I'm going to tell you a story. One I'm afraid I can't tell Floyd or Al. After that, I'm going to drop in on Dolf, but there won't be any record that I saw either of you. Interested?"

"Intrigued would be a better word."

"Oh?" Armbruster chuckled grimly. "Well, you'll be more than just intrigued by the time I finish, Stan."



"Looks like things are finally moving," Aston said as he paged through the folder in his lap.

"At last," Ludmilla threw in without looking up from her book. She was tipped back in a chair, reading a copy of The Marine Officer's Guide.

"Give us a break, Milla," Morris protested half-seriously. "You knew the first layer'd be the hardest to set up, but we're starting to make progress now. And every senior man we clear gives us that much more reach down to the lower levels."

"And that much more chance for a `normal' leak," Hastings said sourly.

"True," Morris agreed with a sigh. He lit another cigarette, and she glared at him.

"I'm going to tell Rhoda you're cheating."

"Snitch," he said, and took a deep drag. "And don't worry too much about leaks. People like Loren and Wilkins know how to keep secrets. It's the congressional side I worry about."

"Don't," Aston said, making a check beside a name in his folder. "The President isn't going to tell them." He chuckled nastily at Morris's raised eyebrow. "You hadn't heard? He decided last night. Just what we needed—a House Speaker with the wrong EEG and an IQ equal to his shoe size! I'm just as happy, though. This way Armbruster can brief all the oversight committees with the cover story, and we can get on with the real job without a lot of elected busybodies blabbing to the press."

"That's a pretty bitter view of your elected representatives, Dick," Ludmilla said, glancing up from her book at last.

"But a realistic one," Morris replied before Aston could. "Some of them—maybe even a majority of them, though I wouldn't want to get too optimistic on that point—are probably honorable human beings. But a bunch of them are neither honorable nor anything I'd like to call human, and a single asshole can blow any operation. What's that old saying? `Any two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead . . . unless he was a politician.' "

"Something like that," Hastings agreed. She looked over at Aston. "How's the strike team selection coming, Admiral?"

"Keep calling me `Admiral' and the first strike is going to land right on your head," Aston growled. She made a face, and he went on with a smile. "Not too bad, so far. We've got a Marine major with a head injury from a training accident last year. They ran lots of tests, and he's got a great, big, beautiful spike right where we need it. Looks like a good man, too."

"You're making it an all-Marine operation after all?" Morris asked interestedly.

"I may. I'm trying to find as many key people as I can without any new testing, and life'll be a lot simpler if they're all from the same branch of the service. And much as it pains me to admit it, Marines may be even better for this kind of operation."

"But how are you going to decide what firepower you need?" Ludmilla wanted to know. "We still haven't solved that one."

"Oh, sorry." Morris rubbed his forehead and smiled apologetically at her. "I should've told you. Admiral McLain's arranged for the Army to take a couple of obsolete tanks that were earmarked for scrapping out of the disposal queue and hand them over to us for testing purposes, instead. Of course," he added sardonically, "they don't know exactly what we'll be testing."

"All right!" Aston said, grinning. "How soon?"

"I'm not sure. Sometime tomorrow or the next day, I think."

"Where?" Ludmilla demanded. "It's got to be a secure place."

"Oh, we've found one that's plenty secure." Morris grinned. "There's a big underground chamber out in New Mexico. They dug it for the nuclear test series we carried out after the START II treaty finally crapped out, but the final two or three shots got scrubbed as part of the CPI nuclear reduction negotiations with China, Pakistan, and India last year."

"Sounds good," Aston agreed, then closed his folder with a snap. "Anything else from Loren?"

"He's got the cover crisis team in place. The plan is for the VP to take over with Loren as his `assistant.' I think Loren's a little pissed at being stuck over there, but he and Wilkins will make sure we get copies of anything they bird-dog for us. Frankly, they're more likely to spot something than we are, since they can use the whole security setup. But our team's the only one who can recognize what they spot."

"It'll just have to do," Aston said pensively. "I only wish we had some idea what the bastard is thinking about right now."



The Troll was exhilarated. At last, thanks to a penniless, embittered drifter named Leonard Stillwater, he'd found his final element.

It was a shame about Stillwater, the Troll chided himself. Something might have been made of it if he'd been a bit more careful. He would have to watch himself. The pleasure of raping human minds was addictive, but he must learn to ration it. Stillwater, for example, had held a promise its shoddy exterior and slovenly thought patterns had hidden until too late.

The Troll checked automatically on his servomechs as they completed the day's camouflage. His progress across the United States had been slower than expected, but that was not without advantages. He'd finally acquired enough data on the humans' primitive radar to build a crude but effective ECM system against it, and there had been time to gain more information.

The Stillwater human had given him the most astonishing data of all, and the Troll had stopped north of the Broken Bow Indian Reservation in the Quachita Mountains of Oklahoma to ponder. Such a lovely revelation deserved careful consideration.

It was odd, but he'd never really wondered how humans thought about other humans, and it had come as a shock when he ripped into the Stillwater human's brain and found the hatred festering at its core. So much like his own in so many ways, and in a human brain! Marvelous.

The Troll had never heard of the White People's Party, nor of the American Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan—not until his combat mechs brought him the hitchhiking Stillwater. It had been dirty and terrified, yet there'd been something about it, the Troll thought—a sort of mean-spirited, vicious defiance under its whining panic. Perhaps that should have alerted him, caused him to proceed more cautiously.

Perhaps, but the human mattered far less than the hatred the Troll had discovered. He'd recognized it instantly as yet another chink in the armor of his human prey—and one so well suited to his needs!

It would require care, but the unthinking hatred of minds like Stillwater's would lend itself to his manipulation, and their need for a leader to think for them would make it much, much easier.

He only had to find another Stillwater, one with more polish and the wit to understand what the Troll could offer it.



Nikolai Stepanovich Nekrasov enjoyed his position as the Russian Federation's ambassador to the United States. He would not have cared to admit it to many people, but he rather liked Americans. True, they were incredibly ill-organized, undisciplined, and spoiled, with more than their fair share of national chauvinism (a vice, he admitted privately, his own people shared in full measure). They were absolutely convinced that the political changes in his own nation were the direct result of their shining example, while its economic woes stemmed solely from a failure to emulate them properly. Possibly as a consequence, they retained a deep-seated distrust of his people which was matched only by Russia's suspicion of them. They were further handicapped by their ridiculous (and, in his opinion, naive) insistence that individuals were more important than the state, and their feelings were hurt with absurd ease if anyone even suggested that they were not universally beloved just because they enjoyed a material lifestyle most of the rest of the planet only dreamed of.

But he was willing to admit that, having been raised as a prototypical Marxist-Leninist new man, his own perceptions of them might, perhaps, be just a tiny bit flawed. And he also found them generous and polite, and, unlike many of his erstwhile comrades in the Party—good democrats all, now, of course!—he rather liked Americans' ingrained refusal to bow to power or position. The pre-Yeltsin Party would have understood Americans far better (and possibly even have remained in power, he thought), if its members could just have grasped that the European class system had never really caught on in North America despite the best efforts of its own leftist politicians.

Yet there were times, he thought, staring out the window of his embassy office, when these people frightened him. They had a ruthless streak, and they believed in effectiveness and decisiveness. Those were dangerous deities for an opponent to worship. It took a great deal to convince an American president to stop worrying about public opinion. The last two administrations had been devastating proof of that. But once a president did make that decision, there was no telling how far he might go. Worst of all, he could be virtually certain of widespread public support if his people perceived his actions as both determined and effective, and the ambassador had tried for over a year now to convince his own President that this American President truly was both determined and effective. It was unfortunate that so many hardline members of President Yakolev's cabinet—including Aleksander Turchin, Yakolev's Foreign Minister and Nekrasov's own boss—continued to think that the anti-American card was a winning one. Nekrasov understood his countrymen's resentment over the way in which their government had become in so many ways a pensioner of the last surviving true superpower, and his own temper tended to rise alarmingly whenever one of his American "hosts" got up on his or her high horse and began lecturing him on all the things which were wrong with his country . . . for which, of course, the lecturer of the moment just happened to have all the right answers. And "standing up" to the generally ineffectual policies of Armbruster's predecessors had been a cheap way for Russian governments teetering on the brink of collapse to win points for "showing strength," both domestically and in the international arena. The fact that it had also helped create, or at least continue, the steadily deteriorating Balkan situation by filling the Americans with so much frustration they had finally thrown up their hands in disgust and gone home like petulant children seemed to have escaped the attention of Turchin and his cronies.

Or perhaps it hadn't. Nekrasov had his own suspicions about where the Foreign Minister was headed. His carefully managed friendship with a currently disgraced ultranationalist general like Viatcheslav Pogoscheva struck the ambassador as an extremely ominous sign, but for the moment, at least, Yakolev needed Turchin's support back home. And so it went, Nekrasov thought glumly. It took only a handful of self-serving opportunists, sometimes only a single one, to set the work of scores of honest men at nought, and his country's democratic institutions were still young and vulnerable, still lacked the toughness and precedents to survive such cretins.

The familiar gloomy thoughts flickered through his brain, but today they were only a background, for he faced a far more urgent (and inexplicable) puzzle. Determined and effective Armbruster had proven himself over the last thirty months, but just what did he think he was doing now? From the moment he'd taken office, he'd worked to improve Latin American relations, and his efforts had born startling fruit. What was left of the Sandinistas were finally in full retreat, relations with Mexico and even Columbia had shown steady improvement, and he'd wrung potent domestic Cuban political reforms out of Fidel's successors by skillful use of economic concessions as the moribund Cuban economy obviously entered its final decline, yet—

He stopped that thought with a brisk headshake. Dwelling on Armbruster's achievements served no purpose, but it did give point to Nekrasov's current puzzlement. After all that, why should Armbruster suddenly deliver what amounted to an ultimatum which had to play right into the hands of his country's Latino adversaries? The United States had no compelling strategic interest in Argentina or the Falklands, and the whole world knew it, so why had Armbruster suddenly intervened so massively . . . and clumsily?

Nekrasov had the strangest impression that something was happening behind the scenes. He didn't think Armbruster's ultimatum was a put-up job; it was clear to him that the Britishers were winning handily and that a cease-fire would benefit the Argentinos far more than the Americans' allies. Not that Buenos Aires seemed to share his analysis. Still, however trapped by their own rhetoric the generals might be, they were military men (of a sort, at least); they had to know the truth.

And yet . . . and yet, in an odd way, the whole South Atlantic situation was only a side show. He couldn't have said why he was so certain, but he was. There wasn't a single scrap of hard intelligence to support his suspicion, and he knew his KGB "colleagues" privately derided it as no more than was to be expected from a pro-Western economic apologist like himself.

Still, he would feel better after he spoke to the President on Monday. He'd established a reasonably friendly adversarial relationship with Jared Armbruster, and he believed he could discover much the President hoped to keep hidden.



The Reverend Blake Taggart slammed his car door and delivered a venomous kick to the front fender. It hurt his foot, but the deep dent made him feel a little better. Not much, but a little.

His cup was full, he told the darkness bitterly. He should have stopped in Muse and had the threshing sound under the hood checked, but the whole town had been closed up tighter than a drum. Besides, that would have cost money, and money was not in great supply at the moment.

He sighed and walked moodily around the car. He should have gotten rid of the gas-hog months ago, but it was the last vestige of his empire, and he hadn't quite been able to let go of it.

He unlocked the limo's trunk and opened a Gucci suitcase, got out a white silk handkerchief, and tied it to the TV aerial, and his expression was unhappy. If only he still had a driver he could have sat comfortably on his ass while he sent the poor bastard off for help; now he had to make the hike.

He growled a heartfelt curse and fumbled in the trunk for a more comfortable pair of shoes, then sat on the bumper to change.

He'd had such hopes, once. His message had seemed so perfect—it had certainly been lucrative enough! He'd begged his followers to support his ministry, and they had: right into a palatial home, swimming pools, a multimillion dollar Midwest television station. . . . Oh, yes. All the things he'd longed for growing up in the North Carolina hills had been his at last.

There'd been times, he mused as he tied his shoes, when he'd actually thought there might really be a God.

His clean-shaven, neatly scrubbed image—bolstered by his carefully maintained accent and the rolling hellfire and damnation of his self-taught, bigoted, street-preacher father—had carried him high in the world, and a carefully metered dose of intolerance and more than a hint of racism had given him teeth. "A Coughlin for the Twenty-First Century," one critic had called him, but his sermons had comforted his "flock." Surely if a man of God shared their feelings they couldn't be wrong!

But then that frigging reporter started after him and the wheels came off. Taggart ground his teeth in remembered rage. It had seemed so trivial, at first—just a single business deal which had intruded into the light somehow. Nothing to worry about. But the bastard hadn't stopped digging, and the more he dug, the more he found. Those deals with certain less than savory brokers. That questionable land speculation in Colorado—the little prick had burrowed through three separate dummy corporations to find out who was really behind that one. Then his connections with the Las Vegas casino and his women. Damn it, he was only human! He had the same sex drive as—

He chopped the thought off with a bitter laugh. It had been a mistake to try to buy the little fart off, but he'd had to do something! How was he supposed to know the son-of-a-bitch was recording the entire conversation?

The contributions dried up. His special brand of followers would tolerate a lot, but not that much. Truth to tell, he was pretty sure it was the hookers had done it in the end. His supporters might have stood for the land deals and the casino—he might even have been able to convince them that he hadn't known what his "business managers" were up to—but not the hookers. Hypocrisy only worked until you got caught.

He closed the trunk with a solid thunk and looked around the darkness again. He'd crossed US 269 a few miles back, and there was an all-night gas station there. The bastards probably didn't have an on-duty mechanic—nobody did, these days—but they'd have a phone and they'd know where he could find a wrecker. He shuddered at the thought of paying for it, but, he told himself with a bitter smile, perhaps the Lord would provide.

He ought to. He'd dropped His friend Blake Taggart deep enough into the shit already.



An inner alarm claimed the Troll's attention. That delightful mind he'd tasted as it passed had stopped. Why, it was practically motionless now, shining in his senses like a beacon of greed and resentment! He'd been certain it would sweep out of his range before he could do anything about it, but perhaps he'd been wrong.

He sharpened his mental focus, "listening" to its surface thoughts, getting a better fix on its location. Oh, yes, things were shaping up nicely. And this time, he reminded himself as he dispatched his combat mechs once more, he would be careful.



"Whiskey One, this is Sierra Three. I have incoming. Range to your position three-niner-seven, bearing oh-seven-four relative, altitude two-five-oh feet, speed seven-five-oh knots. I make it two with a trailer, but the trailer looks bogus. Could be a second pair tucked in tight. Over."

"Sierra Three, Whiskey One copies." Commander Zachary Orwell, USS Washington's CAG, checked his PriFly screens and nodded. "Papa Delta Niner-Two is headed your way," he said. "Meet him on Tac Four, I say again, Tac Four. Over."

"Roger, Whiskey One. Sierra Three Out."

Four F-14Ds of VF-143, known as the "Pukin' Dogs" from the head-down griffin of their squadron insignia, swept their wings and sliced through the air at a thousand miles per hour. Commander Lewis Tobin, VF-143's CO, sat in the front seat of the lead fighter.

"Talk to me, Moose," he said.

"Just a sec, Skipper." Lieutenant Amos "Moose" Comstock was bent over his panel, watching his display alter as the Hawkeye known as Sierra Three gave him a direct data feed from its radar and onboard computers. "Okay, I've got the dope, Skip. How do you want to handle it?"

"Set us up head-on," Tobin directed. "We'll hang onto our altitude."

"Rog. Come around to one-three-four true, Skipper."

The Tomcat swung right and bored on through the sky, followed by its three fellows. Each of the big fighters carried two Phoenix missiles, backed up by three AMRAAM Slammers and a pair of AIM-9Q Sidewinders.

"Closing to two hundred miles, Skip. Want me to light up?"

"Do it," Tobin replied, his mind busy. Second Fleet had declared a one hundred nautical mile free-fire zone around Task Force Twenty-One to give ample coverage against the fifty-mile range of the late-model Exocet ASMs of the Argentine Navy. The bogeys' high speed looked a lot like the Dassault-Breuguet Super Entendard. The Entendards were older even than Tobin's venerable Tomcat and had been relegated to secondary duties years earlier. But the Argentine Air Forces' losses had been so severe that the elderly aircraft had been pressed back into service as their main Exocet attack platforms, with the dwindling supply of much newer Mirage 2000-5s covering them. But whatever they were, they weren't friendlies, and the rules of engagement were clear: anything that entered the zone was to be killed. Tobin had no real desire to kill people, especially not if it could be avoided, but anyone burning that much fuel in burner way out here at less than three hundred feet was hardly up for a check flight.

The fighter's radar went active, probing down the bearing supplied by Sierra Three.

"Got 'em, Skip. The Hummer was right—there's four of the little buggers. Range one-eight-four and closing. They're forty miles from the zone, and they ain't answering anybody."

"Go to TWS. Let's see if that'll warn the bastards off."

"Switching now."

Unless the incoming pilots were sound asleep, their radar warning receivers must have detected the shift from search mode to track-while-scan. If so, they now knew there were Tomcats in the area with weapons locked on them. They might be willing to ignore the warn-off being transmitted by the ships of the task force, but would they ignore that?

They would. They kept right on coming.

"Papa Delta Flight, Niner-Two. Red Section has the leaders: I'll take the point man; Niner-Four, you take his wing. We'll go with Slammers. If the trailers don't break off, White Section will take them."

Acknowledgments crackled in his ears as the range continued to drop.

"That's it, Skip," Comstock said tautly. "They're inside the zone."

"Okay, Moose. Take 'em down."

"Roger. Flashing scope, Skip. Opti-launch coming up . . . now!"

A launch-and-leave missile dropped free, ignited, and flashed ahead of the big fighter at Mach Four.

"One minute to impact," Comstock reported as Tobin broke in a sharp turn to port. He wanted to position himself on the bogeys' tails if they should somehow elude Papa Delta Flight's missiles.

They didn't. The two lead planes hit the water in flaming pieces at almost eight hundred miles an hour, but the two in the rear never hesitated. They only squatted still closer to the waves and bored right on in until White Section blew them out of the sky.



Blake Taggart didn't have a clue what had hit him.

One moment he was walking angrily along the night-black highway; the next there was a weird flash of light, and then . . . nothing. Nothing at all, until he woke up here. Wherever "here" was.

He tried to sit up, but his muscles refused to obey. Part of his brain told him that should frighten him, but he felt only a dreamy wonder. He stared up at a blank metal ceiling, breathing slowly, and something scuttled around the inside of his skull like a spider's dancing feet.

"Welcome, Blake Taggart."

The voice came from all around him—a queer, dead-sounding voice. Mechanical, he thought dreamily, and cold, and it echoed inside his head as well as in his ears.

"Your kind has not treated you well, Blake Taggart," the dead voice went on. "I have seen in your memory how they turned upon you."

Taggart felt the familiar visceral rage. It bubbled within him, yet for all its familiarity, it was different now, stronger than ever, as if his resentment had been honed and sharpened while he was unconscious. As if the last vestige of acceptance had been stripped away by a surgeon's scalpel, leaving only the cold fury of betrayal. He tried to speak, but his lips and tongue were as dead as the rest of his muscles.

"If I choose to help you, Blake Taggart," the slow, grinding voice said, "you can regain all you have lost, and more. You will have your vengeance . . . and I will have mine. Do you understand, Blake Taggart?"

The paralysis left his vocal cords. He made a strangled sound of surprise when he discovered that fact, then swallowed a mouthful of saliva.

"W-What do you mean?" he asked finally, then grunted as anguish lashed his nerves. It vanished almost before he could feel it, but he swallowed again, harder, as he recognized its warning.

"I am generous, Blake Taggart, but not . . . patient. You will do well to remember that. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he whispered. Then, louder, "Yes!"

"Better," the voice said. "Blake Taggart, I require a human assistant with certain talents. You may be that assistant."

"For what?" It was odd how unafraid he was, as if his churning anger armored him against fear. Yet it was more than that, too. Somehow the voice was preventing him from fearing, he thought, but that meant nothing beside his sudden eagerness for the vengeance it promised him.

"That will become clear," the voice replied, "if you have the strength to endure my mind touch. I have learned all I may from your unconscious mind; now you must open fully to me, willingly." There was a weird, horrible sound, one Taggart recognized only slowly as laughter. "You may die, Blake Taggart. Yes, you may well die. But if you live . . ." The voice trailed off tantalizingly.

Taggart stared up at the metal ceiling and wondered just how much the voice had already done to him. His lack of fear, his fiery eagerness to avenge himself, his sharp, bright hatred—those were his, but they'd been strengthened. He knew they had, but he found that he did not care.

"Sure," he said. "Come ahead."



It was a pity Mordecai couldn't be here, Aston thought, looking around the huge cavern, but the Argentinos were showing more balls than brains, and McLain had preempted Morris for his nominal function.

He looked at the two hulking M60A3 battle tanks, and even to him it seemed absurd that anything as small as Ludmilla's blaster could damage them. He turned to her, reflecting that she looked younger than ever in her brand-new uniform. Was that because he knew how old a Marine captain ought to look?

"Ready?" he asked, and she nodded calmly. "Any special precautions?"

"Just stand well back," she said, and checked her weapon settings as Aston joined Jayne Hastings beside the tripod-mounted camcorder behind her.

"Now," Ludmilla continued when they were out of the way, "I know what sort of power settings I need with this—" she lifted her blaster slightly, finger clear of the firing stud "—to take out most Kanga combat mechs, and also the setting to kill a Troll combat chassis. By seeing what effect those settings have on your armored vehicles, we'll all be in a better position to estimate what weapons your strike teams need, Dick."

"I just can't quite believe that—" Hastings indicated the blaster "—can really zap a tank, Milla. I'm trying, but . . ." She shrugged.

Ludmilla glanced back at her and dimpled suddenly.

" `O, ye of little faith,' " she murmured, and raised her weapon.

Once again, the blaster did absolutely nothing. Its complete silence, Aston thought, grew more uncanny, not less, each time he saw it, but there was no lack of other noise.

A blue-white flash, no larger than the palm of his hand, burned with eye-tearing brilliance on the right-hand tank's glacis, directly under the gun. A wicked, whickering crash battered his ears like bottled thunder, and then there was silence . . . a silence broken only by the seething hiss of steaming metal.

Aston stared at the damaged tank, momentarily stunned despite all of Ludmilla's warnings, then made himself walk over to it. Ludmilla and Jayne followed him as he bent over the glowing hole, careful to keep his hands away from its heat.

A small, perfect circle had been bored through the five-inch armor, and he climbed up on the tank and peered down through the opened hatch. There was some internal damage, but not as much as he'd expected; almost all the power had been expended on the glacis, and surprisingly little splash had been flung about the driver's compartment.

"Well?" He climbed down with a thoughtful expression as Ludmilla spoke. "Can your weapons do that, Dick?"

"I think so. The latest TOWs certainly can, but they're vehicle-mounted. I'd say the Predator—that's our newest man-portable antiarmor weapon—can do it, too."

"Good." Her face was calm, but her voice was taut. "But that's the easy part. A Troll's armor can take a lot more damage, and he carries battle screen."

"You mentioned that before," Aston said. "Just what is it?"

"Think of it as a force field that interdicts incoming fire. Warship screens can absorb multimegaton explosions, but even a heavy Troll chassis isn't big enough to carry screen that powerful. The important thing to bear in mind about it, though, is that it can be overloaded locally by a lot less destructive energy than the entire screen can handle. We use sequenced attacks to do that to ship screen, then punch a missile through the weakened spot, but I doubt we can do that to the Troll because it takes such fine coordination. So we'll have to try to punch through with a single shot—and this is what kind of energy it will take."

She herded her friends back into position and changed the settings on her weapon while Jayne slipped a filter over the camcorder's lens.

"Cover your eyes," she said levelly, and squeezed the trigger again.

The whiplash sound was far worse this time. The crackling roar was more protracted, with sounds like secondary explosions, and Aston was devoutly grateful that the tanks carried neither fuel nor ammo. The acrid stench of burning paint and molten metal assailed him, and raw, bitter heat pressed against the hands over his eyes.

Then the noise ended.

"All right," Ludmilla said, and he lowered his hands.

No one said a word as the two twenty-first-century humans stared in awe at what had been a tank. Waves of heat shimmer danced above it, and the entire frontal plate glowed—white in the center, shading to bright cherry at the sides. The gun quivered, then drooped slowly to full depression, hanging on its trunnions, for the pulse from Ludmilla's weapon had cut the elevation actuator in half, sheared through the hydraulic system, and burned clear through the gun tube just in front of the breech. Aston knew it had, because he could see it through the two-foot hole in the frontal armor.

He circled the smoking tank in silence. The blast of energy had torn completely through it—right through the heart of the transmission and the big, 750-horsepower diesel—and then gouged a nine-foot pit in the cavern wall twenty feet beyond it. He turned slowly and saw Jayne staring at the wreckage in shock.

"That," he said, "is just a bit more than the best we can do, Milla. By a few thousand percent, I'd say."

"I was afraid of that when I saw how much damage I did on low power." She holstered the blaster, and the little whisper as it went into its nest was loud against the quiet hiss and ping of cooling steel and stone.

"My God." Hastings shook her head slowly. "What do we do now?"

"I don't know," Aston said somberly. "I can organize teams to take out your combat mechs, Milla, but this—?" He shook his head slowly. "Maybe if we hit it with a shit pot of TOWs. . . ."

"You can't do it that way, Dick," Ludmilla said. She stood beside him, looking at the carnage she'd wrought. "You can't sequence them tightly enough, and even if you could, he's almost certain to have set up a fallback by the time we find him. I don't know what it'll be, but I do know we have to take him out with a single shot, one that'll kill him before he can suicide and take the entire planet with him."

"We can't, Milla. I'm sorry, but we just can't."

"I know." She smiled crookedly. "I half-suspected you wouldn't be able to. But—" she met his eyes levelly "—I can."

She laid a hand on the butt of the holstered blaster which only she could fire, and he wanted—wanted more than he'd ever wanted anything in his life—to tell her no. To tell her that he didn't need her. That he wouldn't risk her.

But instead, he nodded silently.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Major Daniel Abernathy, USMC, didn't look like a man on the brink of mayhem, and the casual observer could have no idea how much effort it took to keep from slamming one huge, dark-skinned fist into the tough plastic window beside him. He was rather proud of that.

He set his teeth, staring down through that same window at the runways of Andrews AFB and hating the sight. He shouldn't be here. He should be back at Lejeune, engaged in a change of command ceremony which would have put him—him!—in command of the Second Marine Division's recon battalion. He'd sweated blood to earn that command, and he by God deserved it! Besides, the orders had already been cut . . . until some desk-bound asshole in Washington changed them.

He closed his eyes, leashing his temper yet again as the landing gear rumbled. He was a passionate, hard-driving man, and defeat—especially defeat which wasn't his fault—sat poorly with him. The fact that Second Force was on alert because of the South Atlantic War only made it worse. He'd trained for twelve years for what might be about to happen, and—

He chopped the thought off, forcing his mind into neutral as the plane moved along the taxiway. It was hard, but he actually managed to smile at his neighbors as he collected his hand luggage.

The Washington sun was as fierce as the one he'd left in North Carolina, and the muggy air felt suffocating. He settled his sunglasses, adjusted his cap, and followed the flow of the passengers. At least it would be air-conditioned inside.

It was, and there was also someone waiting for him—someone with the four rockers, three chevrons, and star of a Marine sergeant major on his short khaki sleeves—and Abernathy's eyebrows rose behind his glasses. Too many years ago, Gunnery Sergeant Alvin Horton had seen to it that a painfully young Lieutenant Abernathy made less mistakes than most with his first platoon. He supposed every Marine officer always felt a special respect for "his" first gunnery sergeant, but he'd known even then that Alvin Horton really was special.

The sergeant major snapped to attention and saluted, and Abernathy returned the salute. Then he removed his glasses left-handed and held out his right with his first genuine smile in the last twenty-one hours.

"Gunny," he said, squeezing firmly. "What the hell is going on here?"

"Sir?" Horton regarded him quizzically. "Why does the Major think the Sergeant Major knows anything he doesn't, Sir?"

"Cut the crap, Gunny. If anyone knows, you do."

"Major, I don't know anything. Honest."

Abernathy's eyebrows tried to rise again. Sergeant Major Horton was the fourth ranking noncom in the United States Marine Corps. He had to know what was going on. But if he said he didn't, he didn't.

"Excuse me, Sir," Horton broke into his thoughts, "but where's your baggage?"

"You're looking at it, Gunny." Abernathy waved his single small bag. "They didn't give me much time to pack."

"I see, Sir. If the Major would follow me, then?"

Abernathy fell in beside the sergeant major, and a path opened before them, though neither consciously noticed it. Abernathy was a powerfully built man, his mahogany skin bulging over hard-trained muscles, and he made an imposing figure in uniform. He wasn't especially tall, but he moved with catlike grace and a sense of leashed power, and the ribbons below his parachutist's wings were impressive.

For all that, and despite the gold leaf on his collar, Horton was even more impressive. He was four inches taller, the sandy hair under his cap cut so short it was all but invisible, and tanned almost as dark the major. He, too, wore jump wings, but the five rows of ribbons under his were headed by the white-barred blue one of the Navy Cross, followed by the red-white-and-blue one of the Silver Star with two clusters—each with the tiny "V" which indicated they'd been won the hard way: for valor.

He guided the major across the baking hot asphalt to a staff car, and Abernathy got a fresh surprise when Horton opened the door for him, closed it behind him, and then slid behind the wheel. Sergeant majors are not normally chauffeurs, and Abernathy's sense of the extraordinary grew stronger as Horton started the engine and pulled away.

"Tell me, Gunny," he said finally, "what do you know?"

"Nothing positive, Sir." Horton never took his eyes from the road.

"Last I heard, you were division command sergeant major at Pendleton," Abernathy mused aloud.

"Yes, Sir. I've been reassigned."

Abernathy digested that. Whoever had put the arm on him had also grabbed the senior noncom of the Third Marine Division. He didn't want to think about how General Watson had reacted to that.

"All right, Gunny, what is it we've both been reassigned to?"

"I understand the major and I will find out this afternoon, Sir."

"From Rear Admiral R. K. Aston, I presume?"

"Yes, Sir." Horton's tone caught Abernathy's attention, and his eyes narrowed. Aston . . . Aston. . . . Now that he thought about it, the name did have a familiar ring.

"Just who is Admiral Aston, Gunny?" he asked finally.

"He's good people, Sir," Horton said, and he wasn't a man who awarded accolades easily. "He started out with the Swift boats right at the end in Nam, then switched over to the SEALs, Sir."

"D'you mean Captain Dick Aston?"

"Yes, Sir," Horton said with a slight smile. "He's an admiral now."

"Well I will be dipped in shit," Abernathy said softly. Horton didn't respond, and Abernathy leaned back. That put a different slant on things. A very different slant. No wonder the name sounded familiar. No man had a higher reputation among the elite forces of the United States, and very few had one as good. It was Aston who'd pulled out the Lebanese hostages, he remembered, and then-Commander Aston's SEAL teams had fought their own short, victorious, and extremely nasty personal little war in Iraq, both before and during the Gulf War. It had been his SEAL teams that retook the Exxon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, too—without, as Abernathy recalled, a single civilian fatality or a single terrorist survivor. If he was involved, things might prove very interesting indeed, and he suddenly realized why Horton seemed so cheerful. The sergeant major had an instinct for these things.

"Well, now, Gunny," he said after a long, thoughtful moment, "I do believe this may not be such a waste of time as I thought."

"As the Major says," Horton said cheerfully.



"But you can't do it that way—sir," Blake Taggart said. He sat in an oddly proportioned chair facing a featureless metal bulkhead and felt no desire to smile at the absurdity of talking to a—what? A machine? A disembodied voice? A . . . presence? Not after tasting its driving, limitless hatred in his own mind. The experience had not been pleasant. No indeed. Not pleasant at all.

"Indeed?" The voice was still cold and mechanical, but it was picking up human-sounding emphasis patterns at almost frightening speed.

"No, sir." Taggart licked his lips. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't human—and not all that tightly wrapped, either. It scared the shit out of him, actually, but he'd already accepted that. He'd been a bit surprised by how readily he did accept it, and he wondered if this . . . thing . . . had done something to make him. There was no way of knowing, and it didn't matter. Taggart had seen too much of this incredible ship. Sane or not, the voice could do what it promised.

He smiled—a cold, amused smile—as he remembered his Bible. He had been taken up on a mountain and offered all the powers of the world. Only as a viceroy and not a ruler in his own right, to be sure, but offered nonetheless. Yet powerful as the voice was, it lacked any instinctive knowledge of people.

"Why not, Blake Taggart?" the voice demanded coldly.

"Assume for a moment that you can control the President," Taggart said. "Or, hell, assume you control the Vice President and knock Armbruster off. Either way, you control the White House, but it won't do you any good."

"He is the head of state," the Troll said flatly.

"But he doesn't work in a vacuum . . . sir. There's Congress and the Supreme Court, just for starters. If he suddenly starts acting strangely, there are plenty of people in positions to get in your way. No. If you want to take over, you have to start at the bottom. Build an organization and move in gradually." Taggart smiled nastily. "Do it right, and in a few years you can elect your own President—with a Congress that'll do anything you want."

"Wait," the Troll said, and considered the human's words. The Taggart human was unaware that he could hear its inner thoughts, that he knew it was already considering how to displace him, but that was all right. The Troll had selected it for its ambition, after all, and the human was unaware of the controls he had already set deep within it. A flick of thought could activate them, shutting down its fragile heart and lungs instantly. Not that those controls would be required; judiciously applied pain would provide all the effectiveness the Troll was likely to need.

But in addition to its ambition, the Troll had chosen it for its knowledge and the instincts he lacked. Unlike its master, it knew the workings of this world from the inside, and the Troll studied the fuzz of half-coherent concepts leaking from its thoughts. He already saw the basic workings of its plan, and what he saw pleased him.

"Very well, Blake Taggart," the Troll said. "Explain this to me."

"Yes, Sir," Taggart said eagerly. "First—"



"What I don't understand," Morris said, watching the taped destruction of the tanks, "is how that peashooter works, Milla. Where's the laser-tinted death? Where's the glowing ray of mass destruction? In short, where's the action?"

"Forgive him, Milla," Jayne Hastings said disgustedly. "Remember he's only a crude, unlettered savage."

"That's all right." Ludmilla smiled. "But I'm afraid I can't really answer your question, Mordecai. I mean, how well could you describe quantum mechanics—or, better yet, a printed circuit—to Copernicus?"

"I see your point," Morris conceded, "but I really am curious."

"Well," she brushed a strand of chestnut hair from her face and held up one of her blaster's featureless plastic magazines, "I'll try. This thing is a capacitor—a very powerful one, perhaps, but that's all it really is—and the energy pulse is a surge discharge. Theoretically, I could drain it in a single pulse, but the self-destruction would be pretty drastic."

"So all it really does is make a spark?" Morris asked incredulously.

"In a crude sense. Actually, it produces what you might think of as a pocket of plasma."

"Inside the blaster?" It was Jayne's turn to look dubious. "That must be one hell of a container, Milla."

"Not really. Oh, it's tough, but it never really `contains' the energy at all. Most of this—" she tapped the blaster lying on the table "—is ranging circuits and a tiny multi-dee." She saw the confusion on her listeners' faces. "Basically, when I press the stud the blaster computes the exact range to the nearest solid object in its line of fire. I can tinker with it to redefine `solid' a bit, which can be handy in, say, aquatic conditions, but that's not a big problem here." Hastings's eyes bulged slightly as she considered the effects of firing that mini-nuke underwater, but she said nothing.

"Anyway, once it's measured the range, it produces an energy pulse to the exact power and . . . dimensions I've set up. I can focus down to a cross section of two millimeters or up to a decameter, and about twice that for the linear dimension. But it doesn't `contain' the pulse, and it doesn't really `shoot' it at the target. Instead, at the instant the plasma is generated, the multi-dee blips it up into the alpha bands until the target coordinate is on top of the blaster, then brings it back down into normal-space." She shrugged. "For all practical purposes, the pulse first manifests on the target, which is why there's none of the ionization or thermal bloom associated with lasers or beamed energy."

"Good Lord," Hastings murmured. "What's the range on that thing?"

"Only five kilometers. You can't pick out a small arms target visually much above that range, even in space. The shoulder-fired versions have electro-optic sights and more range, but this is intended for close combat. Besides, in a planetary environment, you won't have many clear fire lanes even that long."

"`Only five kilometers,' she says!" Morris snorted. "Lady, with that little toy, you could—"

A knock on the door cut him off, and he quickly switched off the VCR while Ludmilla tucked the blaster out of sight inside her jacket.

"Enter," Morris called, and the three of them rose as a uniformed Richard Aston opened the door and stepped into the office. He wasn't alone, and Ludmilla felt a pang as she saw the muscular black major beside him. He looked so much like Steve Onslow it hurt. There was another man with them—a sergeant, only a few inches shorter than Dick, with calm, alert gray eyes that seemed to miss absolutely nothing.

She saw a flicker of surprise in the major's eyes as she came to attention with the automatic response she'd been cultivating ever since she became a junior officer again. The fact that these people had never heard of Thuselahs made them refreshingly unprejudiced, but it also meant every damned one of them judged her age by her appearance. Thank God President Armbruster hadn't decided to give her her own rank!

"People," Aston said, waving them back down, "let me introduce the newest members of our team: Major Daniel Abernathy and Sergeant Major Alvin Horton. Major, Sergeant Major: Commander Mordecai Morris, Lieutenant Commander Jayne Hastings, and Captain Elizabeth Ross." Ludmilla smothered a smile as he used her new name.

"Find a chair, and we'll bring you up to speed, gentlemen. And I warn you," he went on, "whatever you've been thinking, the truth is weirder." He smiled. "Believe it, people."



Ambassador Nekrasov was puzzled. President Armbruster seemed perfectly at ease, yet Nekrasov knew he was not. He couldn't have said how he knew, but he'd learned to trust his feelings, and he frowned as he sipped at his excellent cup of coffee.

"But, Mister President, my country cannot understand why—with no notice, no preliminary diplomacy, no negotiations—you should suddenly choose to impose an outside solution."

"I remind you of the Monroe Doctrine, Mister Ambassador," Armbruster said, and Nekrasov shook his head.

"Not applicable, Sir. Argentina clearly initiated hostilities, and Great Britain is an American power in this instance." He smiled wryly. "While the Russian Federation may deplore the imperialistic tradition which makes this true, it is, nonetheless, a fact."

"Well, then," Armbruster said with a sudden, impish grin, "let's just say I got pissed off."

Nekrasov choked on his coffee. His head spun slightly as he set down his cup and mopped his lips with his napkin, unable to believe that a head of state had just said such a thing to a foreign ambassador.

"Mister President," he said carefully. "I—" He broke off for a moment. Odd. The shock of what he'd just heard seemed to have thrown him off stride. He actually found it a bit difficult to choose his words.

"You are aware, Sir," he said finally, "that lives have been lost because you became—as you say—`pissed off'?"

"Bullshit," Armbruster said, watching him closely. "People got killed because the Argentinos were stupid enough to fuck with a Navy battle group." He noted the apparently bewildering effect of his words with satisfaction.

"Mister . . . Mister President—" Nekrasov broke off and rubbed his eyes, blinking rapidly. "I am afraid . . . That is—" He stopped and swallowed heavily, tugging to loosen his tie. "Forgive me, Mister President," he said thickly. "I feel . . . unwell. I—"

He started to rise, and then his eyes rolled up and he collapsed bonelessly.

Armbruster was on his feet in an instant, catching him and easing him back into his chair. He had beaten Stanford Loren by the breadth of a hair, and he shook his head as he looked up at the CIA director.

"Damn Russians. He's got the constitution of an ox."



President Pyotr Yakolev shook himself awake as the phone rang. He groped for it with a weary groan, hoping it was not yet another crisis.

"Yes?" he growled, then listened briefly and sat up with a jerk. "What?"

"I'm sorry, Mister President, but we don't have all the details yet." The voice on the other end of the phone was cautious. It belonged to Aleksandr Turchin, who considered Nikolai Nekrasov one of the outstanding thorns in his flesh. Unfortunately, that was because of how long Nekrasov and Yakolev had known one another, and that required the Foreign Minister to proceed with care. "The report just came in. Apparently Nikolai Stepanovich suffered a heart attack in the very office of the President."

"My God," Yakolev muttered. Then, "How bad is it?"

"I don't know, Mister President. They have flown him to their Bethesda Naval Hospital, the same place they take their own presi—"

"Yes, yes! I know that. When will we know more, Aleksandr Ivanovich?"

"I can't say, Mister President. Soon, I hope."

"I, too." Yakolev had few close personal friends, and Nikolai was one of them. He didn't want to lose him. "Is his wife with him?" he asked.

"I understand so," Turchin said.

"Deliver my personal sympathy to her," Yakolev directed.

"I will, Mister President. I'm sorry to have disturbed you, but I thought you would wish to know immediately."

"You thought correctly, Aleksandr Ivanovich. Thank you. Good night."

"Good night, Mister President."

Yakolev hung up slowly and lay back in his lonely bed. It was at moments like this he missed the supportive presence of his dead Marina. Poor Nikolai. He'd been working him too hard—he must have been. But Nikolai had always been so healthy. Like a kulak, he used to joke. Who would have thought Nikolai, of all people, would suffer a heart attack? And in the middle of a meeting at the White House?



Daniel Abernathy shook his head doggedly and glanced at Alvin Horton. The sergeant major appeared irritatingly composed, and the major was inclined to resent it until he saw the wonder hiding in Horton's eyes.

"So where do we come in, Admiral?" he asked finally.

"Where do you think, Major?" Aston replied, watching him closely.

"Well, Sir, it sounds like you've picked us to put together your strike team," Abernathy said slowly.

"Right the first time, Major. We'll discuss the details later, but basically what we have in mind is the creation of a provisional company for `experimental' purposes." He grinned. "I know it's not quite the same as getting your battalion, but I hope you won't be too bored."

"No, Sir, I don't imagine I will," Abernathy said with an answering grin. "I was a mighty pissed Marine this morning, Sir, but I think I'm getting over it."

"Good. Then you and the sar-major and I will go sit down and talk hardware. I'm afraid `Captain Ross' and Commander Morris have another appointment."

"Yes, Sir."

"Oh, and Major—"

"Sir?"

"Certain people will have to know some of the truth about `Captain Ross,' but I decide who needs to know and what they need to be told. Not you, not Commander Morris, not even Admiral McLain. Me. Understood?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Sar-major?"

"Understood, Admiral."

"Good. Now, if you gentlemen will come with me?"



Nikolai Nekrasov opened his eyes slowly. He was lying on his back, he decided. In a bed. He rolled his head and took in the bright, cheerful airiness of a well-appointed private hospital room. What—?

His thoughts cleared suddenly and he sat up. The President! He'd been speaking with the President, and then—

"Hello, Nikolai."

He turned and looked into Jared Armbruster's eyes. There was amusement in them, and a touch of wariness, as well. He shook his head slowly, trying to understand. He'd collapsed, but he felt fine. So what . . . ?

"I owe you an apology, Mister Ambassador," Armbruster said calmly. "I'm afraid we slipped you a Mickey." Nekrasov blinked at him. "We drugged your coffee," Armbruster explained.

Drugged his coffee? It was unheard of! And if they had, why should Armbruster admit it? The ambassador stared around the room, fighting a flicker of panic. Surely the President had not run that far mad!

"I'm sorry," Armbruster sounded genuinely contrite, "but I believe we can explain why it was necessary."

"Indeed, Mister President?" Nekrasov was pleased that he managed to sound calm. "I should be interested to hear that explanation."

"Of course." Armbruster sat beside the bed. "First, I must also apologize for the cover story we put together. Your government has been informed that you suffered a severe heart attack. That—" he added quickly "—was unfortunately necessary to explain why we rushed you to Bethesda." Nekrasov started to speak, but Armbruster raised a hand.

"Please, Mister Ambassador. Time is short. Your Embassy's security people are not at all pleased that the doctors have refused to allow them into your room because of your `serious condition.' We'll let them in very shortly, but first I must explain some things."

"Very well," Nekrasov said, and settled back on his pillows, regarding the American suspicously.

"Thank you. Mister Ambassador, you asked me why I involved my country in the South Atlantic War. My answer was, I fear, facetious. The truth, sir, is that I needed a diversion."

"I beg your pardon?"

"In large part, Mister Ambassador, my reasons concern yourself. Oh, my original thought was to create a cover for certain military moves I must make, but then I realized it could also be used as a pretext for special diplomatic exchanges—like the information I'm about to share with you.

"I must tell you, Ambassador, that while we had you here—indeed, it was the entire reason we went to all this trouble to get you here—we ran an electroencephalogram on you." Nekrasov looked mystified, and Armbruster continued smoothly. "It was necessary to determine whether or not your brain waves contained a certain distinctive pattern. Fortunately, they do—and it is my sincere hope that President Yakolev's share it. Unhappily, the only way I have been able to think of to check his is to convince someone he knows and trusts—in short, a close personal friend—to find out for me."

"Mister President," Nekrasov said stiffly, "this is ridiculous. I—"

"No, Mister Ambassador, it is not ridiculous," Armbruster interrupted, and the cold determination—the ruthlessness—in his iron voice startled the Russian. "I believe you will agree with me on that point, and, if you do, I will ask you to return home—officially for health reasons and consultations regarding the situation in the South Atlantic—to tell President Yakolev that."

"I can conceive of no reason why I should," Nekrasov said flatly.

"We'll give you one," Armbruster said, his tone equally flat, "and to that end, I would like you to meet someone. If I may?" He rose and started for the door, and Nekrasov shrugged. The entire situation was patently absurd, but this madman was the President of the United States.

A naval commander and a ridiculously young captain of Marines entered the room, and Nekrasov wondered what possible bearing such junior officers could have on this affair.

"Ambassador, I'd like you to meet Commander Morris, Admiral Anson McLain's senior intelligence officer, and Captain Ross. Commander, Captain—Ambassador Nikolai Stepanovich Nekrasov." Nekrasov nodded to the newcomers, then looked impatiently back to the President.

"Mister Ambassador, Captain Ross is not precisely what she appears," Armbruster said, seating himself once more. "In point of fact, she's the reason you're here." Nekrasov frowned at the striking young girl. That seemed crazier than all the rest! Armbruster saw his frown and grinned.

"I assure you, you can't be more surprised than I was when I first met the captain, Ambassador. You see . . ."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

    subversion n. The act of subverting or the condition of being subverted.

    subvert tr.v. -verted, -verting, verts. 1. To ruin; to destroy utterly. 2. To undermine character or allegiance; to corrupt. 3. To overthrow completely. [Middle English subverten, from Latin subvertere, to turn upside down: sub-, from below, up + vertere, to turn.]

            —Webster-Wangchi Unabridged Dictionary of Standard English Tomas y Hijos, Publishers
            2465, Terran Standard Reckoning

             

"She did what?" Anson McLain demanded, and Mordecai Morris went off in a fresh peal of mirth. His ribs hurt, and he wondered how much his laughter owed to hysterical reaction.

"S-she almost shot . . . shot up t-the Saint Petersburg zoo!" he repeated, gasping the words between hoots.

"In God's name, why?!"

"She . . . she . . . Oh, my!" Morris broke off and wiped his streaming eyes. "President Yakolev thought she might . . . might enjoy seeing the sights," he managed in a more controlled voice. "So he had a guide take her around Saint Petersburg." He shook his head. "It all went fine until they got to the kangaroos."

"To the—" McLain broke off in sudden understanding. "Oh, no!" he moaned, covering his eyes with one hand.

"Exactly, Sir: Kangas. D'you realize, she even told us they were the height of a short human and had tails, but we never made the connection? We've all been too worried about the Troll to bother with what Kangas might or might not look like!"

"Dear Lord," McLain prayed fervently, "deliver me from oversights."

"Amen," Morris agreed, his eyes still damp from laughter. "She took one look and went for her blaster out of pure reflex, and she's fast, Sir. She had it out and aimed—ready to blow the whole damned herd, or school, or whatever the hell you call a bunch of kangaroos, to dust bunnies—before Dick could even move. Scared their guide to death." He shook his head. "Sir, she'd never even seen a real kangaroo."

"But she didn't shoot?"

"No, Sir," Morris reassured him. "She realized what it had to be in time. She was pretty pissed with Dick for not warning her, too, until she realized why he hadn't seen any reason she needed to be warned."

"Well, thank God for that," McLain said. "Jesus! We came that close to blowing the whole secret because of a bunch of ragged-assed kangaroos." He shook his head wonderingly, then glared at Morris. "I don't need any more surprises like this, Commander. Tell her that."

"Oh, I will, Sir. I will."

 

The Troll pivoted his fighter in a hovering circle, examining the hiding place. The Taggart human was right, he thought. It was perfect.

The cool darkness caressed the alloy skin of his vehicle/body, and he dropped another hundred meters, dipping into the oval valley. It was five and a half kilometers long and no more than two across at its greatest width, and night-struck trees were green-black below him, rising towards the star-strewn skies. There were no lights, no signs of human habitation, and his scanners peered and pried at the darkened forest, finding only life that flew, ran on four feet, or swam. Other scanners probed the darkened heavens, assuring him that no satellite or aircraft lingered overhead.

The silent fighter hovered twenty meters above the valley floor while the Troll selected the best spot. There. The slope was almost vertical behind that screen of trees.

He adjusted his position carefully, then activated the battery of special, low-powered power guns mounted under the fighter's prow, and muted blue lightning flared. It was far less brilliant than the sun-hot violence which had killed the cralkhi, and his heart-hunger for havoc longed for the beauty of that brighter, more savage power, but it was time for lesser thunders.

Azure brilliance splashed the mountain, and at its touch, destruction danced. Perhaps not the blazing, shuddering devastation he craved, but destruction nonetheless. Undergrowth and tree trunks vanished. Treetops plunged downward like spears, falling into the ring of light and vanishing with a near-silent whine, and then it was the turn of earth and stone.

The Troll's interior receptors watched his human bend over the vision screen his servomechs had built for it in the cramped "control room." He could feel the human's awe, and silent laughter rippled in his brain. So Blake Taggart thought this was power? What would it say if he told it that this was but an adaptation of a standard Shirmaksu mining tool? That, in the human's own terms, it was no more than a "drill"?

The mountain yielded more slowly than the vegetation which had crowned it, but the Troll chewed steadily deeper. Sixty meters in diameter he sank his shaft, and the humming power of his drill lined the bore with a slick, fused finish. Three hundred meters he pierced into the flank of the mountain, then the blue light died and he turned his ship and slid silently backward into the circular tunnel.

He settled to the floor of the tube and hatches opened, disgorging servomechs that scurried about, filling the tunnel mouth with earth for a depth of fifty meters. They left only one, smaller entrance, just large enough for the largest of the Troll's combat mechs . . . or his own combat chassis. By dawn, every sign of his coming had been carefully camouflaged.

The Troll was satisfied in his hide. There were drawbacks, of course. It would take many minutes to extricate his fighter from its snug nest, and his onboard scanners were inoperable through the rock and soil above him. But he was safe from any chance detection, and the Blake Taggart human had been correct: this was an ideal location.

Indeed, his new servant was proving useful in many ways. It had known, for example, that the Annette human had been wrong about Oak Ridge. No weapons-grade fissionables had been produced there in many years, and it was unlikely that such materials would be available there in the quantities he required. But Blake Taggart had known, as the female had not, of what it called the "Savannah River Plant" where fissionables were produced.

In some respects, the Troll would have preferred to be closer to the source, but Blake Taggart was correct. This isolated hiding place was within range of his combat mechs if a direct assault on Savannah became necessary, and far better placed for the other portion of his . . . No, be honest, the Troll thought, of their plan.

And for now, he preferred to avoid attacks on military installations. He wasn't yet certain his combat mechs were proof against the humans' heavy weapons: better to avoid exposure to them until he was. Besides, the human insisted no weapons assembly took place at Savannah, that the fissionables were shipped to other locations for that purpose. Sooner or later, one of those shipments would cross the Troll's area of mental influence.

 

"Obliging of them, especially after you almost wasted their zoo," Aston observed wryly. He grinned down at Ludmilla and she smiled back, but he knew the encounter had shaken her badly.

"Sorry," she said softly. "It was pure instinct, Dick. Seeing something that much like a live Kanga—brrrr!" She shivered, and he caressed the back of her neck gently. She accepted the comfort of the rare public gesture of affection gratefully.

"Anyway," she said with a less forced grin, "I think President Yakolev is trying to make up for how hard he was to convince."

"Yeah," Aston snorted, then chuckled. "But it makes a kind of sense to do it over here, too. For one thing, it's a real clincher for his technical people, and, for another, their power net is still unreliable enough that they can black out a main grid for a few hours without nearly as many explanations."

"True," Ludmilla agreed, turning back to the control room windows. She didn't care for what she'd seen so far of Russia, even if her ancestors had come from there. She'd never cared for the Soviet system, even when she'd studied it merely out of morbid historical curiosity, but now she had to deal with its actual transition period, and she could scarcely believe what people here managed to put up with. She'd always been rather proud of the Russian people's ability to endure and persevere, and of what the Russia of her own past had achieved (after, she admitted, the bloodbath of the self-inflicted conflagration of their nuclear exchange with Belarussia). But these Russians still weren't at all certain how to make democracy work . . . or even if they truly wanted to. Several people had told her how much they admired democracy, and how firmly they believed democracy would solve their problems in time, and how deeply committed they were to making democracy work. But what she actually saw had best been summed up by the taxi driver who had delivered her and Aston to the Saint Petersburg Zoo.

"Democracy!" he had exclaimed when he recognized Aston's American accent. "It is a wonderful thing—or it will be when someone who knows how to make it work takes over at the top!"

It was apparent that the notion that representative government ought to be predicated on the electorate making the politicians "at the top" behave themselves and govern responsibly had never crossed the cabby's mind. He still wanted someone to make it work, with top-down direction, and that, she admitted sadly to herself, was what had made the Succession Wars inevitable. It had left the entire political field to authoritarians of one stripe or another, and those squabbling for power—even the most idealistic and committed "democrats"—had been all too willing to toss principle overboard in pursuit of tactical goals, as if none of them had realized that principles and limitations, precedents and what the people of her own time had still called "the rule of law," were the skeleton upon which any stable, self-governing state depended. Even Yakolev, much as she had found herself admiring his determination and personal integrity, was clearly more comfortable with the strongman image and the tactics that went with it than he was with the image of a parliamentary leader. He knew how to give orders, she thought; what he didn't know—what no Russian politico she had yet met knew—was how to forge a lasting consensus or achieve genuine compromise.

Yet for all its factionalism, waste motion, and sense of impermanence, the present Russian system had its advantages for her own purposes. It had been incredibly hard for Nekrasov to convince Yakolev to give the Americans his EEG without explaining why, but once that hurdle had been cleared things had moved even more rapidly in the Russian Federation than in the USA. If Pytor Yakolev wanted EEGs run on his people, he simply had to tell them so, and he had.

There had been some problems, she understood, since the KGB head hadn't been on the safe list. But enough other members of Yakolev's inner circle were, and the fact that it was common knowledge that Yakolev and Foreign Minister Turchin had been at odds for months over both Belarussia and the Balkans had actually helped. Turchin was still an ultranationalist, and he still distrusted America's ultimate diplomatic objectives intensely, but he was no fool and, for all his nationalist paranoia, he was a patriot. That was what had convinced Yakolev to include him in his government in the first place, and Turchin did have the right EEG. Confronted with Ludmilla's presence and her technology demonstration to prove her story, Turchin had recognized the imperative need to cooperate with the Americans, however much he distrusted them in other matters. And it had been Turchin himself who proposed that Yakolev use a cabinet shakeup—ostensibly to get rid of Turchin himself, on the grounds that their foreign policy differences had become insurmountable—to dispose of the KGB head and two other ministers whose EEGs prohibited admitting them to the inner secret.

And that, Ludmilla mused, might be the best sign for Russia's future she had yet seen. Turchin was, in many ways, the ultimate Russian peasant: shrewd, canny, warmhearted in his own way, xenophobic, stubborn to the point of pigheadedness, and with that aura of willing brutality which only a people who had been subjected to generations of brutality themselves radiated. And yet he had seen the necessity to act and act swiftly, even at the probable cost of his own political suicide, and he had done it. In the history she remembered, he hadn't resigned. Indeed, it had been he who replaced Yakolev after the President's assassination . . . and who had led Russia into the fateful nuclear exchange with Belarussia. So perhaps her intrusion onto the past history of this universe, whether it was the one from whence she had sprung or not, would have more than one beneficial consequence.

And in the meantime, she could finally do something about the damage Dick had wreaked on her flight suit. The four Russian physicists now bent over the worktable beyond the control room windows had been frankly incredulous when she explained what she needed, but their attitudes had undergone a remarkable change in the past ten minutes.

Academician Arkadi Tretyakov had been the most skeptical of all, and he'd obeyed Yakolev's orders with patent resentment. When she gave him the voltage and amperage she needed he'd looked at her as if at a madwoman and told her it would require the full output of a dedicated nuclear plant.

Which was where they were right now, she thought with real amusement, and a ripple of laughter danced just behind her teeth as she remembered his reaction to the feed wire she'd produced from the heel of the flight suit. She supposed it was understandable—the superconductive ceramic-based wire's cross section was hardly larger than a single strand in one of Tretyakov's computer cables—and he'd sneered as he supervised the technicians who made the appropriate connections. But his sneer had turned into slack-faced shock when the switches were thrown and the feed drank every erg of power from his precious reactor without even warming up.

Now he and his colleagues watched with awe as the suit's self-repair systems did their job. It would take another hour or so, but when they were done, she would have her flight suit back, almost as good as new.

And that, she knew, might be more important than even Dick suspected.

 

The diesel locomotive thudded through the night, clattering over the rails of the Clinchfield Railroad beside the Nolichucky River. The lights of Poplar, Tennessee, had vanished behind it, its headlamp cut a diamond-white tunnel through the darkness, and Unaka Mountain loomed against the stars to the north as the special train rattled along toward Unaka Springs.

Ralph Twotrees was tense. He always was at times like this, and the hordes of military types riding with him were only part of the reason. There were few cars tonight, but those he did have carried trefoil-badged, white-painted containers of stainless steel, each surrounding an inner vessel of heavy shielding, and packed away in their hearts was the better part of a ton of weapons-grade plutonium.

Twotrees hated these trips. Though hazardous industrial chemicals were bad enough and the military had a sufficiency of other horrific cargoes, this was the worst. But he was the line's most senior engineer, and when a stinker came along, he was apt to be picked for it. He found it flattering, in an almost obscene way—until the next time they called on him.

And there would be a next time, he thought unhappily. He was a lifelong Democrat, and God knew there were still more than enough domestic problems which required attention, but even though he'd voted against Jared Armbruster, he respected and (grudgingly) liked the President. Worse, he'd loved the study of history since his high school days, and that made it harder for him to close his eyes to unpleasant realities than he could have wished. Given what was happening in the Balkans, and the Falklands, and the recent ratcheting up of tension in Kashmir, and Chinese saber rattling in support of Pakistan, and the renewed spread of nuclear weapons, the US had no option but to make certain of the effectiveness of its own nuclear force. Twotrees knew that, just as he knew that the Armbruster administration had found itself with an arsenal which previous administrations had deliberately allowed to dwindle in the earnest hope that nuclear weapons stockpiles truly could become a thing of the past. Well, Twotrees had hoped that, too, and he suspected Jared Armbruster had, as well. But things hadn't worked out that way, and Armbruster had brought Savannah River slowly back on-line—first simply to produce the tritium required to keep existing weapons functional and then, reluctantly, to produce the fissionables the military said it needed for entirely new weapons.

Twotrees hadn't minded the tritium too much. He wasn't clear on exactly how it functioned to enhance the effectiveness of nuclear warheads, but at least he'd known it was being produced only to replace other, no longer useful tritium in existing weapons. But these new warheads . . . Those worried him—a lot—and he rather doubted the Powers That Were would have been happy about just how much he disliked the thought of being a part of producing new weapons. Not that it would keep him from doing his job and seeing to it that the horrific freight got delivered safely, but still . . .

There was a major back in one of the two passenger cars, and enough firepower to fight a small war, but that didn't bother Twotrees. He was worried about his own job. He knew, intellectually, that the containment vessels would survive any accident he might contrive, but emotions were something else. This was his train, and the weight of his responsibility was like a load of Tennessee granite.

He glanced over at the Army captain riding the engine with him. Something about the man bothered him. He'd been brisk but friendly when he came aboard, yet in the last hour he'd grown progressively more silent. Now he stood to one side, swaying easily, with one hand on his holstered automatic, and his face was oddly blank.

Twotrees was about to say something when a light to the southwest caught his eye. More than one, actually. There were at least three of them, sweeping down No Business Knob towards the valley. He watched the bright, golden lights curiously. They were moving mighty fast. Must be helicopters. Could they be an unannounced military escort?

He was still wondering when Captain Steven Pound, US Army, drew his nine-millimeter automatic and shot him through the back of the head.

 

"The whole shipment?" Stan Loren stared at Dolf Wilkins in horror.

"Every ounce," Wilkins said flatly. He'd received the report forty minutes before Loren, and he had himself under tight control. "Point-nine-four tons of weapons-grade fissionables. Gone."

"How?" Loren demanded hoarsely.

"We're trying to put that together. The Army, the NRC, and the Department of Energy bomb boys are all going ape-shit, and Admiral McLain is just about as shaken. It would help if there were any survivors from the security detail or the train crew. There aren't."

"None?" Loren's face was bleak as he began recovering from the shock.

"None. They took out one troop car with explosives—some sort of explosively destructive weapon, anyway; we haven't actually confirmed any chemical residues yet—and just strafed hell out of the other with some kind of heavy-caliber automatic weapons. Our people on the scene tell me they've never seen anything like it. Even the container vessels are gone, and each of them weighs tons."

"Vehicle tracks?"

"None," Wilkins said again, even more grimly.

"Oh, Jesus," Loren whispered as their eyes met. They knew who—or, rather, what—had to be behind it.

 

"All right, Mordecai," Anson McLain said grimly. "At least we know whose side of the pond the bastard is on."

"Agreed. Assuming, of course, that he's gone to ground somewhere within his operational range of the hit." Morris tapped a red-crayoned circle on a huge map of the United States. It passed through Chicago, arced north of Detroit, cut right through Philadelphia, and reached as far south as Daytona Beach before it swept back up to the west of Saint Louis. "If that's the case, then he's somewhere inside that circle, Sir. He has to be. Milla says eight hundred kilometers is about the max range at which he can operate his combat remotes."

"That's an awful big circle, M&M."

"I know, Sir. Every recon plane in the eastern half of the country is up looking, and so are all the satellites we can sweep the area with, but we haven't found a thing. Which could mean nothing or a lot."

He turned from the map to face the admiral.

"We may just be missing him—it's not like we've had time to set up a well-organized search, and we figure we lost at least twenty minutes before the missed radio check alerted the security people, so he had a hell of a head start. On the other hand, it could mean that he's worked out the ECM devices he needs, or even that he'd already gone to ground before we started hunting. But the terrain in the area is extremely rough, Sir. Mountains, rivers, national forests, deer reservations. . . . Even if he's in fairly close proximity, we won't find him without a lot of luck. We'll try—he'll be expecting us to—but I'm not optimistic, Sir."

He fell silent, standing beside his boss while the two of them glowered at the map as if the combined force of their wills could somehow force it to give up the information they needed. Unfortunately, it couldn't.

"All right," McLain said finally. "We can leave the search up to the Army and Air Force. Put together everything we've got and every reasonable speculation you can come up with, then bring it in for us to go over. After that—" he smiled mirthlessly "—you and I are going to Washington. And I don't think our commander-in-chief is going to be happy to see us.

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Major Daniel Abernathy, USMC, Commanding Officer, Company T, Provisional (reinforced), blinked on sweat and tried not to smile as he watched Admiral Aston and "Captain Ross" running side by side in front of him. It was hard.

The admiral was no spring chicken, but he certainly didn't run like an old man, either. His nondescript gray sweats were soaked with perspiration under the hot sun, but he was moving well. Very well, Abernathy thought, with the easy rhythm of a man who knew exactly how to pace himself. A man accustomed to pushing himself to the limit, and wise enough to know that limit when he reached it.

Captain Ross—Abernathy seldom allowed himself to think of her by any other name, and no one else in Company T except Sergeant Major Horton knew she had one—ran along the packed beach beside him, in one of her outlandish shirts, this one bearing a flame-eyed skeletal horseman, a long scythe gleaming over his shoulder. It was strictly non-reg, of course, not that anyone was likely to complain. At the moment, she was as sweat-soaked as the admiral, but she ran with an infinite endurance Abernathy found almost unnerving. She needed two strides to match each of Aston's long, loping ones, yet she gave the impression that she could go on doing it forever.

They always ran together, and she always ran the admiral into the ground, yet there was absolutely no competition between them. With any pair of Marines Abernathy had ever known, enlisted or commissioned, there would have been a rivalry. Friendly perhaps, but always there. Not with these two. It was as if they were beyond that. Indeed, Abernathy felt a bit daunted when he looked up and saw the two of them watching his men train. Their eyes were so similar, so knowing, as if each of them had seen the same thing a thousand times and felt an identical kindly tolerance for the brash, tough young men doing it this time.

But, then, he reminded himself, Captain Ross was not what appearances might suggest, and her relationship with Admiral Aston was no one's damned business but their own. They were utterly discreet—they had to be on a teeming military post like this—but Abernathy knew they were lovers, and he was pretty certain Sergeant Major Horton did, too.

Under other circumstances, Abernathy might have been tempted to object. Certainly his professionalism had been offended when he first realized Aston was sleeping with his aide, but no longer. Those two were one of the most effective teams he'd ever seen, and whatever their private relationship might be, it never colored their actions on duty.

Well, practically never, he amended, smiling as he remembered Captain Ross's first day on the pistol range. She'd nearly wet her pants the first time the admiral squeezed off with his .45 auto, and only later did Abernathy realize that, for all her combat experience, she'd never heard a firearm discharged. But Admiral Aston had known, and his face-cracking grin had told Abernathy he hadn't warned her deliberately.

With her extraordinary strength and reflexes, she'd seemed to levitate as the explosive crash blasted over her, and Abernathy understood instantly why Aston had cleared the range of everyone but Captain Ross and Abernathy himself. Her reaction would have been a dead giveaway that, whatever she was, she was not a Marine captain.

But she was, Abernathy had found, a natural shot. Recoil had bothered her a lot the first day, but she'd settled down quickly. Like the admiral—or, for that matter, Major Daniel Abernathy, US Marine Corps—she preferred the .45 to the nine-millimeters the US military had adopted. Unlike the admiral, however, she preferred the polymer-framed SOCOM .45 to the old 1911 variants, and by the end of the second week, she was pushing Aston, himself a past national pistol champion, hard. Her groups were consistently tight, her first magazine regularly blew the X-ring right out of her target, and her combat range scores were incredible. She'd set a new post record—unofficially, since no one but Abernathy and Aston had been witnesses and Horton had acted as range officer. It was her speed, Abernathy thought. That blinding, smoothly flowing speed . . .

Not that there hadn't been problems. She'd insisted on training with every weapon Company T was issued, but though she'd become skilled and deadly with all of them, the men had been uneasy when they realized she'd be coming along when the mission finally went down. None of them were idiots; they knew she was much more than their officers chose to admit, but she was such a little thing, and whatever the official position might be, "No women in ground combat" remained the effective Corps policy.

But she'd surmounted that, too. Company T contained an extraordinary number of vets and "lifers," including such a high proportion of senior noncoms that other unit commanders were grumbling about "poachers." Out of them all, she'd challenged Gunnery Sergeant Morton Jaskowicz, a big, mean mountain of a man from the Pennsylvania coal country whose last duty had been as an unarmed combat instructor at Pendleton, to a "friendly" match. Abernathy had been horrified, but Aston had refused to let him quash the idea.

She and Jaskowicz had ended up in front of the more doubtful members of the company, who had confidently expected Little Miss Smartass to be sent to the showers in a hurry. At first, she'd been almost passive . . . or looked that way. In fact, she'd evaded everything Jaskowicz tried to do, slithering away from him like a greasy, hard-muscled snake until she convinced him he would have to go all out to take her, despite her small size. But once she'd convinced him and everyone knew she had, she'd put him away in six seconds flat with a combination Jaskowicz had never even heard of.

Then she did the same thing to the four next-toughest Marines present to prove it had been no fluke. Company T had spent twenty-four hours in shock, but there were no more muttered comments about the proper toys for little girls after that.

She'd taken everything in stride with equal professionalism, including quickie jump training, though Abernathy had been amazed to find that the mere notion of jumping out of an airplane terrified her. She turned pasty-faced, sweat-popping white every time she went up, but she never let it stop her, and her determination had delivered the coup de grace to any lingering doubts Company T might have harbored. These men knew all about fear, even if they never admitted it, and they respected what it took to conquer a terror as deep as hers.

She and the admiral reached the end of their run and slowed to a jog, moving in circles to keep their muscles from tightening, and Abernathy passed them at an easy lope. Another half mile and then a shower, he thought, followed by the regular afternoon briefing.

He only hoped there would finally be some news of the Troll.



Aston felt his breathing ease and his heartbeat slow. He'd never expected to train this hard again, though he'd certainly never intended to wither away into overweight old age, and it felt good. It had been rough for the first few weeks, but he felt at least ten years younger now. Which, he reminded himself, was still too old for what he was preparing to do. Better, but still too old.

He wiped his face and bald head with the towel from around his neck, then handed it to Ludmilla. She was breathing only slightly harder than usual, and he was sure his ego would have been crushed if he hadn't known she'd grown up in twenty percent more gravity than he'd ever felt and possessed a symbiote that cleaned fatigue products out of her blood as fast as she could generate them.

She smiled at him, but he knew she was worried. That was fair enough; he was worried to death himself. Four months since the bloody raid, and not a peep out of him. A ton of plutonium was an awesome threat, and when Ludmilla had explained just what the Troll could do with it, Aston had felt physically ill with terror for the first time in many years.

He had no idea what the "Nova Cycle" was, but anything which needed a sequence of thermonuclear explosions just to initiate it—especially the sort someone could put together with that much fissionable material—had to be horrific. He'd asked Ludmilla what it did, but she'd refused to be specific beyond the obvious: if it went off, there would no longer be an Earth. He sometimes wondered if she knew how to build one of them herself, for her explanations often struck him as more general than they had to be, as if she was afraid to give the children any noisier toys than they already had.

But if passing time was gnawing at them all, the men were shaping up nicely. "Company T" was closer to a battalion than a company, with four rifle platoons (each with two extra rifle squads and an attached antitank squad), not three, plus two armored assault platoons, a vehicle-mounted heavy weapons platoon, three FAC teams, and an entire extra antitank platoon. Every man was Troll-proof, and all had been briefed on what they were up against—in general terms; none had yet been told who or what Ludmilla really was—and confined to post for the duration. Aston had no fear that any of them would deliberately tell a soul, but accidental slips were another matter. He was gratified to find that his Marines (he'd come to think of them as "his" from a very early point) were as security-conscious as he was. They'd done a lot of bitching, but that was a Marine's God-given right and not a single real complaint about security measures had reached him.

And at least Armbruster's South Atlantic adventure had generated enough confusion to cover the military reshuffling Aston and McLain had deemed necessary. There was some curiosity about "Company T" now, but it was fairly mild, and no one had even asked any questions while they were setting it up. The strange plethora of EEGs had passed virtually unnoticed, as well, and so had the intense, high-level discussions between Washington, London, Berlin, Tokyo, and Moscow.

Aston had begrudged the time Ludmilla had been forced to spend telling her story firsthand so many times, but in the event it had been worthwhile. She'd used up the full charge of one blaster magazine demonstrating it to prime ministers, premiers, and generals on three continents, but it had put any doubts to rest. He wished to hell that they'd been able to share their information a bit more widely, too. He didn't much care for the French or the Chinese, but he had serious qualms about the decision not to tell them about the Troll. Finding and killing the Troll was likely to take all the resources they could pull together, and whatever he might think of France or China—or, for that matter, what they might think of the US—he couldn't quite rid himself of the thought that they had a moral right to know about a threat like the Troll which could well be hidden somewhere on their territory.

Yet Armbruster had decided not to inform them, and Aston knew too much about the security risks involved in telling those two governments anything to try second-guessing the President's call. The French, for example, were involved in a vicious game of internal partisan politics, and their recent, strident anti-American sentiments would have made the possibility of a leak—probably from someone who knew only a part of the story and thus could have no idea what damage he or she could do—extremely high.

The Chinese were another case entirely, and Aston knew Armbruster had come within a hair's breadth of telling them despite the current international antagonism between the PRC and the US. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately; Aston couldn't quite make up his mind which), every attempt to get copies of the required EEGs had failed, for no one had been able to think of a way to obtain them. So Beijing knew nothing about the Troll, although Taipei did (which had the potential to make things enormously worse, of course), which meant that he could look for a hiding place in one of the largest nations on Earth without the local authorities having the least idea that they should be hunting for him.

It also meant that Yakolev and Armbruster had quietly agreed that if the Troll did turn out to be hiding in Chinese territory, the US and Russian Federation would launch a joint nuclear strike on his location. Both were fully aware of the horrible risks and the potentially horrendous loss of life entailed in any such strike, but both also agreed that the destruction of the Troll must be accomplished at any cost . . . and that they dared not risk sharing the information which might avert such a strike with anyone whose mind they weren't certain the Troll could not read.

As if God were trying to offer some form of compensation, however, they'd been very lucky with the EEGs in most of the other nations on their list. Only in Japan had both the prime minister and his assistant failed the test, but the Emperor and the chief of the Japanese Defense Force had passed. Still, Aston was almost amazed that the secret had stood up, though, to be fair, no more than a few hundred people on the face of the planet knew it. Not a single legislature had been informed, and he was quietly certain that at least one highly placed West European statesman's fatal "heart attack" had been arranged by his own government when, despite the most rigorous pre-briefing screening, he proved a poor security risk.

On the operational side, Company T was but one of several strike teams, although it was the only one which had been briefed on its real mission. The tight-knit circle of allies and enemies who had come together to meet the threat agreed that the plutonium theft indicated that the Troll was in North America, so Company T had been designated the primary strike force. The others were basically backups, and he had no idea what cover stories their superiors had concocted for them.

But all of the intricate cooperation and planning was useless without a target, and they had none. Four months had flowed past without a single additional clue to the Troll's location, plans, or status.

Not one.



The Honorable Jeremiah Willis, Mayor of Asheville, North Carolina, hated Raleigh. A month—even three weeks—ago, that hadn't the case, but it was now. He'd been to the state capital three times in the last two weeks, and each meeting had been grimmer than the last.

"Governor," he said, speaking for himself and the mayors of Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Charlotte, "we have to do something! This . . . situation is about to get totally out of hand. It's a nightmare."

Governor James Farnam nodded slowly. His face was lined with fatigue, and State Attorney General Melvyn Tanner looked equally worn and harassed.

"Mayor Willis," the governor said heavily, "I couldn't agree with you more, but what, exactly, do you suggest? The State Bureau of Investigation is working overtime, but the `situation,' as you put it, is as confusing to them as it is to us. They don't have the manpower even to ask the right questions, much less find answers."

"Governor," it was Cyrus Glencannon, Mayor of Charlotte, "I don't even know if law enforcement is the answer." He frowned, his black face tense. "So far—so far," he repeated "—we only have a handful of confrontations, and the local authorities seem to be dealing with them pretty well. It's what's coming that scares me."

"Scares all of us," Mayor Willis interjected. "I haven't seen anything like this since . . . since before some of the people in this room were born! It's like a throwback to the forties!"

There was a glum silence of agreement. What had started as a trickle of racial episodes—a trickle particularly agonizing to Southern leaders—had grown steadily more numerous . . . and uglier. As Glencannon said, there had been no more than a score of known incidents, and most of them had been of the ugly intimidation variety rather than true violence, but there was a vicious ground swell. It had spread slowly from Western North Carolina, but now it enveloped half the state. Membership in lunatic-fringe organizations like the KKK and the American Nazi Party had risen steeply, and the tempo was increasing.

So far, the rest of the country was scarcely aware of it, but the men in this room knew. They were not alarmists, yet they were frightened. Badly frightened. The unrest had come out of nowhere, with absolutely no warning, and the first signs had been so scattered that it hadn't occurred to local authorities that they might involve other jurisdictions. Only in the last two weeks had the incidents begun to coalesce, and now they were moving like a gradually accelerating freight train. It was only a matter of time before the public became generally aware of them, and what might happen then did not bear thinking of.

What the rest of the country might think was bad enough, but it was nothing compared to the anguish in this tense room. Their state, their cities, and, above all, their people were falling prey to an old, ugly hate they'd thought they were defeating—and they seemed helpless before it.

"Gentlemen," Farnam said, "believe me, I understand. And it's not just us. Every Southeastern state north of Florida is involved, and none of us has any idea why it's happening. We're asking the Justice Department to put the FBI on it, but I don't really expect them to find the answer either. The economy's strong. There's no special hardship to bring out the worst in people. It's like it just . . . appeared out of nowhere." He saw from their expressions that he'd told them nothing they didn't already know, and his face darkened with rage.

"Goddamn it!" He slammed a fist on the conference table, and his curse was a mark of just how distressed he was, for he was a devout Southern Baptist who abhorred profanity. "We were on top of it! We were making better racial progress than any other part of the country! What in God's name went wrong?"

It was a strong man's desperate plea for enlightenment, and no one had an answer at all.



"It goes well, Blake Taggart?" The Troll's voice had become very nearly human in the past several months of conversation with his minion.

"Very well, Master," Taggart said with a grin. He scarcely noticed any longer that he used the title the Troll had demanded of him. There were moments when he worried—fleetingly—that the Troll's insanity was infecting his own brain, but they were increasingly less frequent, for his master's nihilism had begun to send its strange, dark fire crawling through his own veins. He was becoming the Troll's Renfield; he knew it, yet it scarcely bothered him. He'd discovered the controls the Troll had set within his own brain and body, and, strangely, they didn't bother him, either. The operation had become something greater than he was, and the power he would wield as the Troll's viceroy was sweet on his tongue.

"Good," the Troll said, and the still-hideous sound of its laughter echoed in the buried fighter. "My candidates will do well this November, Blake Taggart."

"I know they will, Master. We'll see to that." And Taggart's laughter was almost as hideous as his master's.

The Troll was pleased. This human was worth every moment invested in it. It had a brain of vitriol and venom, and his judicious alterations had only made it better. And it was cunning. The Troll had anticipated building his power base out of the Leonard Stillwaters of the United States, but Taggart had shown him a far more productive use for them.

It wouldn't have occurred to the Troll to use the humans who hated to win control of those who did not. He admitted that. But Taggart had taught him much about these easily led sheep.

The Troll could touch no more than a third of the minds about him. His experiments had shown him how to completely control any he could touch, but to dominate even one totally required his full attention . . . and left its owner a mindless husk when he was done. What he most desired were willing slaves, but barely five percent—seven at the most—were as susceptible to corruption as Taggart itself, and to make specific changes even in those few required individual time and effort. Yet he could "push" at every open mind when they slept, influencing them gradually, bending them subtly to his will. He could reshape their perceptions and beliefs as long as there was even the slightest outward stimulus to drive them in the desired direction.

Taggart had provided that stimulus. He and the Troll had made a painstaking survey of state and local political figures in the upcoming elections, selecting the ones who would be most amenable to manipulation once in office. Many of those individuals were already likely to win in November, but others were likely to lose. So the Troll had thrown his own influence into the scale to support "his" candidates.

Many—indeed, most—of those candidates would have been horrified if they'd known of the Troll's existence or what he planned for them, but that was satisfactory. Once they were in office would be soon enough to begin reshaping them, and, in the meantime, he could amuse himself to good effect with their more corruptible fellow citizens.

He was working strongly, if subtly, upon all the ethnic groups caught within his net, and he'd been delighted by what Taggart called "the domino effect." Hatred begat hatred, making it ever easier for him to stir his cauldron of prejudice and bigotry. It would take only a tiny push to tip that cauldron and spill its poison across the land, and the Troll intended to provide that push.

But not everywhere. He would use his Pavlovian monsters with care, for they were the tool with which he would prod and chivvy those minds he could not warp directly. Where his chosen candidates were already firmly in power, there would be little or no violence. Where his selected pawns were only shakily in control, there would be violence which they would contain, and a thankful population would return them gratefully to office. And where his future tools were the outsiders, there would be carnage . . . carnage for which the current officeholders would be blamed.

Oh, yes, it would be lovely. The Troll could hardly wait to light the fuse, especially in the areas where "his" politicians were the challengers, for it would be there he could indulge himself. There he could slake his appetite for destruction—for the moment, at least—with the sweet knowledge that humans were killing humans for him. He would set his puppets in motion and savor the exquisite cunning which used them to torment and enslave themselves.

In the meantime, he'd culled a force of the most hate-filled and destructive. Taggart called them his "Apocalypse Brigade," and the Troll was amazed that he hadn't seen the need for them himself. His combat mechs were few in number and far too noticeable to employ where they might be seen or reported.

His humans were another matter. More fragile and less reliable, yet able to go anywhere and programmed into total loyalty. Their numbers were still growing, but he had over nine hundred already, and the contributions he could "persuade" other humans—many of them wealthy—to make had armed and equipped them well by the primitive standards of this planet.

They knew nothing of his existence. Indeed, they believed they followed Blake Taggart, and, in truth, Taggart understood them even better than the Troll who had created them. It was Taggart who grasped the inner workings of their twisted psyches and had designed an emblem to focus and harness their driven, destructive energy. But they would do the Troll's bidding, for Taggart would order them to do whatever he desired. Already he had tested them in small numbers, in isolated areas, upon travelers and others who would never be missed, and the cruelty and savagery he had instilled in them pleased him.

They pleased him, yet the need to touch so many minds was wearing. His creators had given him an electronic amplifying system of tremendous power, but it was his brain which produced the original signal. The power supply of his fighter pushed his mental patterns outward, hammering at the humans about him, yet he'd underestimated the time requirement, and for the first time in his tireless life, he felt fatigue. His brain was organic; unlike a computer, he wearied eventually of concentration and required rest. And, also unlike a computer, he could do but one thing at a time, however well he might do it. The need to concentrate upon the task at hand—and to rest from it—had delayed his bomb badly.

But that, too, was acceptable. He had made progress—not as much as he'd hoped, for the technical data on the construction of weapons, as opposed to their employment, were guarded by Shirmaksu security codes he could not break easily. But they could be broken with time. He had most of what he required now, and once the design was completed, his servomechs could fabricate and assemble the components in a very few days.

Not that he expected to need the bomb. Things were going well, very well, and surely if any human on this benighted planet had possessed the wit to search for him, it had given up by now. Besides, he thought with a wicked, hungry happiness, anyone who might have hunted him would be occupied with other matters very soon.

Like the wildfire waiting to consume its land.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Dolf Wilkins looked up as Allison DuChamps entered his office. DuChamps, one of the Bureau's most senior female agents, was a pleasantly unremarkable-looking woman with a first-class mind and a levelheadedness that was almost infuriating—a combination which had served her well in the field—and head of the domestic terrorism unit.

Wilkins smiled and she smiled back, but only with her lips. Her dark, foreboding eyes touched him with a chill, and his own smile faded.

"What is it, Alley?"

"I think we have a bad situation," she said carefully. "Possibly very bad."

Wilkins stiffened. The Bureau had learned its lesson (yet again, he conceded) about overreaction, Big Brotherliness, and clumsy interventions brought on by panic attacks among its leadership, which was one reason DuChamps had been chosen for her job. If Allison was concerned . . .

"What?" he asked again.

"I've been reading some reports from domestic surveillance," DuChamps replied, "and there's a very strange—and ugly—pattern developing. One with the potential to do a lot of damage."

"Where and how?"

"The Southeast and racism," she said succinctly. "To be more precise, large-scale, organized, deliberately orchestrated racial violence."

"What?" Wilkins sat straighter. Organized racial violence had become less of a concern to the Bureau over the last decade. Oh, there were still bigots—of every color and creed—who were willing or even eager to resort to violence, just as there were occasionally horrific incidents in which they did just that. But society's tolerance was drying up, and that, as every good cop knew, was the true secret to controlling any activity: turn it into something society as a whole rejected. Judicious pressure from the Justice Department and the Bureau helped keep it trimmed back, though there'd been a few ugly flare-ups in various inner cities and the Midwest and Northeast, but compared to other motives for organized violence, racism had become very much a secondary worry.

That was his first thought; his second was that the South wasn't even where racist organizations remained strongest. In fact, the focus of active bigotry seemed to have moved north from the Sunbelt, especially into the decaying urban sprawls of the "Rust Belt." Southerners had taken the rap too often in the sixties and seventies. As a society, they'd learned a lesson which the rest of the country, having taught it to the South, seemed disinclined to learn for itself.

"Are you sure, Alley?" he asked finally, and she nodded.

"It surprised me, too, Dolf, but it's there. And the entire pattern is . . . wrong. I've never seen anything like it."

"Explain," he said sharply.

"I'll try. Look, we all know there are patterns for organized hate groups. National and regional groups grow out of long-standing, widespread prejudice and/or the need for some sort of scapegoat. A localized group can arise from those same pressures or from the emergence of some `charismatic' (if you'll pardon the term) local leader or from strictly local, and therefore, by definition, special circumstances. Or, in some instances, a single powerful individual or group of individuals can, by economic or other pressures, create an organization, in which case it's usually rather fragile and tends to fall apart once the pressure from those individuals eases off. And, of course, some groups become pure hate groups as the `purity' of their other political goals degenerates. Right?"

"Yes," he said a bit impatiently.

"All right. What we have here is a series of apparently isolated episodes, scattered over parts of nine states. The states in question have different economies, social patterns, and ethnic compositions. With a few exceptions, none have any recent record of large-scale, racially motivated hostility—certainly not on an action-oriented, organized model. Only portions of each state seem to be affected, with no abnormalities outside the affected areas. And, finally, there are very clear similarities between these widely scattered episodes. So much of one, in fact, that I'm tempted to say we're looking at a single group's MO . . . except that the activity seems to jump back and forth across racial lines like a ping-pong ball!"

"Huh?" Wilkins leaned back in his chair. "Are you sure there really is a pattern, Alley? You're not reading correlations into unrelated data?"

"I'm certain." She opened a folder and glanced at some scribbled notes. "The Civil Rights Division passed us a formal—and quiet—request from the Southern Governor's Conference to look into racial unrest in both Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia. Aside from those mail bombings a few years back, the area's been quiet for so long that I'm afraid we didn't assign it a very high priority at first, but then the facts started coming in, and not just from those states.

"Fact: five months ago there was no significant racist activity in the affected areas. Fact: a little over three months ago, local law enforcement people started noticing a marked increase in both recruiting by and visibility of racist organizations, predominantly white. Fact: about two months ago, there began to be a few widely separated incidents—more what you'd call ruffianism than anything else—mingled with vandalism, cross burnings, harassment, that sort of thing. Fact: once the first moves had been made by the white groups, nonwhite groups started popping out of the woodwork and shoving back. Fact: one month ago, there was a decided and very noticeable acceleration in the situation, almost like a controlled surge, from both sides of the racial line . . . and the rate of increase is still climbing."

She closed the folder.

"What we seem to have here, Dolf," she said very precisely, "is the blow-off of carefully concealed but long-standing mutual hatreds. I mean, these people are organized—on a cell basis, no less—on both sides, and they're heavily armed and turning more extreme, more violence-prone, almost in unison, no matter which side they're on." She paused, regarding him levelly.

"I suppose it's theoretically possible that the situation could have been this bad all along without our noticing, but I don't believe it. The more peaceful, process-oriented radicals would have given us some sign of it, and I simply cannot convince myself that the Bureau and that many local law enforcement agencies could all miss something like this. Besides, the pattern is wrong. It's geographic, but not regional; it's racial, but not limited to one or even a few racial groups."

Wilkins nodded, fighting a strangely mixed exhilaration and horror.

"Go on," he said quietly.

"I plotted the data on a map, Dolf," she said. "I mean everything: rallies, known financial contributions, confrontations, the whole shooting match. And when I did, I found a uniform, graduated density of events, like a ripple pattern, spreading out from a common center, going just so far, and then stopping." She waved a hand. "Oh, there are odds and ends beyond the edge of the pattern, but I think they're rogues—copycats, that sort of thing. I mean, there'll always be some nuts, and if they get the idea there's some sort of `wave of the future' coming, it's bound to bring them out of the closet in their white sheets and swastikas or what-have-you. The point is that outside the boundary the events are scattered. They don't plot. But inside it . . ." Her voice trailed off.

"Did you bring a copy of your map?" Wilkins tried to keep his voice as normal and professional as possible.

"Here." She produced a photocopied map and unfolded it on his desk, tracing the rough circle she'd scribed upon it. It was centered on the North Carolina-Tennessee mountains, Wilkins noted, reaching out to just beyond Atlanta to the south and Portsmouth, Ohio, to the north. DuChamps had marked its approximate center, and Wilkins's mouth went dry when he saw its location. A little north of Asheville, he noted with a queer sense of almost-calm . . . and very close to the site of the plutonium theft.

"See?" she said. "Why should rural West Virginia or southern Ohio exhibit exactly the same pattern as Atlanta or Columbia, South Carolina? And if Columbia's going crazy, why isn't Raleigh? Or Charleston? And do you see how the incidence just stops at the edge of the circle?" He nodded silently, and she went on with quiet urgency.

"There's something else I don't think many of the locals have had enough data to notice, Dolf. A new organization. It's so well hidden we still don't even know its name, but it's there, and its members use a really weird `secret' identification symbol: a skeleton on a white horse."

"A what?" Wilkins blinked in confusion.

"A skeleton on a horse," DuChamps repeated, then shrugged. "I know, it doesn't make any sense. Doesn't relate to any known group's symbology, as far as we can determine. Weirdest of all, it definitely seems linked to all this racial unrest, but it appears to be more of an anarchist group, and we've identified members from several different races. And," she added more grimly, "it's violent as hell. The North Carolina SBI seems to have lost a four-man undercover team that got too close to just one member of whatever it is."

She shook her head slowly, stroking her folder.

"I don't know what's going on, Dolf, but some one outfit is pulling the strings. There's a common thread, some strategy I can't quite put my finger on. You just don't get this sort of pattern without someone creating it. I couldn't prove it in court, but that's the only explanation that even half-way makes sense—only that's crazy, too!"

"Maybe, Alley," he said, then paused; Allison DuChamps did not possess the critical alpha spike. He cleared his throat. "Keep an eye on it and put your planning staff to work on an in-depth analysis and some sort of reaction plan in case worse comes to worst, all right?"

"We need more than that, Dolf," she said. "Recruiting rallies are starting to pop up—big ones, with some ominous alliances behind them. The KKK and the Nazi Party plan to formalize something called the `Appalachian White People's Alliance' at a joint rally in Asheville this week, and that's just the start of it. Rumbles of opposition rallies by nonwhite militants are already turning up, too, and if something breaks, we won't begin to have the manpower to deal with it on a reaction basis. We've got to put somebody inside, see if we can't get a handle on who's setting it up. And we've got to do it fast."

"I'm inclined to agree," he lied, "but give me a little while to think about it. And leave me a copy of the map, if you can."

"Certainly. This is your copy of my report." She laid the folder on his desk and headed for the door, then paused and looked back. "But, Dolf," she said softly, "don't think too long, okay?"

"Okay, Alley," he said, never taking his eyes from the map.

"Good."

The door closed behind her, and he reached for his phone the instant the latch clicked. He punched in a long-distance number and waited, fingers drumming nervously on the desk, until it was answered.

"Commander Morris?" He spoke quickly, urgently. "Dolf Wilkins. Look, don't get your hopes up, but I think we've found Grendel. . . . Yes, that's right, found him. Well, within thirty or forty square miles, anyway." He paused and listened for a long, taut moment. "Bet your sweet ass I can," he said with a savage grin. "I'll grab Stan Loren and be there within two hours if I have to carry the damned plane on my back!"



A bevy of tilt-rotor MV-22 Ospreys swooped out of the hot September sun in a hurricane of dust and flying debris to disgorge the first echelon of Company T. The fixed-wing planes had come roaring in at three hundred knots, then slowed sharply and rotated their wingtip engines through ninety degrees to descend vertically. Side and rear cargo hatches opened before they touched down, and three fully equipped squads stormed out of each aircraft, heading for preselected firing positions. They carried their usual personal weapons, M249 SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) machine guns, and an astoundingly high number of antiarmor weapons. In addition to extra issues of the single-shot Predator SRAW (Short Range Assault Weapon) which had replaced the AT-4 and the even older LAW (Lightweight Anti-Armor Weapon) as the standard light antitank weapon of the Corps, each platoon contained an extra antiarmor squad equipped with three Dragon heavy man-portable tank-killer launchers equipped with the new Superdragon II fire-and-forget missile upgrade which had become standard Army issue but had not yet reached the Corps.

Rear Admiral Richard Aston watched Major Abernathy's men deploy, racing through the waist-high grass while their aircraft lifted out to clear the landing zone. The moment the LZ was clear, C-130Js rumbled in just above the ground to drop palletized eight-wheeled LAVs (Light Armored Vehicles) with their turreted, twenty-five-millimeter autocannon, and the vehicles of an attached heavy machine-gun platoon from their rear-opening cargo doors. The vehicles landed amid the sounds of splintering pallets, and beyond them a second wave of Ospreys was already coming in with vehicle crews, more rifle squads, more ammunition, and still more antitank weapons.

He glanced at his stopwatch, then at Ludmilla. They'd managed to shave off another few seconds, but in a sense they were just marking time. They had no idea what sort of terrain or tactical situation would obtain when they finally found the Troll, so they were running standard exercises to keep basic skills sharp. They'd run several urban exercises, as well, but the strategy team all agreed that they were unlikely to find something as visually obvious as the Troll hiding in a city.

He looked up, frowning, as the whacking sound of fresh rotors came from behind. They were running the exercise without helos, so what—?

The Blackhawk transport came over a rise, headed directly towards them, then flared and settled like a giant, dust-breathing dragonfly, glittering in the hot sunlight under a whining halo of rotor blades.

Aston and Ludmilla turned curiously to watch the hatch open, but when a familiar, pudgy form in the uniform of a Navy commander jumped out their curiosity became tension. They glanced at one another and then, without a word, moved quickly to meet him.

Morris waded through the grass towards them, waving for them to wait where they were, and they stopped. He toiled over to them, sweating heavily in the heat, and his expression was taut.

"Mordecai! What are you doing here?" Ludmilla demanded before Aston could get a word in.

"It's Grendel," Morris said in a low, fierce voice. "We've got him, Milla! We've pinned the bastard down at last!"



"I don't know, Mordecai," Aston said unhappily, rubbing his bald pate while he stared down at the map on which Morris and Jayne Hastings had further refined Allison DuChamps's data. They'd narrowed the possible area to a circle no more than ten miles across and plotted it on a large-scale topographical map, but it was a rough ten miles. "Okay, I agree he has to be more or less in here—" he tapped the circle in which the lines connecting various incidents all crossed "—but look at it. It's all heavy forest, the road net stinks, and once we start a systematic search, he'll be up and away before we can stop him. If we knew exactly where he was, things'd be different, but going in blind . . ."

His voice trailed off and he shook his head, and Morris wiped sweat from his face silently. It was sweltering in Aston's command trailer, and his own elation had dimmed as the admiral took him step-by-step, remorselessly, through their meager data. The information represented a tremendous breakthrough—the first real break they'd had—but Dick was right. Morris admitted it unhappily, but he admitted it. He and Wilkins had been too exhilarated to look for difficulties, but Aston was a professional's professional. He knew that Murphy's was the first law of military operations.

The intelligence officer sighed and ran fingers through his sweaty hair, frowning as he, too, stared down at the map. Now he understood why Loren had seemed less euphoric than the FBI director and himself. The CIA man's ex-Ranger background meant he was more accustomed to operations mounted in trackless wilderness without street signs, and he'd seen more clearly what Aston faced.

Still, they knew roughly where he was. . . .

"If large-scale searches are out, what about small ground parties of Troll-proof recon troops?" he asked finally.

"That may be the way we have to go." Aston sighed. "And we've been training for just that, but I'd hoped to avoid it. That's a damned big area, and we've only got so many men, Mordecai. Besides, if we send people in on the ground, Grendel's likely to spot them before they spot him, especially if he's well hidden. If he does, they won't have the firepower to stop him. They can't—not if they're supposed to be unobtrusive. So if there's hard contact between us and him, we're going to lose a lot of people and he'll probably bug out before we can get the main force in place."

"All right," Morris said, "suppose we set up an air umbrella before you go in? A squadron of F-16s from Shaw—or, better yet, F-15s from Langley—could fly top cover and nail him if he took off, couldn't they?"

"I don't know," Aston said thoughtfully. "Milla?"

"It's worth trying," she said slowly, "but he's faster than anything we've got, and he can accelerate faster, too. With a small start, he could simply outrun your missiles, and his antimissile systems are pretty good, as well. Then, too, he'd have an excellent chance of fighting his way through several dozen of your best fighters head-to-head—unless you arm them with nukes. And with chemical warheads, you'd have to use heavy surface-to-air missiles to do him much damage, because your air-to-air missiles just don't pack enough punch."

"Their SAM versions knocked down his wingmen," Morris pointed out.

"True, but you fired hundreds of them." She wiped her damp forehead, and Morris hid a grin. At least her symbiote didn't keep her from sweating. "And the real reason they worked wasn't their power but the tactical situation. They took the Kangas—and Grendel—by surprise, because none of them expected any threat from such primitive technology. Even then, they wouldn't have worked if they hadn't been moving at such high velocity that their drive fields were all focused forward and couldn't interdict. Not to mention the way atmospheric friction tore them apart once their hull integrity was breached." She shook her head. "No, it's going to take something at least as heavy as a Patriot to damage his hull significantly, assuming he's not configured to interdict. And, frankly, your SAMs would be dead meat against his active defenses unless we can fire enough to saturate his tracking capability."

"And we don't happen to have a couple of dozen Patriot batteries already in the area," Aston pointed out to Morris. "Which means we can't count on taking him out once he gets airborne even if he hasn't come up with some way to screw our tracking systems over. We've got to catch him on the ground, someplace we can close in with enough heavy weapons to deal with his mechs and catch him on take off, when his drive field can't interdict."

Morris nodded, his expression unhappy. Ludmilla had briefed them all on the Troll's flight systems. Fighters didn't mount battle screen because they used their n-drives to intercept incoming weapons, but the Troll couldn't configure his drive field to do that until he was at least a hundred meters off the ground. Up to that point, he could be hit—assuming they got through his active defenses—but the window would be only seconds wide.

"More to the point, perhaps," Aston went on, "we're all agreed that we're only going to get one clean shot at him—if we're lucky. Once he knows we're on to him, he'll redouble his security measures, at the very least; at worst, he'll go for the quick kill and simply blow the planet up. So we have to catch him when he's vulnerable, and to do that, we have to know where he is. Which is only another way of saying that we can't search for him without risking alerting him, but that we've got to know where he is before we warn him in any other way."

"Maybe." Ludmilla licked sweat from her upper lip and ran her fingertip over the mountainous terrain, frowning. "I know we'd hoped for some sort of physical sighting, but this may actually be better. He must be pretty well hidden—probably underground; they like that—and we haven't had any search activity in the area. So he must know we haven't spotted him, and when we do turn up, he's going to spend a few minutes wondering why we're there."

"Which would be all very well if we knew where he was," Aston objected, but his face was intent, as if he sensed some thought working itself out behind her eyes.

"Maybe we can figure that out," she said softly, turning to Morris. "Mordecai, is there any sort of aircraft which would normally fly something remotely like a search pattern in that area?"

"Hm?" Morris thought for a moment, frowning, but it was Abernathy who provided the answer.

"Sure," he said. "Forestry Service planes buzz around the national forests and parks all the time." Morris and Aston looked at him with surprised respect, and he chuckled. "Hey, I'm a California boy. I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley—little place named Exeter, just below Sequoia National Park. They do surveys, aerial mapping, hunt for pot growers, watch for forest fires, all that sort of thing."

"Yes, they do," Morris said slowly, "and the Southeast's been dry again this year. I bet they're keeping a real close fire-watch."

"Good." Ludmilla looked at Aston. "I've half-expected something like this. That's why I was so glad to get my flight suit back together."

"Why?" he asked tensely.

"Because the sensies work. I can wear it and ride around in one of these Forestry Service planes. Even if he's buried himself, he'll have set up detection posts. Why not? Your technology wouldn't even recognize one of his scan beams."

"But yours will," he said flatly, and frowned when she nodded. "No, Milla. We need you to handle your blaster. I let you talk me into jump school because we might have to go in by chute, but if you go mucking around up there with twenty-fifth century technology and he spots you—"

"I'll use passive systems," she said calmly. "Everything else will be powered down to a shielded trickle charge. He'd have to be within a hundred meters to pick that up, and that's assuming he knew to look for them in the first place. Which he won't, because I'm `dead,' right?"

"Just so you don't get that way for real." He tried to speak lightly, but she heard personal as well as professional concern in his voice, and her eyes smiled at him.

"All right," he said after a moment, "how close can you pin him down?"

"Well, with a little luck I can place his scanner sites, at least, to within . . . oh, twenty meters. The area he's protecting with them should give us a good idea where he is, and if you put up an air umbrella that knows where to look, you'll at least double your chance of catching him as he lifts."

"All right," he sighed again, after a long, silent moment. "I don't like it, but I don't see any way around it, either. So where do you think he is?"

"I suspect he's right here," she said, tapping the map. Aston craned his neck and looked over her shoulder. Her finger rested on something called Sugarloaf Mountain. "Right in the middle of Mordecai's area with this nice valley right at the top, see? There's even a road of sorts, connecting to state highway—" she bent closer to the map "—Two-Twelve, and it looks pretty heavily forested in there. Good cover."

"You may be right. But he could be in one of these side valleys, too."

"I know. But that's where he is, Dick. Somewhere on this mountain."

"Agreed," he said, giving himself a mental shake and banishing his feeling of dread. "All right, Mordecai, get us a Forestry Service plane. We'll put a pilot we know the bastard can't read into it to be on the safe side, and we'll have Jayne see what kind of satellite pictures she can hunt up, too." He turned to Abernathy. "Major, alert the troops. I want a full gear inspection by eighteen hundred."

"Yes, Sir," Abernathy said crisply.

"Mordecai—" Aston turned back to the commander "—get back to Washington and tell Admiral McLain we need a fighter umbrella—a distant one. See if he can set it up out of Langley or Pax River; they're both outside the Troll's reach, but they can get there in a hurry. But stress that I don't want them mission-briefed ahead of time. Find the senior man with a good EEG and put him in charge, then brief him so he can set up an ops plan, but don't let him give it to the troops until just—"

He broke off as he realized Morris wasn't listening to him.

"Mordecai?" Aston cocked his head and followed the direction of Morris's eyes. Ludmilla had just taken off her jacket, and the commander was staring at her as if at a ghost. "Mordecai!"

"Just . . . just a minute, Dick," Morris said softly. He was still staring at Ludmilla, and she looked back with a puzzled expression.

"Milla," he asked quietly, "where did you get that shirt?"

"This?" She looked down, stroking the silk-screening, and Abernathy and Aston looked at her in puzzlement. It was the one with the skeletal rider, and they'd seen it many times without noting anything extraordinary.

"That," Morris said. "According to the FBI report, there's a screwy anarchist group with an interracial membership turning up. Not many members actually spotted, but they're spread all over the affected area."

"So?" Aston asked.

"Their emblem," Morris said softly, "is a skeleton on a white horse."

There was silence, and Ludmilla rose slowly, reaching for the FBI report. As she stood, Morris started visibly and reached out quickly. Her eyes widened, but she stood motionless as he grabbed the bottom of her shirt and stretched it out, reading the lettering.

"My God, my God!" he whispered. "No wonder I didn't think of it. It's not from my book—it's from yours!"

"What in hell are you talking about, Mordecai?" Aston demanded.

"This." He turned the lettering and read it aloud. " `The Fourth Horseman,' " he whispered. Aston looked blank, but Abernathy straightened with a jerk. "The rider on the pale horse," Morris went on. "The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse." He looked up and met Aston's eyes.

"Death," he said quietly.

There was total silence, then Aston cleared his throat.

"All right, M&M. When you talk to Admiral McLain, tell him to make sure at least some of the air cover's armed with nukes."

"Nukes?" Morris stared at him, frowning in protest. "But what about the ground force? We can't use—"

"You damned well can," Aston said harshly. "We can't fuck around with him, Mordecai. If this son-of-a-bitch gets off the ground, we'll lose him. Either he'll go to ground all over again—this time knowing that we're at least partly onto him—or he may just be pissed enough to set off his bomb. So if I tell you to, or if whoever's in charge upstairs sees the bastard taking off, nail him. Understood?"

There was another long silence, then Morris nodded reluctantly.

"Understood."



"Master, I think it's a mistake," Blake Taggart said to the featureless panel which hid the Troll. "We know they're ready. Why risk it now?"

"It is illogical to assume that what has not been tested will function as desired," the Troll replied coldly. Deep within himself, he was amused to be preaching logic to a human after all the endless years in which the Shirmaksu had prated of it to him.

"But it's too soon, Master," the Blake Taggart human argued stubbornly, and the Troll felt a grudging respect for the creature's courage. Or was it simply that it sensed his own dependence upon it? No matter.

"It is not too soon." The mechanical voice was even harsher than usual, and the Troll smiled mentally as he felt the human's fear. It had argued too long once before, and days had passed before it even began to forget the anguish that had earned it.

"Blake Taggart," the Troll went on more evenly, "the plan requires increasing violence as the election nears, but it must be controlled, directed. I must know that I can begin it when I wish and aim it as I will, and also that I can call these vermin to heel when I must. Much depends upon that, and I will not rely on a tool I have not tested. Besides—" the hideous sound of trollish laughter grated in the control room "—a foretaste should improve the panic. And this town of Asheville is perfect. Close enough to watch with my remotes, small enough for an excellent laboratory, yet large enough to determine how well our tool fares against one of your urban centers. And I do not care for this Asheville, Blake Taggart. Its leadership has proved too hard to touch, to control, and it is close to my base. No, I will destroy it."

"Destroy it?" Taggart was alarmed. "But that would take—"

"More strength than I have recruited here. Yes, Blake Taggart, I know. My creatures are already on the move—not all, but enough."

"In that case, why not call in the Brigade? We don't know exactly what will happen, but it might be better to have some of our own people handy—people we can trust to do exactly what they're told, not just what you can suggest to them indirectly."

"Yes," the Troll mused. "Yes, Blake Taggart, that may be an excellent idea. Summon them all. We will test your mobilization plan, as well."

"I will, Master," Taggart said.