When it hit the planet’s upper atmosphere, the starship Vermillion was still traveling at an appreciable fraction of orbital velocity. Like the majority of its onboard systems, the colony vessel’s ingrav and regrav drives were glitching badly in the Void, leaving them unable to suspend the titanic bulk against gravity and lower it to a gentle landing as they were designed. But they could still exert some resistance against the planet’s hungry gravity, so they strained to slow the starship’s otherwise-catastrophic speed. On the bridge, Captain Cornelius and the ten remaining volunteers from the crew did what they could to mitigate the impending disaster. Force fields, normally tough enough to deflect nuclear blasts with ease, headed toward breakdown as they expanded out from the hull. Redline instability warnings bloomed in Cornelius’s exovision as they held Vermillion secure at the center of a bubble of incandescent plasma five kilometers in diameter.

Vermillion curved around the planet, tearing a screaming hole through the atmosphere as it aerobraked to a manageable speed, its fiery hypersonic wake scoring a terrible furrow of destruction across every landmass it zoomed over. After seventy-two minutes of this torment it finally dropped to subsonic. They were still traveling at eighty kilometers an hour when their altitude reached zero. A last desperate burst of power was pumped into the fading drive units to brake their speed further. The force fields collapsed on impact, and Vermillion’s unprotected hull struck the ground.

Their wild flight had brought them to a rumpled stretch of ground just beyond a massive river where the humidity was a constant mist twisting among the verdant trees. This was jungle territory, with a soft loamy ground. But soft was a relative term for a transgalactic colony ship more than a kilometer and a half long and massing hundreds of thousands of tons.

It hit at the foot of a small incline, pulverizing vegetation and ripping out a deep gorge. Modules and compartments never designed to withstand such forces broke off, tumbling away to their ruin through the trees. But the main section kept surging onward and upward until it, too, came to rest.

Seventy-five percent of Vermillion remained intact through a miraculous combination of good luck and steely nerves. Captain Cornelius was justifiably lauded by the passengers who’d flown down to the planet earlier in much safer shuttles with good old-fashioned solid wings. That hero-worship enabled him to retain his authority as the lost survivors slowly built their civilization in the strange environment of the Void. The threat of the Fallers who began to invade their world from space justified the formation of defensive regiments, of which Cornelius became commander in chief. The machines Vermillion had brought from the Commonwealth were largely useless in the Void, where electrical current was inhibited, and anything more complex than a steam engine was subject to constant glitches. The resources that did work, especially the precious medical capsules, were guarded and restricted to the captain and his immediate family, enhancing his power and authority.

Vermillion’s remains became the seat of power on the new, and somewhat ironically named, world of Bienvenido. To protect their declining technological advantage, the Captain’s family incorporated the starship’s original sections into a working residence, then extended that to embrace an executive complex and military headquarters as well as their private clinic. As the palace grew in size and splendor, so more and more of the ship was built around, but mainly on top of.

After three thousand years, nothing of the Vermillion was visible from outside. But by then it was no longer relevant; the nature of the Void had incapacitated even the simplest artifact of Commonwealth technology. The rule of the Captain’s family had become established by law, political power, and a brutally effective secret police force.

Then—somehow—Nigel Sheldon arrived on Bienvenido. A quantumbuster was detonated, and the Void responded with the Great Transition, flinging Bienvenido out into the deepest Gulf of intergalactic space. Technology worked again.

The great, gloomy warrens of vaults underneath the ancient palace, built by the flickering light of valseed oil lamps, were now illuminated by new electric bulbs. It was just as well, Laura Brandt thought as she hurried toward the crypt that housed the wormhole gateway she’d managed to renovate. So many people were rushing around down here, and all of them wearing a look of suppressed fear. Aboveground, Fall alert sirens were shrieking a warning across the city of Varlan. That wasn’t strictly accurate. Those new lights in the sky above Bienvenido weren’t a Fall, at least not in the usual sense. But it would do, warning people of an impending threat from space.

Marine guards in their smart black uniforms stood outside the big wooden doors that led into the wormhole crypt. For once the doors were wide open, allowing dozens of freshly laid telephone cables to snake inside. It also enabled technicians from the Manhattan Project to wheel in large metal trolleys. Whyever did I call it that? Laura wondered. Probably the mental equivalent of comfort food.

She stopped to let the trolleys clank past, staring at the black iron casing of the big cylinders they carried. The atom bombs weren’t streamlined, but then she’d never intended for them to be dropped in the planet’s atmosphere.

Inside the crypt, the sound of frantic voices dipped as technicians and officers from the People’s Air Defense Force gave the weapons fearful glances. Their arrival was the final confirmation that the threat was terrifyingly real.

The marine guards suddenly snapped off salutes. Laura turned to see Prime Minister Slvasta arriving behind her. He was wearing some kind of yellow-and-blue regimental dress tunic; she never could be bothered to remember which regiment had which colors. As always, Slvasta’s empty sleeve was pinned prominently across his chest, the result of an encounter with a Faller. Of all Bienvenido’s anachronisms, that was the oddest to Laura. She’d spent the first three hundred years of her life in the Commonwealth, where the concept of people walking around with missing limbs was unheard of. Even if some gross fluke accident did somehow maim a citizen, a replacement clone limb would be grown and attached within weeks. But not here. Here Slvasta was a physical reminder of how vigilance should never be allowed to falter.

She detested him, but needed his authority to instigate her desperate rescue plan for this benighted world. So the oppressive downside of his dictatorial rule had to be quietly overlooked. And her biononics—including full-body force field function—meant that he couldn’t eliminate her. They were stuck with each other.

Slvasta’s usual entourage of cronies formed a phalanx around him. Javier, a fellow leader of the revolution who’d slid smoothly into his role of Slvasta’s political adviser, was a huge man who looked as sullen and angry as always; not even the emergency had broken his constant suspicion of Laura. Yannrith stood beside him—Slvasta’s bodyguard during the revolution, and now the head of the People’s Security Regiment. His appearance matched his job, stiff and forbidding, with a vivid scar on his throat giving his voice a sharp rasping quality. He remained ever alert for Faller nests and even more alert to counter-revolutionary forces—of which there were, apparently, never-ending processions. Andricea completed the trio: a tall lean woman with a face Laura judged too cruel to be genuinely pretty. She was officially Slvasta’s chief bodyguard, though rumor around the People’s Congress said that she also shared his bed now that his wife had been sentenced to twenty years in the Pidrui Mines.

“Laura, is everything working?” Slvasta asked.

“Seems to be,” she said grumpily. Fatigue was starting to take its toll, even on her biononics-enriched body.

“The floaters,” he said urgently. “Did you repair the floaters?”

“Yes. They’re working.” She closed her eyes, allowing the last five crazy days to flash past like a dream. Biononics had allowed her to keep going without sleep, but she could feel that body-debt lying in wait now. Nonetheless, she and her exhausted team of assistants had managed to refurbish two of the floaters, cannibalizing the others for spare parts. Her earlier experience rebuilding the gateway had provided plenty of insight to the procedure.

“If there’s anything else you need, anything at all, just tell me,” he said sincerely. “I’ll make sure you get it.”

Democracy. Civil rights. Trial by jury. “Sure.”

They walked into the crypt together. It was one of the largest chambers beneath the palace, with dusty brick walls curving up to an arched roof, supported by metal ribs that had come from Vermillion. Looking around it, Laura was always struck by the resemblance to a European-style church, albeit with a dark gothic quality. It had been abandoned for centuries before she found the ancient machines it housed.

Standing at the far end, instead of an altar, the circular gateway shimmered with the purple ghostlight of Cherenkov radiation. It was a CST BC5800d2 model, intended to create small-scale planetary and interplanetary wormhole connections that would transport bulk material about while a new settlement established its manufacturing base. Vermillion had carried five of them, all of which were still sealed in their transit shells when Laura had landed on Bienvenido eight years earlier. As the last survivor of the Vermillion, she was the only one who understood Commonwealth technology. Even so, getting the wormhole gateway to work had been a devilishly tricky job, especially given everything else she’d had to do.

Every day since she’d landed, Laura mused that she’d committed some terrible crime back in the Commonwealth and this was her punishment: first trapped in a weird temporal loop in the Void, then liberated by Nigel Sheldon, only to fall into this hell populated by people she regarded as psychotic half savages. She’d spent those last eight years trying to educate the mistrustful citizens of Bienvenido, whose society had leveled out to something equivalent to Earth, circa 1850. That education had focused on raising their technology and engineering base by almost a century to combat the Fallers—a mission that had to be approached carefully. Bienvenido was fighting for its life against the alien invaders, and the machines she showed them how to build needed to be reliable, something their very basic factories could produce dependably. So far they had aircraft powered by simple V12 engines, better guns, electricity, and radio. The planes of the new People’s Air Force had proved sufficient to hold the Fallers at bay while she got to work renovating the wormholes stored below the palace. The idea behind that was to reach out to the Ring of Trees orbiting high above Bienvenido—crystalline alien biotechnology hive spaceships, as near as she could determine, which produced the lethal eggs that Fell as a plague across the planet. Her plan was that once she could open a wormhole amid the Trees, she could nuke them with the primitive fission bombs that the Manhattan Project was painstakingly assembling under her direction. Once the Fallers were eliminated, Bienvenido could finally start to progress along standard socioeconomic lines and hopefully one day reestablish contact with the Commonwealth. It was always a desperate notion, but it was all she had.

Now even that fantastical daydream was dying around her. The threat she’d uncovered on Ursell was closing fast on Bienvenido, and it was potent enough to obliterate humans and Fallers alike.

A row of trestle tables had been set up along one side of the crypt. Senior officers from various regiments sat there, talking into the black Bakelite telephone handsets linking them to their various headquarters, their babbling voices rich with suppressed panic.

“Ma’am,” one of the officers called. “The Space Vigilance Office has confirmed approach tracking. The first invasion fleet is going to reach the atmosphere above Fanrith in seven minutes.”

“Thank you,” Laura said as calmly as she could manage. She knew if she showed any weakness in front of these people, everything would be lost. They were all depending on her to save them. “Can someone get me confirmation on the second fleet?”

“Estimated atmosphere entry over Tothland in twenty-eight minutes,” another of the officers announced.

“Okay. Chief Air Marshal, are you ready?”

“Our squadrons are over Fanrith, ma’am,” the marshal said, her face grim. “We won’t let you down.”

Laura gave her a quick nod, fighting to prevent tears from forming. They’d deployed just over four hundred IA-505 air-interceptor planes to the uninhabited Fanrith continent—two-thirds of the planet’s entire Air Force. The IA-505s were her own design, cobbled together out of her storage lacuna’s basic encyclopedia files of the Second World War: terribly flimsy things made from an alloy monocoque structure, with the skin riveted on. The V12 engines powering the props were just supercharged pistons; she hadn’t gotten around to introducing turbines yet. Control surfaces moved when the pilot pulled on a joystick, which tugged wires connected to hydraulics. The planes were armed with four powerful pneumatic Gatling guns in the fore and aft turrets. And the crews, seven to a plane, were all proud and eager kids, fiercely loyal to their world, and determined to protect it no matter what. They were delighted with their radical flying war machines, smiling gamely when she went to meet squadrons at their aerodromes, promising her they’d do her proud when they took to the air to blast the Faller eggs apart with their guns.

And now she’d sent them into battle against interplanetary spaceships, crewed by the vilest aliens humans had ever encountered. She’d told Slvasta and the Air Force regiment marshals it was almost certain suicide, but they’d ordered the squadrons into the air anyway. If they hadn’t, all Bienvenido would be lost.

Laura blamed herself for that.

It was a mere six months ago when she’d gotten the wormhole functioning again. After the utterly hellish time she’d endured since arriving on Bienvenido—desperately upgrading its primitive military technology to cope with the Fallers, struggling against a paranoid Slvasta’s authoritarian regime—she had finally found the time to repair it. Her hope was that, by exploring the other planets that shared this terrible exile with them, she might find an ally against the Fallers. And for those brief months it looked as if the dream had come true.

She’d opened the wormhole five hundred kilometers above Aqueous—the most promising-looking of the nine other planets in orbit around this lonely sun. A beautiful oceanic world of deep turquoise scuffed by long white clouds, and possessing a standard oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. If it weren’t for the complete absence of any landmass, it could have been another Earth. It was only when the wormhole opened just above the atmosphere that they saw the green and pink dots of tiny coral islands, not one of which was more than a hundred meters in diameter.

They’d made contact with the Vatni, who lived on and around the islands—a semi-aquatic species who, for all their willingness to be allies, didn’t have any technological ability. However, thanks to the finite number of islands, they did have a considerable population pressure problem, which gave Slvasta’s diplomatic team an easy time during negotiations. It was agreed that Vatni families could come and live on Lamaran’s coastline in exchange for dealing with any marine threat posed by the Fallers in a way humans never could.

After a month during which thousands of eager Vatni came across to Bienvenido, Laura had switched the wormhole terminus to the second most viable planet: Ursell. The Vatni had told her that a thousand years earlier they’d seen spaceships flying from Ursell to explore every planet. After that, Ursell had undergone some kind of war, which had lasted for years. The flashes of explosions on the surface had been visible across interplanetary space.

Standing in this very crypt she and the observation team looked down on a planet swathed in a thick layer of dingy gray clouds. It wasn’t really H-congruent anymore, though it must have been centuries ago. Through the occasional gaps in the swaddling vapor they’d glimpsed a desolate landscape of brown semi-desert littered with wrecked towns. Background radiation was high—the inevitable result of nuclear weapons being detonated all over the planet. And the radio picked up a constant high-frequency click click click signal amid the heavy static. Something was still alive down there. They’d transmitted a message toward the source—a standard welcome sequence, devised by ancient Commonwealth alien contact specialists, and stored deep in her lacuna. And they got an answer back—a linguistic code also stored in her lacuna. A lot of red symbols had erupted across her exovision that day, for it was a species the Commonwealth knew well.

The Prime: the living embodiment of ruthlessness, with a single evolutionary imperative—to constantly expand. To the Prime, all other life-forms were a threat to be exterminated.

Just as they were about to be exterminated now, if Laura’s desperate plan failed.

“Ah, bollocks,” Laura muttered under her breath. “Here we go.” She went to stand alone in front of the wormhole. Her u-shadow sent a code to the ancient machine’s smartcore and schematics opened across her exovision, giving her a status review of the wormhole’s systems. It was entirely self-contained, powered by a direct mass energy converter. There had been plenty of component decay in the three thousand years it had lain here undisturbed, but by cannibalizing the other four BC5800d2s she’d gotten this one operational again—even if it was a bit quirky.

She ran through the exovision displays, checking there weren’t too many amber warnings. Satisfied, she loaded in coordinates.

“Stand by,” she told everyone.

The four-meter circle of Cherenkov radiation was abruptly contaminated by serpent shadows. Then the haze cleared. The wormhole terminus was poised two thousand kilometers above the Fanrith continent, looking directly down. Laura’s exovision displays showed her that the terminus was juddering, which always happened to an open-ended wormhole; it needed to be anchored to be completely stable. But the movement was minimal, a few centimeters at worst. Looking through the opening she had an excellent view out over the landmass lying twelve hundred kilometers west of Lamaran, Bienvenido’s major continent. Roughly oblong in shape, it straddled the equator, with a desert dominating a third of the interior. Dawn had reached its eastern coastline, shading the ground a pale ocher, fringed in the dark green of native vegetation. Thin clouds scudded slowly across it.

Laura was very aware of the awed silence behind her. “Observers,” she called. “Front and center, please.”

Five young officers with perfect eyesight hurried forward. The vista was slightly fuzzed by the wormhole’s integral force field holding back the vacuum, but despite that, nine points of light were visible, descending slowly into the atmosphere. The exhaust was a high-temperature hydrocarbon that was extremely radioactive. Laura thought it might be some kind of nuclear gas core rocket.

They’d tracked the Prime spaceships for six weeks, ever since they launched from Ursell. The ships massed about two thousand tons. Not huge then, but big enough to carry a significant threat. The Ursell Primes’ technology certainly wasn’t up to Commonwealth levels, and they didn’t have force fields—which meant Bienvenido’s more primitive forces stood a chance against them. A small one.

“They’re well below orbital velocity now,” she said, checking the vector reading from the terminus. “The descent trajectory is effectively vertical. Mark them.”

The observers started talking to the operators gathered around the big strategic map that took up two of the trestle tables. Wooden spaceships—simple cones—were pushed across the big map of Fanrith by long poles. The Air Force squadrons were already there, marked by model planes. She would have wept in frustration if it weren’t that she knew she’d end up laughing in hysterics at the monstrous futility of it.

Squadron communications officers talked urgently into their telephones. Poles began prodding the model planes as the IA-505s started to change course to intercept the descending spaceships.

“Let’s hear it,” she said.

Tannoy speakers came alive, filling the crypt with distorted voices and a lot of static as the radio links played. Squadron leaders relayed instructions, receiving tight confirmations from the aircrews.

“I see them” was repeated several times, jubilant cries riding the static. More voices crashed out of the tannoys, a confusing medley of navigation vectors and course-correction commands.

Laura turned back to the gateway. The spaceships were entering the atmosphere, their rocket plumes shrinking away. Even though they were traveling below orbital velocity, their size and blunt cone shapes created a huge shock wave in the tenuous ionosphere, sending out annular waves of glowing atoms, as if phantom flowers were blooming high above Fanrith. The nine ships were holding a loose circular formation, no more than twenty-five kilometers across.

Typically unimaginative, Laura thought. No clever tactics. Just get down, establish a planetary beachhead, and start attacking.

The ships reached the chemosphere, and the flares of superheated atmosphere began to elongate as they grew brighter. Chatter from the pilots grew louder and jumbled as they flew toward the invaders. Laura checked the tabletop map, seeing twelve squadrons clustering around the ships. They were coming down on the northern edge of Fanrith’s central desert, just south of the equator.

“They need to get underneath,” Laura told the chief air marshal.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Right underneath. That’s their sensor blind spot.”

“They know that.” The chief air marshal’s voice was level. “Your briefings were very clear.”

Slvasta stepped up beside Laura. “Let the aircrews do their job,” he said quietly.

Laura nodded, rubbing a hand across her forehead. She was worried now—worried for the planes and their crews, worried the invasion would succeed, worried she was making mistakes she was so tired.

“Something—” a tannoy spat out.

“Marco, Mar— Oh, Uracus, they just disintegrated! There’s nothing left!”

“Evelina. Evelina’s gone!”

“Explosions, they’re just exploding!”

“Three down.”

“Command, we’re taking some kind of hit!”

“What are they using? Wha—”

“Nothing! There’s nothing.”

Laura stared at the nine long glowing contrails that were streaking down through the stratosphere. “Beam weapons,” she said. Then louder, trying to keep the anguish from her voice, “They’re hitting you with beam weapons. X-rays, or masers. Get underneath them!”

One of the officers at the end of the trestle tables was chalking numbers on a board. The tally of planes lost. When he put up twenty-seven, Laura looked away. The IA-505s weren’t even in Gatling gun range of the invaders yet.

“Portlynn and Siegen squadrons circling under intruder seven,” their liaison said.

The tannoys were broadcasting a barrage of screams. Orders were garbled shouts. Static grew louder.

On the table, the models of Gretz and Wurzen squadrons reached intruder three.

Laura’s u-shadow ordered the wormhole terminus to descend. The panoramic view blurred as it lost altitude fast. Then the image steadied as it came to rest 110 kilometers above Fanrith, allowing them to look directly down on the fringe of the desert. There were no clouds. The only blemishes were the diminishing glimmers of distorted air ripped apart by the spaceships.

“Nineteen kilometers altitude,” Laura announced. “Watch out for the rocket exhaust. It’s as bad as any weapon.”

As she spoke, she saw the white spears of radioactive plasma emerging. More confusion and shouting erupted from the tannoys.

“Thirty-two confirmed lost,” a communications officer declared. No one in the crypt spoke.

“Stand by missiles,” Laura said, knowing it was all so wretchedly futile. They weren’t guided missiles; she hadn’t gotten Bienvenido’s electronics up to that level yet. These were unguided, developed to be fired in clusters from pods under the wings at a Faller egg in mid-descent. Thirty IA-505s had been hurriedly modified to shoot them vertically. Laura didn’t have any illusion that they’d hit the spaceships, but they would act as chaff, and hopefully divert some of the beam weapon fire.

“Begin missile barrage,” the chief air marshal ordered. The spaceship exhausts were now incandescent streaks, kilometers long. Coming down fast. Her u-shadow activated retinal filters, allowing her to see the tiny sparks of the cluster rockets swarming up at seven of the nine invaders. She wasn’t sure, but she thought the cries of fury and pain surging out of the tannoys might have decreased slightly.

“Invaders two, three, and eight coming down to your altitude, and slowing,” Laura said. “Four and six reaching attack altitude.”

“Converge,” the chief air marshal ordered.

“Giu bless you all,” Slvasta said in a strong clear voice. “Go get them!”

“One and seven,” Laura said. Then: “Five and nine. That’s all of them.” There was nothing left now but to pray.

The tannoys were a continual blast of shouted warnings and curses mixed with the high-pitched whine of the pneumatically driven rotary barrels. She closed her eyes, seeing the flimsy propeller-driven planes banking, turning toward the monster invaders and diving in, their Gatling guns firing furiously. They were good, those Gatling guns she’d designed for them, slinging five and a half thousand rounds a minute, hundred-gram projectiles with a muzzle velocity close to nine hundred meters a second.

Individually, a strike by one round would be nothing to spaceships this size, but the IA-505s were slamming out a wall of metal, chewing up the hull and outer systems. There would be damage, and the invaders were still in the air with three kilometers to go. If anything harmed their rockets…

A massive cheer burst across the crypt as intruder seven’s rockets failed. The spaceship began its long tumble to the unyielding desert below.

“Seventy-three percent casualties on seven’s attackers,” their liaison announced.

“Oh, bollocks,” Laura groaned in anguish. She refused to glance at the tally board. It wouldn’t be accurate anyway; they were losing planes so fast nobody could keep count. But she could see them through the terminus, small balls of flame flickering and dying in the hot air far above the desert.

On the map table, a pole ceremoniously knocked over the wooden rocket that represented intruder seven.

Intruder three’s rocket exhaust dimmed and vanished. Intruder five began to wobble, scything its plasma around in long curves.

“We’re killing them,” Slvasta said in satisfaction.

“Not enough,” Laura snapped back. You don’t understand. If just one of these bastards lands…

“Attack on intruder two is over,” the communications officer announced.

“Over?” Javier asked. “What do you mean over? It’s still flying. Send the planes back.”

“We can’t,” the officer told him bleakly.

“Why not?”

“They’re all gone. Wiped out.”

“Crudding Uracus!”

Laura tried to block it all out of her mind, the suffering and deaths. Suspend emotion, everything that made her human, and concentrate on the facts. Intruder three was plummeting now, spinning wildly as its erratic rockets sliced their lethal exhaust across the sky. Intruder one was abruptly knocked sideways as something exploded, sending out clouds of flame. Then it began to tilt, less than a kilometer from the ground, its blunt cone-nose sweeping around to point directly at the scrub desert below. Its rockets continued firing, accelerating it down.

The spaceship struck hard, detonating in a massive seething mushroom of flame and smoke. Planes that were already retreating were caught in the blast wave. She saw wings crumpling; then the mangled fuselages began their long plummet.

The tannoys fell silent.

“Intruders two, four, eight, and nine are on the ground,” the chief air marshal said. “We’ve taken the rest out. Confirmed kills.”

“Get the squadrons out of there,” Laura said urgently. “Low and fast. If they’re in the air, they’re sitting ducks to the beam weapons.”

“Surely one last assault…”

“Would just be suicide. You’ll achieve nothing and lose what remaining planes we have.”

Slvasta turned to look at the big atomic bombs on their trolleys, then back to the wormhole, which showed the edge of the desert where the invaders now sat. For kilometers in every direction the ground was smothered in flaming debris. “You’ll have to use the nukes.”

“We can’t,” Laura said wearily. “We only have three, and there are seven ships in the second invasion fleet heading for Tothland. If they fly close enough, and if I can open the terminus just right, three bombs might be able to take them all out while they’re in the air.”

“But—” He gestured at the wormhole, which was still looking down on the edge of the desert where the invaders had landed. “You said they will be unstoppable if they land!”

“I know.” She took a breath and told her u-shadow to open a link. “I need you,” she sent.

“You have a Commonwealth force field,” Javier said. “Can you eliminate them?”

“I have to take out their planet,” Laura told him, pleased at how calmly she’d spoken that preposterous statement. “I can’t fight four ships here as well.”

“So it is down to the regiments to defend us yet again,” Slvasta said gravely. “I will tell Master General Doyle to order full mobilization.”

“No,” Laura said.

“But we have nothing else! Bienvenido will be destroyed. You told us these aliens are worse than even Fallers. How can we—”

There was a commotion just outside the crypt doors. One of the marine sentries called: “Halt! You are not authorized to be here. I will shoot.”

“It’s all right,” Laura said. “Let them come in.”

Kysandra walked into the crypt—an entrance that brought complete silence with it. Biononics, the tiny machines permeating every cell in her body, barely had anything to do with maintaining her youthful looks. She was still in her twenties, her Celtic-pale skin rich with freckles, and thick Titian hair falling halfway down her back. She wore a long brown suede skirt and a white blouse; a loose suede waistcoat with many pockets held a variety of small metal and plastic gadgets. A long black cylinder was carried on a shoulder strap—featureless, but everyone in the room knew it had to be some kind of Commonwealth weapon.

Marek and Fergus followed her in. They were dressed in identical gray coveralls made from some slick fabric, and they carried the same cylinder weapon as Kysandra. Even their height and build were identical, though Marek had darker skin and looked a good thirty years older than Fergus.

Laura acknowledged the visitors with a wry grin. You had to use a full biononic field function scan to tell the men were ANAdroids, not actual people. And she’d never seen versions with morphic features quite so human; their creators had done an excellent job. But then, they were part of Nigel’s mission, and she knew no effort would’ve been spared.

Yannrith and Andricea immediately drew their pistols and aimed them at the newcomers with a steady double-handed grip.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Laura said in her most contemptuous voice. “They have integral force fields, like me. You can’t shoot them.” Which was almost true. Kysandra’s biononics did have that energy field function, while the two ANAdroids wore force field skeletons under their light armor suits.

“What in Uracus are they doing here?” Slvasta hissed.

“I asked them to help,” Laura said. “Nobody else can take out the invaders on the ground. Now will all the morons waving medieval weapons around please put them away before you hurt yourselves?”

Andricea flashed her a hateful glare before silently consulting Slvasta. He nodded, and the pistols were reluctantly holstered.

“Good to see you again, too,” Kysandra sneered at the prime minister. “Imprisoned any innocents yet today? Some kid complaining his state-issue shoes are too tight, maybe?”

“Uracus take you, Faller-whore,” Slvasta spat back.

“Oh, for—Nigel was not a Faller, you bonehead cretin!”

“He has given this world to them,” Slvasta shouted, spittle flying from his lips.

“Nigel freed us from the Void,” Kysandra said coldly. “He sacrificed himself in that quantumbuster explosion so we would have a chance of a decent future.”

“Falls have increased tenfold since the Great Transition.”

“Because the Trees that survived the quantumbuster blast are no longer confined to the Forest formation they were locked into,” Marek said calmly. “Now they have dispersed into a high orbit ring, and the temporal loop is broken, so they can release their eggs with greater frequency. It was an inevitable consequence of liberation from the Void.”

“Liberation! You call this being free?”

The ANAdroid produced an expression of mild puzzlement. “Yes.”

“Then I pity you.”

“It could have been freedom,” Kysandra said sweetly. “But then you took over from the Captain.”

“I am nothing like—!”

“Ha! Even your own wife saw the truth—eventually.”

“You corrupted her. It was your fault.”

“Enough!” Laura said. “Everybody, forget your political pissing contest. This is the day we face extinction, so let’s not try to do that job for our enemies, shall we?”

Slvasta gave Kysandra a furious glare. She matched it with the most indolent stare, taunting…

“Kysandra, thank you for coming to help,” Laura said. “Four spaceships made it past the IA-505s—numbers two, four, eight, and nine.”

“The squadrons did a good job then,” Kysandra said sympathetically.

“Yes.” Laura gestured at the wormhole. “Can you handle them?”

Kysandra patted the cylinder she was carrying. “Count on it.”

“Okay, where do you want us to put you down?”

Marek had been studying the table map. “Are these landing positions accurate?”

“Yes,” the chief air marshal said.

“Okay, nine and four are close together. Laura, drop me between them. I can deal with both of them.”

“I’ll take number eight,” Kysandra said.

Fergus grinned. “So I guess that leaves me with number two.”

“All right, stand by.” Laura’s u-shadow sent a stream of encoded instructions to the gateway. The terminus started to shift.

“Can you really do this?”

The voice was soft, but anxious. Almost everyone in the crypt looked at Javier. The big man was staring at Fergus.

“We can do this,” the ANAdroid said. “Even Kysandra. She might look like an angel, but she can be quite the warrior when she needs to be.”

Kysandra winked at Javier.

The terminus shifted, coming down to ground level, revealing a level expanse of rock-strewn desert sand, with dunes rising high up ahead.

“Terminus is in the lee of a dune,” Laura said. “No sensor coverage. Picking up some low-level radiation out there.”

“The exhaust,” Marek said. “We believe they used nuclear gas core rockets.”

“That was my conclusion, too.”

“Okay, my armor can cope with that. Let me through.”

Laura sent a code to the gateway, and the force field became porous. Marek took it at a run, jumping through onto the grainy sand beyond.

“Clear!”

Laura shifted the terminus to spaceship two. This time the ground was covered in scrub bushes, but all of them had wilted. Some were smoldering. Then the terminus jittered, shifting up several meters then sliding sideways. Laura sent a flurry of corrections through her u-shadow, and it stabilized again. She checked her exovision schematics.

“It’s holding,” she said.

Fergus sprinted through. He ducked behind some boulders as the terminus shifted away, but not before they all saw his coverall transform to the same color as the rocks. It would be stealthed, too, Laura knew, keeping him hidden from any sensors the invaders could deploy.

“Then there was one,” Kysandra said quietly as the terminus settled a kilometer from number eight.

“Good luck,” Javier said.

She turned to Slvasta, her red hair flowing over her shoulders, and took her time placing a wide-brimmed leather hat on her head. “I won’t abandon these people you oppress,” she said. “I will always be here to help them. But never you.” With that she walked calmly through the gateway, taking the cylinder off her shoulder as she went.

“Arrogant bitch,” Slvasta grunted. But not before Laura had shifted the wormhole terminus once again.

“Don’t underestimate her,” Laura said without looking at him. “And remember, I have exactly the same opinion of you.”

Nobody said anything; all the officers were suddenly busy studying their maps or clipboards.

“How are we doing with the second invasion fleet?” Laura asked.

“Estimated eleven minutes until landing,” the Space Vigilance Office liaison officer said. “They’re entering the chemosphere.”

Laura reconfigured the wormhole, opening the terminus above Tothland—an island in the Sibal Ocean not big enough to qualify as a continent. Seven crimson patches of light shone bright above the nighttime landmass as the spaceships aerobraked. Her u-shadow analyzed the positions and trajectories. Their rocket exhausts started to fire, sending pale splinters of luminescence shimmering across the hidden mountains far below.

“Weapons Master,” Laura said. “Please prepare the bombs.” Three keys were hanging on slim chains around her neck. She passed them to him.

Slvasta handed over his three keys as well. The weapons master opened the control hatch on the first of the three atomic bombs and put the keys in their twin sockets. Laura was almost tempted to activate her biononic force field function, but if the damn thing did go off, a force field wouldn’t protect her—not at this distance. The keys were turned simultaneously.

“Bomb one activated,” the weapons master announced solemnly.

Laura’s u-shadow performed a quick calculation as she walked over to the crude metal cylinder, and she set the timer for a hundred seconds. She flicked the red switch, trying not to flinch. Three lights shone red, and she closed the little hatch.

Five Manhattan Project technicians wheeled the bomb into the middle of the crypt, directly in front of the gateway.

“Stand by,” she told them. The terminus shifted again, down into the stratosphere, close to the trajectories of three invaders. Silver light shone through, coming from somewhere above the opening. “Go!”

The technicians were all young and fit, chosen for their strength. They pushed hard, building speed quickly across the ancient stone-paved floor. The bomb weighed nearly half a ton, but it was moving fast when the trolley reached the gateway, and they gave it a final shove. Laura’s u-shadow immediately moved the terminus away.

Theoretically, the bomb had a yield of forty-three kilotons. It would have been useless deployed in space against the invaders. For one thing, she couldn’t hope to open the gateway terminus close to an accelerating spaceship and match velocity accurately enough. And for another, even if they could deploy the bomb close enough, a nuclear explosion in a vacuum was unlikely to be effective. There would be no blast wave. Yes, the spaceship would suffer the radiation spike, and the electromagnetic pulse, but she couldn’t be sure that would kill it.

An atmospheric strike, however, was different. The ships were vulnerable during their descent phase, and it was the blast wave that would cause the real damage. Supersonic winds smashing into the spaceships in tandem with the radiation deluge and the electromagnetic pulse knocking out unprotected electronics and power systems…

With only three bombs it was their best chance.

“Bomb two activated,” the weapons master said.

She set the timer for a minute. The short interval was used to confirm the location of the invaders’ ships. Looking down from four hundred kilometers above Bienvenido, they saw proof that the first bomb had exploded successfully, which brought a swift cheer around the crypt. The detonation flare was spent; now there was just a seething ball of star-hot plasma, cloaked in a shroud of ruined air. Tothland was fully illuminated by the devilish purple-white glare. Her u-shadow could just distinguish four spaceships still descending within the chaotic atmosphere.

The terminus switched position again. Bomb two was shoved through, six kilometers above the ground.

Bomb number three was deployed at a mere two and a half kilometers of altitude.

Please work, she prayed as the five determined technicians let go of the trolley handle. It seemed to be the mantra she lived her life with these days. Everything she’d done since she landed had been nick-of-time kludges in the face of adversity. Every time she thought she was making progress, something would come along to challenge her satisfaction.

In a bizarre way she almost welcomed this invasion. If they destroyed the Prime, it would buy Bienvenido time. The planet’s society might just start to change as newer technologies began to make life easier. She might live to see the Commonwealth once more.

Unlikely.

Not that there was anyone left for her in the Commonwealth, anyway. The majority of her friends and family had all been on the colony fleet. But it has to be better than this.

The terminus opened again at five hundred kilometers above the radiation-saturated zone. Everyone watched anxiously as the three malevolent swirls of energy staining the air slowly subsided. Massive firestorms had broken out across Tothland as vegetation vaporized and entire forests ignited. Broiling hurricanes raced outward, bringing ruin with them. There was no sign of any spaceship rocket exhausts.

“Did we do it?” Slvasta asked in trepidation.

“I think so,” she said. Her enhanced retinas scanned the area where the ships had been, unable to detect anything but the billowing ion haze.

“Thank you.”

She nodded acknowledgment. He’d actually meant it.

“Do we open the gateway back to Fanrith and bring them back?”

“No. Kysandra said they would find their own way home.”

“I see.”

“So how do we know if they’ve been successful?” Yannrith asked.

Always the suspicious one, Laura thought. “You need to send the forward scouts into the landing zone to confirm the ships were destroyed. But Kysandra will have done the job. Trust me.” I haven’t told you half of the things biononics are capable of.

“All right.” Slvasta turned to one of the regimental colonels. “Send the scouts in.”

“Sir.” The colonel picked up a telephone and started talking into it.

“Time to finish this,” Laura said. “Let’s get the floaters in here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the weapons master acknowledged.

Slvasta and Javier exchanged a glance.

“Are you sure about this?” the political adviser asked.

“I’ve never been more sure of anything,” Laura told him solemnly. “If we don’t eliminate Ursell, the Prime will just keep on coming. Once they confirm how vulnerable Bienvenido is, it won’t be sixteen ships they send next, it’ll be sixteen thousand.”

“I thought you said Ursell was ruined?” Slvasta said.

“It is.”

“So surely the ships we’ve just defeated are all they can send?”

“No,” Laura told him firmly. “What they’ve sent is just what they could put together in a hurry. The Prime that are left back on Ursell will expend whatever is left of their resources to transfer themselves here. They know they can survive and expand again on Bienvenido.”

“But the Fallers—” Javier began.

“What? They’ll save us?” she asked scornfully. “Even they can’t stand against the Prime. No, this is something that must be done.”

“All right. Just…be careful,” Slvasta said.

“I always am.”

They continued to look through the gateway as the bombs’ devastation slowly cleared, the devil’s light draining from the sky above Tothland. The firestorms raged below them, pumping dense smoke into the tormented air. Then the next two trolleys were being wheeled into the crypt by the same technicians who’d delivered the atom bombs.

The floaters were another part of Vermillion’s cargo that had lain undisturbed since the landing. Like the gateways, floaters also generated wormholes, but they were intended to support the new colony’s burgeoning manufacturing industry rather than provide transport. Slightly smaller than the CST BC5800d2s, they were designed to be dropped into a gas giant’s atmosphere, where their force fields would expand, acting as a buoyancy system so their altitude could be selected with a good level of accuracy. That was necessary in a gas giant, where the atmospheric density meant the chemical composition was enormously varied, from almost pure hydrogen at the uppermost levels to complex hydrocarbons at the bottom. When the floater reached the required strata, its wormhole would open directly into a refinery, and a near-infinite supply of hydrocarbons would rush in, ready for conversion into whatever products the burgeoning colony needed.

The first time she saw them still in their protective transit shells, she’d thought she could use them to assist Bienvenido’s petrochemical era, providing combustion engine fuel without the need for oil wells and shale mines. Then she’d hesitated, wondering if she could skip that entire stage by going directly to fusion and high-density batteries—and cut out decades of pollution. It was a good problem to have, taking her mind off the Faller threat and Slvasta’s despicable regime.

The weapons technicians had to turn the floaters sideways to get them through the crypt’s arched doorway. They were cylinders four meters in diameter, and two deep, with a concave center on one side. The casing was a gray metalloceramic mottled with turquoise blemishes, as if it were a living carapace. They’d been relatively easy to restore, with less component degradation than the gateways. She supposed that was due to the tough environment they were designed to work in.

Her u-shadow established a link to both of them, and interrogated their smartnets to run a final systems check. Like the CST BC5800d2, they were powered by a direct mass energy converter that could be fed by the superpressurized atmosphere they were immersed in. Exovision displays showed her they were fully functional.

She stared at them as the trolleys came to rest. She’d done good work, aided by information from the ANAdroids. So no reason to delay, then. Bollocks.

“All right then,” she announced. “Let’s do this.”

“And there’s no other way?” Javier asked.

“No.”

“You would kill an entire world?”

“Sonny, it’s us or them.” Again.

Slvasta held up a hand and gave Javier a sharp glance. “Laura knows what must be done. Without her…” He smiled ruefully. “It’s just the risk. Please allow me to send some marines through with you.”

“They wouldn’t be any help,” she said. “But thanks anyway.” Her u-shadow sent a new series of instructions into the CST BC5800d2.

The terminus shifted again. Exovision displays showed her the gateway’s increased power consumption as the wormhole extended its range by eighty million kilometers. This time, the terminus judder was more pronounced.

A wan heliotrope light shone through the gateway, but there was nothing to see, just a haze. The terminus had opened deep inside Valatare’s atmosphere. Laura studied her exovision displays as 3-D graphics fluctuated, with amber caution graphics streaming in. The force field was being subjected to a huge pressure. “Odd,” she muttered.

“Something wrong?” Slvasta asked. There was an edge to his voice, not anger for once, but fear.

“Not specifically.” Her u-shadow sent a fresh batch of instructions to the gateway, and the terminus shifted. She monitored the pressure against the gateway’s force field, which was reducing rapidly. Then the haze cleared. The terminus had risen out of a cloud layer. It was as if they were looking out across an infinite cyan sky, roofed by another unbroken cloud sheet tens of kilometers above them. Mammoth hurricane-whorls chased through the gulf at colossal speed. Phenomenal lightning bolts snapped between them, rivaling solar flares in power.

Valatare was the sole gas giant orbiting this lost sun, ten million kilometers farther out than Bienvenido. At ninety-seven thousand kilometers in diameter, it was considerably smaller than Jupiter, but still massive. Whenever it was in conjunction, it created storms and tides the likes of which Bienvenido had never known before.

Laura frowned at the readings she was getting from the gateway—not the force field, but the wormhole itself. “That’s not right.”

“What is it?” Slvasta asked. “Are there more aliens?”

“It’s not that,” she assured him and everyone else in the crypt. Aliens were now Bienvenido’s ultimate nightmare. They had a justifiable collective paranoia of monsters swooping down on their planet, she acknowledged.

In truth, she’d been worried by what might be lurking in Valatare’s atmosphere. The theory she and the ANAdroids had come up with was that the Void used this lonely star as a place to banish the planet of any species who defied it in some way. A theory confirmed by the Vatni, who claimed to have seen Ursell emerge from nowhere more than a thousand years ago.

The Vatni themselves, though amenable to strategic deals with humans, were stubborn in the extreme, refusing to have their nature consumed by whatever malevolent intelligence lay at the heart of the Void. Ursell was a semi-habitable wasteland, ruined by a nuclear war. So typical of the Prime, whose existence was one of constant belligerence. Macule was in an even worse state than Ursell; whatever species used to live there must have wiped themselves out in a ferocious nuclear exchange millennia ago. Odd Trüb was a featureless barren planet with a thin atmosphere and a dozen tiny moons—the only ones in the system. She never had the time to work out its enigmatic presence. Asdil, orbiting much farther out than Valatare, was completely frigid under its nitrogen-methane atmosphere. Laura didn’t know what kind of alien that could support; the Commonwealth had never found any cryolife, and there were no electromagnetic signals or thermal emissions indicating any kind of civilization. The same went for Fjernt, which was visually encouraging, with water oceans and 20 percent landmass, but the atmosphere was nitrogen and carbon dioxide; there was no free oxygen. Because it was unscathed by any conflict, Laura liked to think its aliens had found their way back to wherever they’d come from. And if they can do it…

But from what she’d experienced so far, this isolated star system was turning out to be utterly lethal for humans.

“Then what’s the problem?” Javier asked.

“It’s the gravity.”

“The what?”

“Valatare’s gravity. It’s wrong somehow. The gradient is steeper than it should be this close; that’s what threw the terminus emergence point off. The pressure is all wrong, as well. It might be the density—that blue color is from methane—but there’s not enough to…This is weird.”

“Does that affect your plan?”

“No.” She locked the terminus coordinates and looked over her shoulder at the technicians clustered around the first floater. A final activation signal from her u-shadow—confirmed by the floater’s smartnet—and she told them: “Go.”

They pushed hard, but the floater weighed a lot more than the atom bombs. It trundled slowly over the floor toward the gateway. Javier went over and added his considerable strength, soon followed by Yannrith, and then Slvasta. Several Air Force officers joined them until it resembled a rugby scrum piled up against the floater’s dark casing. The machine began to pick up speed.

“Careful,” she warned as the leading edge slipped through the force field. The bulk of it went through, and Valatare’s gravity took over, pulling sharply. Everyone let go and lurched back. The floater fell through and dropped away fast.

Laura stood close to the gateway so her link to the floater’s smartnet would be maintained. Secondary routines in her macrocellular clusters monitored the telemetry, seeing a force field expand out around the tumbling cylinder, increasing its buoyancy. The rate it dropped began to slow, then stopped twenty kilometers below the terminus—a dark speck buffeted by the winds. “Okay, that’s good. External pressure at the floater is thirty-three times Earth standard. That should do it.”

She suddenly realized that it was now. The inevitable moment had just crept up, which was maybe for the best. Laura knew she wasn’t the bravest person; her first encounter with Fallers had shown her that. But she’d accepted her fate then, so once again—“Bring the second floater up, please,” she said.

“Can you really do this?” Andricea asked. “Destroy a whole world?”

“Believe it,” Laura said. She activated her biononic force field function. A thin layer of air shimmered around her, rippling like a heat haze before stabilizing. Her u-shadow delivered a new coordinate for the wormhole terminus.

It opened a hundred kilometers above Ursell. Laura looked down across an expanse of filthy clouds. Even the stratosphere above was clotted with particles, staining it a benign sulfurous yellow. The quick mapping run they’d performed weeks earlier had given them a rough outline of continents and seas, so the terminus should be above land—a region devoid of radio emissions and without any large ruins.

She told the gateway to lower the terminus. It slipped down through the clouds, kilometer after kilometer of dank gray vapor. Exovision displays showed her the radiation level rising as the terminus approached the ground. Then it was abruptly dropping through the base of the cloud. The ground was five hundred meters away—a wasteland of flinty stone cluttered with boulders. There was no vegetation, only ribbons of dark lichen clinging to fissures in the rock. Turgid rain drizzled down, giving every surface a dull oil-rainbow gleam.

Under Laura’s direction, the terminus rotated to the vertical then turned 360 degrees, allowing her to study the entire area. “Looks clear,” she said.

“How long will you need?” Slvasta asked.

“Not long. A few minutes, maybe,” Laura said. She looked at the team standing behind the final trolley. “Stand by.”

“Do you have to go through?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, and walked through the gateway onto Ursell. The light level was almost as bleak as it had been back in the crypt. Drizzle spluttered against her force field, dripping onto the sodden ground. Exovision displays showed her the atmospheric composition, the toxins and contaminants. All easily filtered by the force field. She turned full circle. There were hills in the distance, with tiny scarlet lights scattered along a deep valley. Her fieldscan function couldn’t detect any electromagnetic signals, though there was a spray of radiation coming from the valley, and also some strong magnetic fields. Having the Prime this close was still a worry, though. “Come on,” she muttered. “Get it through.”

On the other side of the gateway, men pushed hard against the trolley. The floater began to trundle along the crypt’s stone floor.

Something moved. Laura’s secondary routines caught it—a flicker above the valley with the red lights. She turned and faced it, her enriched retinas scanning frantically. Infrared was difficult; the cool rain wrecked the image. Light amplification routines cut in.

Flying machines. Small, blunt hemispheres, maybe twenty meters across, eight deep. Stubby fin-wings. Strong magnetic field. Ducted fans tilted to power them forward. Heading straight for her.

“Bollocks,” she grunted. She twisted around. The floater was almost at the gateway. “Move it!” she yelled. Nobody seemed to hear her. Her u-shadow transmitted a crude analog radio signal. “Hurry! They’re coming. Push!”

The signal must have gotten through, roaring out of the tannoys. The scrum pushing the trolley strained hard. Slvasta and half a dozen officers added their strength once again. The front of the floater emerged through the gateway.

A maser beam struck Laura. Her force field stiffened for an instant, flaring green. Amber warnings zipped across her exovision. Rain flash-vaporized around her, cloaking her in a seething steam squall.

“Double bollocks.” The beam was strong, but her force field could withstand it relatively easily. From this distance. Another beam struck her. The fliers were still seven kilometers away. She faced them, frowning with determination, bringing her arms up like some pre-Commonwealth priest-queen. Her biononic field function sent out a disruptor pulse. Ionization made the wet air flare purple-white as if a lightning bolt had just discharged. She fired again. Again.

Alien fliers tumbled out of the sky. The remaining fliers broke formation fast, shooting up away from the valley, accelerating into the dank camouflage of the rain and cloud base.

Behind her, the trolley carrying the floater cleared the rim of the gateway. It tilted down slightly and its small wheels dug into the wet ground. The team pushing it strained with all their might, but Laura could see it wasn’t going to budge.

“Oh, triple bollocks.”

Her u-shadow linked her to the CST BC5800d2’s smartcore, and the terminus shot upward thirty meters. The floater fell out, smashing onto the ground five meters away from her and crushing the trolley. She looked up to see Slvasta and Javier standing at the edge of the terminus, staring down anxiously. She gave them a quick wave, hoping to reassure them. Another maser blast hit her. Her field function scan backtracked it easily. The flier was hovering in the cloud two kilometers above. She hit it with a disruptor pulse.

Her u-shadow established a link to the floater’s smartnet. Its force field strengthened.

Pity there’s no way of using it to kill the individual fliers, she thought. When she glanced back at the valley, she could see another flock of fliers shooting up into the clouds. These looked even bigger.

Laura activated the floater’s wormhole, feeding in a coordinate that should see its terminus opening above Valatare. Somewhere from above, the fliers opened up a salvo of electronic warfare pulses. They were crude but still managed to degrade her link with the floater. Smoking debris from the flier she’d destroyed began to hail down around her. Her scan pinpointed the sources of the electronic warfare pulses, and she responded with more disruptor fire.

Then the floater’s wormhole opened: a sapphire haze streaked with white strands. Exovision displays showed her the terminus at the far end reaching for Valatare.

Eight fliers dropped from the base of the clouds. They were more than a kilometer away and coming down fast. Another cohort dropped down on her other side. They were all emitting strong electronic warfare distortion pulses, trying to fuzz whatever sensors she had. It was good, but not good enough to deflect Commonwealth systems. She blew the first group apart, its glaring fireball swelling out. The surging red light showed her things scampering over the drab wilderness.

Four stumpy legs, a fat pear-shaped body wearing some kind of black-glitter armor, with sensor stalks sprouting from the crown like whip antennae weighed down with electronic modules on their tips. No mistaking them: Prime motiles. The memory was ingrained into the human psyche after a war that had brought the Commonwealth to the brink of extinction.

No wonder the Void shat them out.

Laura blew up another flier. Prime motiles were scuttling out of all the other hemispheres that had landed. With the jerky way they moved, zigzagging from boulder to boulder, it was like watching a charge of giant crustaceans. There was only silence around her, except for swift coded radio bursts. She emitted a powerful jamming signal and watched with satisfaction as they all stopped moving for several seconds. The Prime weren’t a hive mind, but the motiles certainly qualified as a herd, functioning best while under direct control from the immotiles—who were the herd brains as well as the egg layers.

The smartnet on the floater above her reported it had established a real-time link to the Valatare floater through the wormhole. Her u-shadow was in direct control of both of them.

Now for the tricky part. Laura directed the Ursell floater’s terminus toward the Valatare floater, at the same time reconfiguring the Valatare floater’s mechanism. She wanted to turn it into a stable anchor for the Ursell floater’s wormhole rather than generate its own.

The motiles started to move again. Her fieldscan function detected small objects flying toward her on ballistic trajectories. The scan identified a small quantity of uranium inside each of them. “Holy fuck!” Her secondary routines took over, running in parallel, identifying the mini-nukes arching through the air, and slammed out over a dozen disruptor pulses in less than two seconds.

More than twenty maser beams stabbed down, hitting the floater. Its force fields resisted easily. She couldn’t waste time targeting the fliers overhead, but this all-out saturation attack was going to overwhelm her pretty quickly.

Her exovision was showing her the wormhole terminus easing slowly to the Valatare floater. The engagement procedure was working, helping to reel it in. Just a couple more minutes, and the gateway to the crypt and safety was a simple jump away…

But she had to be here, had to maintain a direct link with the floaters so her u-shadow could manage the incredibly complicated procedure. More mini-nukes came streaking toward her. Her routines knocked each of them out.

A dazzling flash erupted five kilometers away. Her force field turned opaque to cope with the monstrous gamma pulse. Data flowed across her exovision: The yield was about four kilotons. Survivable.

She watched the mushroom cloud ascending, finding its grotesque seething shape oddly elegant, as if seeing a legend reborn. The ground around her was suddenly steaming. Then the blast wave reached her, a rolling eruption of sand and small stones hurtling across the wasteland. She flung herself down. Her force field strained into a dull rouge as it fought the pressure slam. The screaming storm began to tip the floater up. She ordered it to expand its force field, and watched it take off, dwindling away into the sky, flipping around and around in the violent air. Her link remained intact.

Laura rolled over, seeing the BC5800d2’s terminus still hovering thirty meters above the ground, with long fronds of dust and vapor flashing across it. She couldn’t risk its force field being overloaded by Prime weapons. The radiation and pressure surge would kill everyone in the crypt—and probably smash half the palace to pieces, too.

With a sense of bitter inevitability, she knew what she’d have to do next.

Slvasta was there, pressed up against the force field, watching aghast. Her u-shadow transmitted an analog signal again.

“For crud’s sake, Slvasta, pardon Bethaneve!” she sent. “This is a big bad universe, you’ve seen that for yourself now, so you can’t go through it jumping at shadows. You have got to dial down your paranoia. Grow up, think logically, plan ahead. You have to defeat the Fallers, kill the bastard Trees. Build the atom bombs and get them up there into the Ring—any way you can. With the Trees gone, there’ll be no limits to what your world can achieve. Do it!”

She saw him shouting at her, saw the anger and fright on his face. Her u-shadow linked to the BC5800d2, shutting down the wormhole and codelocking its smartcore. The terminus shrank to nothing then winked out in a purple ember of Cherenkov radiation. Her fieldscan function caught five more mini-nukes in flight. Secondary targeting routines zapped them.

At last, the Valatare floater’s smartnet reported it had anchored the wormhole from Ursell. The connection between the two planets was open and stable.

All right. Now we’re getting somewhere!

Over two hundred Prime motiles were advancing on her from all directions. More fliers were ascending from the valley. Twenty-five accelerated after the floater as it spun lazily through the air, gradually rising—four hundred meters high already.

Another mini-nuke detonated on the ground three kilometers away. Then a third went off.

Laura sent another batch of instructions into the linked floaters. The final procedure had to be enacted. Then the first of the new blast waves struck her, sending her rolling helplessly across the sharp rocks until she crashed into a boulder.

Pinned there by the wailing superheated wind, with her force field fizzing aquamarine, she stared upward. The blasts had torn the clouds from most of the sky, allowing her to see the floater and its shimmering force field bubble. The explosions were swatting it about brutally, sending it skipping higher and higher. Her u-shadow initiated the final sequence, and the wormhole’s diameter began to expand. She watched a plume of the gas giant’s hydrogen atmosphere come squirting out. Thin at first, then gradually getting wider, but still the colossal pressure was maintained. Her mouth split open in a smile. It was acting like a rocket exhaust, accelerating the floater upward. And the wormhole diameter continued to expand—a hundred meters wide now. Then bigger. The flow of gas was fierce and undiminished, backed by the incredible pressure of the gas giant’s atmosphere. And the fringes of the massive gas plume were bursting into stark blue flame as the hydrogen finally mixed with Ursell’s oxygen, creating a fire halo.

Another mini-nuke detonated. The closest yet. Laura left the ground, spinning over and over in the glowing air before crashing down painfully. Her exovision medical readouts blinked up a series of amber warnings. Biononics shut down nerve paths, closing off the pain.

The immotiles must be using the motiles as carriers, she thought, sending them crawling along ridges and depressions to infiltrate her defensive perimeter, sacrificing them. Which was what the Primes did; individual motiles were valueless.

The wormhole was two hundred meters wide now, its roar rivaling the awesome soundwall of the nukes. Laura ran a systems diagnostic on the two floaters. Everything was functioning very smoothly, all components within tolerance, gas feeding easily into the mass energy converter.

Four hundred meters wide, and the sky above her was a single layer of elegant indigo flame.

“It will never stop,” she broadcast to the Primes in their own neurological code. And started to laugh. It wasn’t quite true, of course, Valatare’s atmosphere wasn’t infinite, but there was more than enough to crush and burn the Primes a thousand times over.

Her link to the Ursell floater was still working, which surprised her. She suspected the local immotile clusters were analyzing what was happening, trying to decide what action to take. Demoting her priority status.

She started downloading her personal memory store into the floater’s smartnet for safekeeping.

Which has to be the universe’s most desperate roll of the dice.

The floater was seven kilometers in altitude, and its wormhole 680 meters in diameter—and still widening. After analyzing the component loading factors, she’d settled on halting the expansion at five kilometers in diameter. The floaters should be able to maintain that indefinitely.

The Primes launched a barrage of mini-nukes up at the catastrophic incursion.

“Pissing in the wind, boys,” Laura called out with manic cheerfulness as she deactivated her force field.

Ten mini-nukes exploded simultaneously above her—