The sun was rising as the Percheron descended toward Pad Seven on the floating city of Fortrose, giving Donal a splendid view of the sprawling, six-sided patch of green and sand-white. The structure had originally been designated as Industrial Fishery Complex Two, but the artificial island with its lagoons and palm orchards and central spires was far too much a place to be known only by the cold number of a catalogue designation. The fishing city covered perhaps a hundred square kilometers of ocean, a vast, artificial island of seament electrically accreted out of the water and plated out across the surface of a preform molded in slender conducting wires.
Most of the outer portion of the hexagonal cell was given over to breakwater and dunes, shielding the central habitat from storms and wave damage. At the center, near the emerald-green sweep of the lagoons, the island's habitat rose in a series of slender, spire-tipped columns of seament and sun-sparkling transplas, a city, Donal was told, that normally housed some tens of thousands of workers and their families. Unseen, plunging deep into the emerald waters below the structure's center, was the vertical support core containing the seament accreters, the thermal power generators, sub pens, fish intakes, stabilizers, and all of the rest of the technological complexities necessary to support the idyllic, upper-surface environment.
Perhaps, Donal thought, idyllic was no longer exactly the right word. The towers of Fortrose still gleamed in the sun like the turrets of a fairy-tale castle, but as the Percheron descended toward the landing pad, the clutter and chaos everywhere on the floating city's upper works became more and more evident. The open areas, the malls, the parks, the sandy expanses around the lagoon, even the broad, hard tops of the breakwaters had all been taken over by brightly colored tents and shantytown structures of plywood and cloth and fiberboard. The lagoon and the gated channels leading to it from the sea, as well as the outer reaches of the seawall itself, were thickly crowded with ships and smallcraft of all sizes and descriptions, from vast hordes of personal yachts, trimarans, and hover runabouts to a three-hundred-meter submarine liner surfaced and moored in the main channel.
A half-dozen space transports were moored by the seawall as well, including three of the big, spherical D-12 Conestogas that handled so much of the freight and passenger service out here along the Rim. Donal turned from the Percheron's window to glance at Lieutenant Foster, questioning, but the soldier was slumped back in his seat, powergun cradled against his chest, eyes shut in exhausted sleep. Turning back to the window, he surveyed the human sea crowding the artificial island below and shook his head. It looked to Donal as though refugees from all over the planet must have been flocking to the Scarba floating city complex for some days, now, while at the same time, star transports gathered here, a last, desperate chance for them to get off-world.
It would be up to Wide Sky's military forces, though, to buy time enough for the civilians to get clear.
Not exactly an enviable responsibility.
"Those poor people," Kathy Ross said quietly, at his side. Her face was pressed against the window as she stared down into the enormous tent city below.
"I'm surprised the invaders haven't attacked here," Donal said. "If they're as ruthless as everyone's been saying . . ."
"Maybe the invaders don't see the place as a threat," she replied. "They ignored us, after all, back on the beach . . . until it looked like we'd called in an air strike. Then they came down on us with both metal feet."
"They've attacked civilian targets before this," he reminded her. "Hell, Wide Sky didn't have much in the way of a standing army to begin with, and these monsters still started hitting every city and town on the map and taking it apart. I think we need to learn more about the enemy, about how they think, before we can start taking guesses at their motives."
Out of sight but close by, just over the curve of the horizon, Donal knew, four more of the floating cities had gathered, a slow-moving fleet that ought to make an excellent target for the invaders. He wondered again why they hadn't attacked already.
The Percheron settled to the hard-surfaced pavement of the landing pad with a dwindling shriek of belly jets and blast-swirled sand. As the cargo bay doors hissed open, he heard another, more ominous sound . . . the thunder of a large, desperate, and angry crowd.
As he jumped down from the cargo deck, he paused and looked around. Thousands of people, it seemed, most of them in rags, surrounded the landing pad, restrained—just barely—by a thin line of armed troops.
"Do something about the invaders!" one voice called, rising above the others. "Do something!" Other voices pitched higher and louder in response, in agreement.
A pair of Gremlins howled low overhead, circling the area. It was hard, on the face of it, to know whether they were watching for invaders . . . or keeping watch on the near-riot below.
A harried-looking junior lieutenant met Donal and Kathy with a salute and a gesture toward a waiting aircar. "What's with the crowds, Lieutenant?" Kathy asked.
"They want off of Wide Sky, Commander," he replied as they slipped into the passenger compartment of the vehicle and a military pilot up front spooled up the turbines. "And you know, I'm not sure I blame 'em."
It was a five-minute aircar flight from the landing pad up to a broad balcony in the tallest, central tower. Military uniforms were more in evidence up here, including more uniforms of higher ranks. The lieutenant escorted Kathy away to another suite of offices for debriefing by naval officers, while depositing Donal in a large, transplas-walled office overlooking the entire island, occupied by an overweight man in an army major's uniform and at least a battalion of aides, mostly lieutenants with a smattering of captains.
"I'm Major Fitzsimmons, CO of the Wide Sky militia here," the man said brusquely and without preamble. He looked Donal up and down, a quick and less-than-pleased evaluation. "Have a seat. I understand that you are our cavalry from Muir."
"Cavalry? No, sir. I am here to try to find out what's going on for my bosses back at HQ. They, ah, were having a bit of trouble believing in the reports they were getting from Wide Sky."
Fitzsimmons's face puckered into a wry smile. "They were, were they? Well, I can sympathize. None of us has really been able to believe in this threat. But it's real enough, as you've discovered for yourself."
"Yes, sir."
"These Dinos are deadly. Never seen anything like 'em."
"Dinos?"
"We've recovered some bodies. Not many, not as good as their combat machines are, not as hard as they are to stop. Four-armed dinosaurs, sort of. Tough. Fast. Mean. These things are good, Lieutenant. Their walkers are much faster and more maneuverable than anything we have. They leave Bolos in the dust, quite literally run rings around them. Individually, they're not as heavily armored as a Bolo, of course, but they operate in close-knit packs that make them far more deadly."
Donal's eyebrows rose. "Deadlier than Bolos, sir?"
Fitzsimmons snorted. "I take it from your file that you are a Bolo officer."
There it was again. That challenge, as though admitting to working with Bolos was somehow admitting to some small, secret perversion. "Yes, sir."
"Well, simply take it from me that two-megatons-per-second firepower is not the ultimate in military strategy and tactics. Accurate placement of that firepower, and the maneuverability to survive while placing it, are of considerably more importance than the firepower itself."
"I can't refute that, sir. Bolos are designed for accurate placement, however."
Fitzsimmons waved a pudgy hand in casual dismissal. "Foolishness. These things took a Mark XVIII apart piece by piece as though it . . . I don't know. As though it was some sort of big, slow, clumsy game animal or something. Yes. That's exactly the impression I had, watching it. The Bolo was game."
"Bolo Mark XVIIIs aren't exactly the latest thing in military hardware, Major. The invaders would have a bit more trouble with a Mark XXIV."
He sighed. "I'm not going to argue force structures and maneuvers with you, Lieutenant. What we are facing here is unlike anything I've ever seen or heard of. We've been running computer simulations, and they suggest that we would need a far more powerful force of Bolos than the Cluster has available, simply to have a chance of matching this threat, let alone overcoming it. And now," Fitzsimmons added, with the definite air of someone who has said all there is to say on a topic, "my staff and I here would like to hear what happened to you and your pilot out there, when you got shot down."
For the next half hour or so, Donal described what he'd seen and experienced, including his up-close, almost too close encounter with the two walkers on the beach. Fitzsimmons and his staff were particularly interested in the Lightning's approach to Wide Sky, and in how Kathy had managed to slip in past the invader blockade.
"I'm really not sure," he said for at least the fifth time, when one of the aides asked for the probable upper speed of the blockaders' maneuvering envelope. "You'd have to ask Commander Ross about that."
"We have," Fitzsimmons replied glumly. He gestured at the computer terminal on his desk where, evidently, he had access to Kathy's debriefing, elsewhere in the building. "But the more points of view we can round up the better. We're going to need that information."
Donal frowned. Wide Sky had no navy to speak of; the entire Strathan Cluster couldn't muster much more than a handful of gunboats and frigates. Knowing invader ship capabilities wouldn't—
Then the reason for their interest struck him. "You're planning on an evacuation," he said. "You need to know how to get past the orbital blockade."
"A partial evacuation, anyway," Fitzsimmons agreed. "We can't hope to get everyone off, of course."
"Wide Sky has a population of, what?" Donal asked. "A hundred million?"
"Too many to cram aboard a handful of transports and passenger liners, that's for damned sure. Alexie wants to get as many of the kids and young people off as we can."
"Alexie?"
"Alexie Turner. She was the DDG." He shook his head. "Our Director General was here, as a matter of fact, when the Dinos hit. Pure bad luck. He was flying back. Caught in the air by Dino flyers. So I guess she must've inherited."
"I see. And where is she now, Major? I'd like to pay my respects."
He nodded toward a spot on the floor. "Down on the main level, at the moment. In the Assembly Hall dealing with God knows how many different civilian delegations, refugee groups, camp organizers, you name it. They're talking about who should get evacuated, and for me, I'd just as soon stay here and face the Dinos as mix it up with that crowd."
Donal smiled. "I know what you mean, sir."
"Anyone else have any questions of this young man?" Fitzsimmons said, looking at his aides. There was a general shaking of heads and muttered "no, sirs" for response, and the major waved Donal off. "If you hurry, you can probably catch her act, or part of it. Tell the elevator to take you to the Assembly Hall."
"Thank you, sir." Donal saluted, then turned and left the office.
Fitzsimmons, he thought, seemed to be a bit more solidly grounded in reality than the brass back on Muir. He wondered if that was a reflection of the man's basic nature, or if it had more to do with his proximity to the alien invaders.
The Assembly Hall was an enormous public arena on the ground floor of the central tower, an enclosed stadium beneath a blue-tinted transplas dome that let the morning sun spill into the auditorium but robbed it of glare and heat. The seats, he estimated, could hold several thousand people, and most were already filled by the time he entered the room.
At the auditorium's central stage, there was a round, raised platform with a table and holographic display apparatus. An older, white-haired man was addressing the crowd with all of the passion of a somewhat bored university professor giving a lecture.
"We know pathetically little about this species as yet," he was saying as Donal squeezed into the room. The man's voice, amplified by the room's electronics, was perfectly clear but somewhat on the frail side. A curved, two-story wall screen set up behind the speaker's podium magnified the man's image to titanic proportions; his name and title—Dr. Ulysee Goldman, Professor of Xenosophontology, University of Wide Sky at Galloway—was spelled out at the bottom of the screen in letters half a meter tall.
"Everything we know about them so far, in fact," Goldman continued, "has been gleaned from a handful of bodies recovered from what were probably scout machines destroyed by Skyan military aircraft, and from radio transmissions between the surface and their fleet that we were partially able to translate with the AI at the university before the invaders overran Galloway. We know that they call themselves 'Malach,' and that they organize themselves in what appears to be a strict, military hierarchy. Whether, of course, that hierarchy is a direct reflection of their entire culture, or of the fact that we are so far dealing only with their military, is unknown."
So, the invaders called themselves Malach. The speaker had pronounced the name with a German "ch" that turned the end of the word into a soft-palate gargle. It helped, somehow, making them less faceless and impersonal, to know their name for themselves. Fitzsimmons's "Dino" seemed calculated to deflate the enemy, to make the threat feel smaller and more manageable.
But Donal wanted to know them as they really were. The Cluster's survival might depend upon stark and uncoated truths.
"We have some graphics here," Goldman said, placing his hand on the podium's control screen, "that may give you an idea of what we are facing."
The blue-tinted transplas overhead darkened sharply, plunging the room into near darkness as a nervous titter ran though the crowd. After a moment, however, a shaft of blue light flicked on above the table as Goldman engaged the holoprojector. Donal leaned forward in his seat, studying the figure repeated on the big screen behind the speaker. It was . . . disturbing.
The being, evidently, had followed the same line of evolutionary descent as had certain carnivorous dinosaurs on old Earth, a hundred million years before. According to the scale showing in the three-dimensional image, the thing stood at just over two meters tall . . . indeed, its flat, dragonish head would have looked down on Donal in a face-to-face confrontation. It was bipedal, with the digitigrade stance of a large bird, but the body was canted forward, level with the ground, rather than carried erect, with a whiplike tail serving for balance. The jaws were those of a predator, with razor-keen, back-curved teeth that protruded in a blood-hungry grin even when the scaly jaws were shut. A bristling of red-pink tendrils, each the size of Donal's forefinger, sprouted across its lipless upper jaw like an obscene mustache. The bone-knobbed head behind the four large and vertically slitted, gleaming red cat's eyes, however, was large and deep, plenty roomy enough for a sizable brain. Not two, but four arms were suspended from a complex shoulder girdle arrangement beneath the wrinkled neck, two small arms above with delicate, four-fingered hands, two larger ones below, more massively turned and muscled and with hands more adapted to ripping or grasping than fine manipulation. The claws were impressive, both on hands and feet; sickle-shaped slashing claws curved from loose-skinned pouches on wrists and ankles, designed, perhaps, for tearing at prey to cripple it on the run. The color was startling, overall a deep forest green above and pale gold below, but with bright ruby-red stripes picked out in scales that flashed and gleamed like jewels in the light. The creature was astonishingly beautiful, for all that evolution had crafted every muscle, every curve to the single-minded need for pursuit and slaughter.
"We put this image together," Goldman said, standing next to the glowing holo, "from the bodies we managed to recover from those few walker machines we've been able to take out. It looks more or less reptilian, though we have reason to believe that it's warm-blooded, like a bird or mammal. Dr. Duchenny, at the Wide Sky Institute, has suggested that they are evolved from paradinosaurian pack-hunters, creatures that have evolved in parallel from creatures similar to the deinonychus and velociraptor that roamed Earth during the Cretaceous era, some sixty-five to one hundred million years ago. Obviously, too, they evolved from hexapodal stock, as opposed to the quadrupeds of higher terrestrial life. We should keep in mind that the similarities to extinct terrestrial life are no doubt the result of parallel evolution . . . of organisms shaped to familiar form by similar evolutionary and environmental forces."
"Excuse me, Doctor," someone down in the front called out. "We can all see what these beasts look like. What I want to know, what I think everyone here wants to know, is where the hell do they come from?"
"If you mean have we identified a homeworld yet," Goldman replied, "we have not. However, it seems fairly clear that this is a new species, unknown as yet to humanity. This far out along the Eastern Arm, the only place they could have come from is one of the worlds of the Gulf."
A stir ran through the audience at that, and a low-whispered murmur of many voices. Goldman had their full attention now.
"Their curious . . . habit," the professor continued, "of dismantling captured ruins, buildings, vehicle wreckage, and so on in order to strip them of useful metal appears to be one predictable aspect of such an evolution. The Gulf stars tend, on the whole, to be metal poor, at least compared to those that formed within the Galactic disk. Most, of course, are ancient Population II stars, possessing no elements heavier than hydrogen or helium at all and, therefore, no terrestrial planets. A few, however, a small percentage, are either Population I suns accreted from areas enriched by rare supernovae within the Gulf, or they are Population I stars ejected from our Galaxy at some point eons in the past. In the latter case, of course, the star and any attendant planets would be identical to those we know within the Galaxy. In the former, however, planets will tend to be heavy-element poor. Elements such as carbon and aluminum will be relatively common, but iron will be comparatively rare, since the planet's iron core will tend to be smaller and buried within a thicker silicate crust. Extremely heavy elements, such as radioactives, will be scarce or even non-existent.
"We expect that this scarcity has dramatically affected their culture and their outlook on the universe, as well as their attitude toward other intelligent species . . . such as ourselves."
"They woke up cranky, you mean," someone called out from the audience, and there was an answering patter of nervous laughter.
"It may be that the Malach perceive their entire universe as raw materials for their use," Goldman went on, ignoring the comment. "They may be unable to recognize a viewpoint other than their own. At the university, we have been speculating that the Malach see all other species, whether intelligent or not, as prey animals of some kind, as sources of raw material for them to exploit. That, certainly, is the upshot of what seems to be happening here on Wide Sky. We are to them nothing more or less than a source of already mined, purified, and sequestered metals."
"We're not gonna let these lizards take away what we've built here!" someone in the first row shouted. He was echoed by another voice, then by another ten, then by fifty more. In a moment, everyone in the auditorium it seemed, was on their feet, shouting.
At the podium, Dr. Goldman tried to continue with his presentation, but the sound system was drowned out by the commotion. A moment later, an attractive, blond-haired woman in a severe gray business suit stepped up to the podium, took Goldman's arm, and whispered quietly to him. The professor nodded and walked away, leaving the woman next to the glowing holograph of the green-and-red-striped Malach. As she touched the podium controls, the image of the invader faded out and the windows depolarized, flooding the huge room with light once more. She then waited patiently as the commotion in the chamber dwindled to the point where she could address the crowd. From the cool detachment with which she surveyed the audience, he assumed she was Alexie Turner.
"Thank you, Professor Goldman," she said. "That information was hard won and cost us dearly. We appreciate your coming here today to brief us. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all that we have for you today—"
The crowd noise rose again, an angry thunder as most of the people leaped to their feet, shouting down at the small, lone figure at the podium.
"What about the evacuation?" someone yelled. "What about getting people off this rock?"
"Hell, no!" another voice echoed back. "We're gonna stay and fight these monsters!"
"We came here all the way from Galloway! What's the government going to do about these Malach things?"
"Yeah! We want to know what's being done!"
The room exploded in noise and shouting. Men wearing the light blue uniforms of Wide Sky security appeared, standing in front of the stage in an attempt to block it off, but there were too few to stop the surging crowd. The mood in the room was fast turning ugly. Desperate people, feeding off the atmosphere of panic, might do almost anything. It looked to Donal as though the most immediate danger to the survivors on Fortrose wasn't the Malach . . . but the very real threat of mob violence. Something was going to have to be done, and fast, or that riot would kill more people than a Malach attack.
Donal took a deep breath and started forward.