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Rocket Science


the mind of the world is a consciousness which emerges from the interactions of the biosphere and the lithosphere of life-bearing terrestrial-type planets such as this one. It is similar to that of the smaller celestial bodies, the minds which some of you call the gods. Unlike them it is incoherent. Unlike them it is capable of manipulating very large energies, and of forming real images from plasma generated by atmospheric or tectonic polarities and hallucinatory virtual images from the effects of these electrical potentials on the nervous systems of animals. Its response to the intrusion of new and unfamiliar intelligent species, especially those using quantum manifold devices, is to generate real and virtual images of them. It is excitable, unpredictable, playful, and violent. Its communications are confusing and in part subjective on the part of the percipient. It is what produces phenomena such as the ‘saurs who were here already,’ of which the Salasso saur spoke, and it is producing such phenomena now in response to the skiffs of our expedition. We thought you knew,” said Mr. Orange.

“We didn’t,” said Matt. “None of us did.” His glare focused on the saurs. “Am I right?”

“We did not know that there was a god in the world,” said Salasso. “And we did not know what it was capable of.”

“All right,” said Matt. He turned again to the Multiplier. “What I thought we were doing was surveying the planet and simultaneously generating a degree of paranoia and mass hysteria which would at least weaken the credibility and unity of the New Babylon regime, and thus give us more possible points of contact and support. What did you think we were doing?”

“Very much the same,” said Mr. Orange. “With the addition that we knew that the mind of the world New Earth would generate many real and virtual images which would be quite unpredictable and uncontrollable and which could result in much military and political instability such as coups and wars and so forth, thus degrading the system’s defenses to a point which would enable an easy assault by your and our main forces.”

That was your idea of an elegant invasion plan?”

“Yes,” said the Multiplier. “It would have led to large numbers of deaths on the opposing side without great risk to our forces.”

“We were kind of hoping,” said Matt, “to accomplish our objectives without large numbers of deaths on any side.”

“Ah,” sighed Mr. Orange. “That makes a difference.”

He scurried back to the other aliens and rapidly conferred by touch, then rotated to face the humans and saurs again.

“Death is different for us because our memories are distributed. It is not easy for us to bear in mind at all times that this is not so for you.”

“Oh yes,” said Ramona. “You’ll have noticed how careful humans are to avoid killing each other in large numbers. Just out of idle curiosity—I had the impression you had picked up from Matt’s memories some idea of something similar that happened on Earth—all kinds of strange phenomena that taunted and baffled the military forces and excited the populace. How did that not lead to wars and coups and so forth?”

“Did it not?” said Mr. Orange. “We had not formed from the Matt Cairns’ memories an impression that the twentieth century was a period of political and military stability. However, as you have been told, the past is not of great interest to us. We may have misunderstood the probable causes of events.”

A babble of speculative conversation ensued. Mikhail Telesnikov stood up and raised his fists to his forehead.

“Friends,” he said, “let’s agree with the Multipliers that the past is not a priority. The only history I’m interested in right now is the history that is happening right now, and that we can do something about.” He waved a hand at the radio. “Armed clashes are beginning already. New Babylon and its neighbors could be at war within minutes or hours. We have to intervene right now to calm things down.”

“Yes!” shouted Ramona. “Tell us a way to intervene that won’t make things worse, why don’t you!”

“I have an idea,” said Susan. “We could just land somewhere real public, and tell them the truth. By the time the rest of the Bright Star Cultures arrive, we might well have convinced them it wasn’t a threat.”

“In principle that’s a good idea,” said Telesnikov, surprising her. “Unfortunately I don’t see any of the major powers giving us mass media access to put our case, or even access to the political leaderships. We’d more likely just disappear instantly into the maw of the security apparatuses.”

Matt slapped Mikhail’s shoulder. “Brilliant!” he said. “That’s exactly what we have to do.”

“What?” asked Mikhail, voicing the general feeling.

“ ‘Disappear instantly into the maw of the security apparatuses,’ ” said Matt. “Now that’s a way of getting their undivided attention.”

“It’s not one I care to try,” said Telesnikov. “We need to think this through very carefully. These plasma-cannon bolts are obviously—or at least ostensibly—aimed at what seem to be skiffs. Now there is no way I can think of that the forts in New Earth geostationary orbit—there are three, as far as I know—can be spotting them directly. They must be responding to information relayed from ground observation, probably radar. If we could take out these radar stations, we could blind the forts to anything happening in the atmosphere or on the surface. That’s one vulnerability. Second, New Babylon has a launch facility on the coast of Genea, at the equator. If it’s put out of action the orbital forts will eventually run out of supplies, and the farthest away—the ones out on the moons and asteroids—are likely to run out fastest.”

“Other way round,” said Matt. “They’re likely to be more self-sufficient. Also, they’ll have local resources, maybe even water ice.”

The three Cosmonauts went into a brief technical bicker.

“All right,” said Telesnikov, “we don’t know. My point stands—the launch facility is a choke point. We should consider ways of taking it out.”

“Before we do that, assuming we can,” said Ramona dryly, “we’d do well to think through the politics. New Babylon’s Space Defense may be aiming at skiffs, or what it thinks are skiffs, but it’s actually hitting towns and villages and bits of random countryside in Illyria. It’s risking war with Illyria. That strikes me as one hell of a big step to take in response to a few UFO phenomena, especially as Illyria seems quite ready to pick up the gauntlet.”

Susan and Telesnikov nodded.

“They certainly are,” Susan said. “And the guy I spoke to was pretty skeptical about the skiffs being from what they call the Spiders. I don’t think he was in much of a minority. He sure didn’t think he was.”

“Okay,” said Ramona. “So what else do we have to go on? New Babylon’s Senate, no less, isn’t afraid of antagonizing Illyria. That strongly suggests Illyria doesn’t have nukes. But still, there’s a sort of paranoid intensity about this reaction that strikes me as being about more than a few skiffs and so forth—ours or otherwise—seen over Illyria, and even over New Babylon’s own territory. They’re worried about something we don’t—”

“Hey!” shouted Ann Derige, who was sitting closest to the radio, which had become unregarded background noise to everyone else. “Listen to this!”

She turned up the volume. It was the same news channel as Susan and Telesnikov had tuned into an hour or two earlier, in Junopolis.

“—Minister responded immediately to the news just in of a devastating explosion in downtown New Babylon with the following statement: ‘We deplore the damage and loss of life in the capital of our neighbor and stand ready to offer all necessary humanitarian assistance on request. The present defensive mobilization of Illyrian armed forces is suspended by Ducal decree and with immediate effect. The Ministry of Defense strongly rebuts initial suggestions in New Babylonian reports that Illyrian forces are responsible for the explosion and repeats its longstanding categoric assurance that Illyria does not possess, and does not seek to acquire, nuclear weapons and supports the monopoly of such weapons by New Babylon’s Space Defense Force. The Illyrian armed forces are hereby ordered to take no actions other than in immediate self-defense and to await further orders.’ Now we go live to our correspondent in New Babylon, where—I’m sorry, the line appears to be down. Please stay tuned for further news flashes.”

The voice was replaced by somber music.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Matt. He looked utterly dismayed, his face pale and running with sweat.

Ann was already turning the dial.

“—small nuclear device aimed squarely between the HQ of the Ninth and the Space Authority building, both of which are now completely destroyed along with approximately two square kilometers of the eastern end of the island, which until half an hour ago was the administrative and business center of the entire Republic. So far, all known potential opponents have denied responsibility and—”

“—initial radioactivity readings confirm suspicions that—”

“—pointed out that the sole possessor of nuclear weapons is the Space Defense Force itself and strongly hinted that this may be related to an internal power struggle rather than current international tensions—”

“—possibility of a Spider attack has not been discounted, sources close to the Patriarch have averred—”

“—continuing emergency launches from the rocket base at Kairos—”

Telesnikov stalked over and turned the radio off. “Shut up, everyone!” he shouted above the chorus of protest. “We need a few minutes to think without all that speculation. Oh, all right, Ann—plug in your phones and tell us when any news comes in, okay?”

Ann glanced at Phil Johnson; the captain nodded.

“Suppose we believe the Illyrians,” Telesnikov went on. “If it wasn’t them, who was it? We can rule out the Lapithians and the lesser powers of the Genean League, they don’t have the capability. I very much doubt that our own forces—unless the Bright Star Cultures have changed fundamentally in the past century—would do that even if they were here already, and I still think we would know if they were here already. They’d make some effort to contact us, and they could detect the presence of our skiffs. That leaves the only power we know for sure has nukes or equivalent—kinetic-energy weapons, heavy-duty plasma cannon or whatever—the New Babylon Space Defense Force itself. And there’s only one reason I can see why they’d do something so drastic as to take out their own official headquarters—they believe that the enemy, the aliens, the Spiders—us—have somehow subverted it.”

“There is another possibility,” said Salasso. “You mentioned kinetic-energy weapons. It’s possible that this was not a nuclear strike but a large meteor which was too fast for the orbital forts to stop, or too small for them to detect until it was too late.”

“Yes,” said Telesnikov heavily, “that’s a possibility. But if it was a meteor strike the SDF would be saying so loud and clear. If they do, fine, in a sense. We can actually help if the gods are attacking, and it’s help they’d be likely to accept. If it’s the SDF itself that’s attacking, we have to stop them before they do more damage, and stop them without destroying the orbital forts. That means jumping Illyrian troops into the forts.”

“How do we let the Illyrians know about this offer?” Ramona asked.

“We do what Matt suggested,” said Telesnikov. “We vanish into the maw of their security apparatus. Volunteers?”

Susan jumped up. “I’ll go, in case they need convincing about the—about what happens when—”

Telesnikov nodded. “Understood. Matt? It was your idea.”

Matt shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I think this is all my fault, and I’m pretty useless for the moment.”

“Okay,” said Telesnikov. “Take it easy.”


If Mikhail and Susan hadn’t reported back by the end of the day, or if general war broke out, the others were to use their initiative; if all else failed, as Telesnikov pointed out, they could always navigate a jump to the nearest habitable system in the Bright Star Cultures’ likely path, and warn them off. Some of the Multipliers took this as a hint to start constructing astronomical instruments from improbable materials.

Less than half an hour after the plan had been finalized, Susan found herself looking down at the garish rooftops of Junopolis.

“The building from which the greatest density of encrypted microwaves emanate is over here,” said Mr. Blue, guiding the invisible machine toward a large yellow office block on whose roof—and, Susan guessed, unnoticeable from the street—dish antennae bristled.

“Are you sure it’s not the television station?” she asked, half joking.

The Multiplier rattled some fingers like a bunch of twigs. “Television is not a major medium in Illyria. The population seem to have retained the traditional saur prejudice against it. In any case, the television tower is there.”

She looked where it had pointed, to a tall building on whose roof meter-high neon letters spelled out “Television Tower.”

“Oh, right,” she said, somewhat abashed.

The rooftop stabilized a couple of meters below her feet. Her knees were knocking. She could see them. The plan was brutally simple. They were to gain access to the building from the top, find the most senior person they could, and tell him or her their story, producing their concealed weapons if necessary. They both had their tracking and comms devices rigged with hidden throat mikes, set up to maintain continuous contact on their own encrypted channel—if they called for help Mr. Blue would simply jump the skiff into the building right beside them. The skiff’s emergence from a jump in a space occupied by other objects would damage the other objects, but not the skiff. It was, he assured them, something to do with the exclusion principle. Susan hoped he was as certain as he sounded, and also that any falling brickwork or whatever didn’t fall on her skull, which as far as she knew, was not protected by the exclusion principle.

“Ready?” said Telesnikov.

They were both wearing the black suits—faked up from plant cellulose by the Multipliers—that they’d used earlier on what Matt had called MIB work. If they looked like intruders, at least they would look like respectable intruders, not Nova Babylonian commandos.

“Yes,” said Susan, loosening her tie above the throat mike and patting her shoulder holster.

“Okay.”

The hatch’s opening was indicated by the inrush of hot city air. They jumped down. The skiff stayed where it was, like part of the mirage off the flat roof. Beneath it some gravel and grit on the tarpaper had been swirled into a complex circular pattern. Telesnikov cast about and led the way through the electronic shrubbery to a two-meter-high wooden box with a door in it.

“Not even locked,” he said, and opened it. An alarm shrieked immediately.

“Dammit to hell!”

“Keep going,” said Susan.

Telesnikov descended the ladder, looked around and beckoned. When she closed the door behind her, the alarm stopped.

“I don’t think that’s a good sign,” said Telesnikov. “Shutting off when the intruders are inside strikes me as what Matt would call a feature.

They were in a corridor dimly lit with caged electric lights and a red light at a metal door at the end. The door was thick and it was locked from the other side.

“There’s a CCTV camera up there,” Susan pointed out.

“Oh yes,” said Telesnikov. “Well, let’s see if anyone’s watching.”

They both stepped back from the door and stood waving their hands above their heads. After a minute they heard a lot of heavy steps coming up stairs. Something clunked against the other side of the door.

“Step back and put your hands on your heads,” a voice boomed, amplified by the door as well as by whatever was behind it.

They complied. After some grating and clicking the door banged open to reveal two men with black visors and protective gear and rifles. The rest of the squad were literally backing them up, muzzles poking over the top of the stairwell.

“Who are you and how did you get in?”

“Cosmonaut Mikhail Telesnikov of the Cairns Fleet, Mingulay,” said Mikhail. “And Susan Harkness, mission recorder. We’re part of the advance party of the Bright Star Cultures. There’s a Spider skiff above your roof. If has unlimited stealth and jump capability. If I ask—or if its pilot hears any sounds of violence—it can jump into the exact space where you’re standing now, about two meters in front of me. I suggest you lower your weapons and take us to the most senior available officer of the Illyrian Defense Department.”

Five blank visors and five black rifle muzzles glared back at them.

“All right,” said the squad leader. “We’ll have to search you first.”

“We both have pistols in shoulder holsters,” said Telesnikov.

Two of the men stepped forward and frisked them while a third and fourth kept everyone covered. They took the pistols and then tugged off the mikes and the adapted radios.

“Hey!” said Susan as the radio was pulled from her inside jacket pocket. “That wasn’t—”

“Shut the fuck up.”

The squad leader and his mate tossed the devices, then the pistols, back to the others.

Now we take you—”

Susan heard an enormous crash behind her and hit the deck. Telesnikov’s reflexes were just as fast. A split second later, the rifles opened up. Susan clasped her arms over her head and waited for it to stop. After a few seconds and a yelled command, it did. An implacable grinding noise, accompanied by more crashing, continued. Susan raised her head slightly. The two men who’d searched them were crouched at the top of the stairwell; one of them had an arm raised. He motioned to Susan and Telesnikov to get up. As they scrambled to their feet they glanced back and saw the skiff advancing down the corridor toward them. It was a lot wider than the corridor and on both sides its forward edge was cutting through plaster and lath, concrete and steel, like a plowshare through black earth. Telesnikov faced it and waved his hands above his head. The skiff stopped.

Glass tinkled somewhere.

“Now you take us,” said Telesnikov.


“You may go,” the Director of Military Intelligence told the two visored guards who’d escorted Susan and Mikhail to his office.

“But sir—”

An upraised hand and a mild querying look sent the two guards out. The Director sat back down. The office was modest, its only distinguishing feature what was undoubtedly the best view over Junopolis that the building afforded. An uncluttered desk, a leather office chair, a couple of smaller chairs and a few bookcases and a filing cabinet. The Director, a man in his thirties, was likewise modest in a dark suit with a minimum of slashes and padding. Only his ringletted red hair and luxuriant but neatly trimmed beard made him look vain, almost foppish.

“Please, please,” he said. “Take a seat.” He flicked his fingertips as though shaking off water. “And your weapons and radios.” It was like he didn’t want them spoiling the layout of his desk.

They sat down. “My name is Attulus,” he said. “I have come here from a much busier and more crowded room, as you can imagine. So let’s get down to business. The guard relayed what you claimed, and I’m willing to believe it. A Spider skiff on my top floor is . . . compelling. Tell me more. Fast.”

He listened intently as they told him.

“This is fascinating,” he said. “And your plan is feasible—if your alien allies can jump a skiff with this precision, they can jump right inside the orbital stations, whose location of course we know. But how can you ask us to trust you that”—he wiped a hand wearily across his face—“you’re not as much of a menace to the rest of humanity as Volkov always warned?”

Susan stared at him with a feeling of angry helplessness, a sense that she had walked through a mirror into a world where truth was no argument. It was the world to which Matt had taken her, when they had walked through the door into the house of that frightened latifundia chairman and messed with the poor guy’s head. He’d had a picture of Volkov among the family photographs on top of his television, and had squirmed when Matt had casually asked him about it. The older cadres were still loyal to the Engineer.

At that moment, Susan realized something that she wanted to blurt out right there, but it would have taken too long to explain her intuition and her reasoning. It would have to wait, and she had a more urgent point to make.

“We’re not asking you to trust us,” she said. “We’re offering you a chance to get your troops inside the orbital forts. If by the time the Bright Star Cultures arrive we have not persuaded you, that’s our problem. Besides, you must have information by now from Traders who have encountered the Bright Star Cultures.”

Attulus gave her a very sharp look. “That’s an interesting point,” he said. He stroked his beard with thumb and forefinger. “Very interesting.”

He reached for his telephone.


The Ducal Marines were a tough bunch. There was something almost comical about the looks on their faces when they climbed into the skiff and saw Mr. Blue, and about the way they relaxed in the few seconds it took for the Multiplier’s pheromones to overcome the sweat of fear. Then it would all happen all over again when they tumbled out of the packed skiff and into the hangar and met the other Multipliers, and saw the Investigator, and saw the other skiffs arrive, disgorge their comrades and depart to repeat the operation within seconds—a continuous shimmering shuttle. Even the saurs were unfamiliar to most of them, almost legendary. The Marines looked at them as though they were elves.

The five hundred Marines were already geared up for action, having just been stood down after preparing for commando raids on the coast of the Half Moon Sea. Their new mission profile wasn’t much different. Even their weapons—plasma carbines, submachine guns, and short swords—were preadapted for use inside the space stations. The decision to use the hangar in Sauria as the base had been taken hastily—despite the suspension of hostilities, nobody knew whether the orbital forts, or for that matter the New Babylon air force, would strike at Illyria. For the moment the whole military and administrative apparatus of New Babylon was not so much paralyzed as flailing about after the blow struck at its center.

There were nine orbital forts—three in geostationary orbit, two on the moons, one at the Trojan point that intercepted incoming merchant starships, and three in the inner reaches of the asteroid belt. Only the Trojan one was known to have a significant contingent of actual troops—in effect, space marines—and even they had mainly experienced nothing but decades of unopposed boardings. Nonetheless, the most effective way to take them on would have been to hit them all at the same moment, so that none would have any knowledge of what was happening to the others. This wasn’t possible, because there were only six jump-capable ships available: the five Multiplier skiffs and the Investigator. Of these, only the skiffs could emerge unscathed inside another object, destroying anything that happened to be in the same space more thoroughly than an explosion. The battle plan required a staggered departure of the skiffs and a careful calculation of the light-minutes and seconds that separated the targets, as well as of their military significance—the most distant, a fort that happened to be on the other side of the sun from New Earth, was about thirty light-minutes away, but it presented the least immediate threat.

The plan, then, was for the five skiffs to hit the five forts within easy reach first, and substitute force concentration for surprise in overwhelming the others—first the one in Trojan orbit, then the three in the asteroid belt. Only in these three would there be a need for microgravity tactics—the geostationary and the Trojan forts had centrifugal spin, the lunar ones had low gravity. The three Cosmonauts were hastily explaining micro-gravity movement and fighting to the troops, but there was no doubt that they would find it difficult.

The Investigator, and its one onboard Mingulayan skiff, were assigned the role of recovery and backup. Its precision jumping would have to rely on a Multiplier navigator, Mr. Magenta, working together with Johnson and Derige. Its rocketeers and gunners would do whatever was necessary. Their missiles and plasma cannon didn’t amount to much but they were better than nothing. In terms of weapons deployed outside the ship, nothing was what the Marines had.

Susan hopped out of the skiff after its first return journey and watched the preparations in the hangar’s late-afternoon gloom, recording with her tiny Mingulayan camera gear and murmuring her own notes. She managed to corner Matt and Mikhail after they’d both stepped back from a conference of the Marine officers around a table spread with sheets of paper. Matt seemed to have recovered his morale.

“You’re not coming,” he said as soon as she faced him. “It’s not a question of danger, it’s just that it would leave room for one less Marine or Cosmonaut on—”

“Oh, shut up, Matt,” she said. “I know that. History will have to make do with what I record here, and that’ll be more than enough. No, it’s about something you need to know. Both of you. And the troops.”

Matt reached for a mug of coffee that Johnson handed him. “Okay.”

“You too, Phil,” said Susan, pulling in the captain before he could get away.

“So what is it?” asked Mikhail.

“Volkov is alive,” she said.

“What?” they all said at once.

“How would you know?” Matt asked.

“I’m not saying I know,” she said. “I’m saying it’s very likely. Think about it. Who else could have ordered a missile strike on New Babylon, and been obeyed? Who is the one person who had more authority than the Senate and the President and all the rest of them put together?”

“Yes, informally, when he was alive, but—” said Matt.

“Come on Matt, Mikhail, you knew him, you’ve told me all about him. The consummate political Cosmonaut. He would never have fallen to a palace coup. Oh, the coup might have been carried out, the plotters might even have thought they’d succeeded, but Volkov would have been ahead of them. And I’ll bet he’s been up in one of these orbital forts for all the decades since. The SDF must have been Volkov’s power base. So I think you and the brave lads there are going to face absolutely fanatical resistance in at least one of the forts.”

“That or some very clever negotiation,” said Mikhail, with a skeptical grin that partly humored her.

“You overestimate him,” said Matt, half to Mikhail and half to Susan. “He had a way of setting things in motion that ran away from him. That’s what happened with the Modern Regime, I don’t doubt. But, yeah, I can see he could still be alive—hell, he still has supporters in the bureaucracy and the SDF, sure, if he was alive he could get them to do it if anyone could . . . but why should he attack New Babylon? Especially with a crisis like this. If he wanted to make his comeback he could do it without wiping out the people who ousted him. I mean, the old President was just about dead of—”

He stopped, and his hand jolted so hard he splashed hot coffee over it—Susan could just see the half-started gesture of slamming his fist on his palm.

“That’s it!” he said. He was smiling for the first time in days, for the first time since it had all gone wrong, and now he was straightening up, a weight off his shoulders.

“Yes,” said Susan. “I just thought of it when we were speaking to Attulus, and I mentioned the Traders who’d met our side already.”

Mikhail and Phil frowned at them.

“You’ve lost us, you two,” Phil said.

“Whoever hit New Babylon,” she said, “wasn’t just aiming to wipe out the central apparat. They were aiming to wipe out people in the apparat infected by the Multipliers. People right at the top.”

She hardly had time to explain the rest—to the Marines as well as to her friends—before whistles sounded, and the run for the skiffs began.


Recording events from the hangar was a safe but uncanny and terrible way of being a war correspondent. The skiffs blurred into their jumps and returned for more troops about once every minute as they zipped back and forth at lightspeed between the geostationary and lunar forts, then in longer jumps as they took on the Trojan-orbit fort and, at even longer intervals, two of the three asteroid bases. It was from the Trojan fort that the first casualties from both sides came back, sliding in blood down from the skiffs’ hatches. The dozen or so Multipliers who weren’t piloting pounced on the wounded men and began repairing them without waiting for permission. Ramona and Susan rushed around explaining. All that the combat medics could do, and all they had to do, was hold down thrashing, screaming men while the Multipliers worked. After the first few terrifying miracles, soldiers who’d been mangled or dead minutes earlier could reassure the new arrivals that the Spiders were doing them good. Even some of these revenants were frightening—men with only a scaffolding of Multiplier offspring, a webwork of minute Spiders passing blood and bits along where parts of their bodies had been, visibly being repaired on the run. Some of the revived Marines went back into action, carried away by the fever of the benign infection, the ecstasy of the strange vision through their rebuilt eyes. There were still deaths—not even the Multipliers could do anything for a blasted-out brain. Corpses were laid out one by one, but they were not stacked up by the score, as without the Multipliers they certainly would have been.

After about half an hour of fighting, the first prisoners began to come back—initially the few armed men on the geostationary forts, then SDF cosmonauts and technicians, then a sudden flood from the Trojan fort and the two lunar stations. The space marines had fought hard, but the sheer surprise and the prisoners’ shock as they arrived in the hangar after being thrown bodily aboard the skiffs made them compliant. As the nearer stations were secured forty-odd soldiers piled into four skiffs that were assigned to the first two asteroid forts, one only five light-minutes away, the other twenty-five. Matt traveled with one pair of skiffs, Telesnikov with the other. The departures were staggered by twenty minutes, so that they would hit each fort simultaneously.

A skiff from the first squad returned, with casualties and prisoners, after about half an hour. One of the prisoners, triumphantly collared by Matt, was Volkov.

The two Cosmonauts came off the skiff still screaming at each other. Blood ran from Volkov’s mouth. Matt’s pistol muzzle had been jammed against his upper lip, but despite that, he was still yelling. What they were saying was hard to make out but Matt’s most oft-repeated epithet was “Murdering commie bastard” and Volkov’s was “Spider-loving scumsucking traitor son of a bitch.” Two Marines rushed up and parted them. Matt used his advantage as he was being dragged off to kick Volkov as hard as he could in the crotch. Volkov gasped and doubled up, almost wrenching himself away from the Marine, then shouted:

“You haven’t won, you bastards! Give up while you still have a chance!”

“Jeez,” said Matt, shrugging off his restraint, “I should kill him now.”

“Do that if you want, you can’t stop us!”

Then Volkov slumped, whether with delayed shock from the kick or in passive resistance it was hard to say, but at least he shut up. He was dragged off and snap-cuffed with the other prisoners.

“What happened?” Susan asked. One of the Marine officers rushed up.

“He got an appeal out before we got him,” Matt said. “A call to the citizens and military of New Babylon to rise against the Spider-infiltrated remnants of the de Zama clique and resist their Illyrian pawns. Don’t know how effective it’ll be, but it may be taken up.”

“Damn,” said the officer. “Civil war and national resistance in the Republic is not what we need.”

Matt jumped back on the skiff at the head of a fresh squad. Both skiffs returned shortly afterward, the station secure. The squad led by Telesnikov came back from the farther station in a bad way. They’d won, but they’d had a struggle getting back through howling, thinning air and then, briefly, vacuum as the defenders suited up and evacuated the air from the areas of fighting. The Multipliers had a lot of repairing and reviving to do.

“They got warnings off,” said Telesnikov. “The third station will be ready for us, they’ll have suited up and blown all the air out and they’ll have armed men in every compartment.”

“How many suits have you got?” the Marines’ CO asked.

“Ten,” said Johnson. “And our people aren’t well-trained in them, let alone for fighting in them. Training up your guys would take too long.”

“Could take the other sides’ suits,” said Susan, looking at some prisoners being taken off the Investigator, to which they’d been shuttled by a skiff on site.

Matt and Telesnikov were shaking their heads.

“Same problems, plus sabotage and creative misunderstanding,” said Matt.

“Do we need to take the third station right away?” Ramona asked. “It’s not like it can hit New Earth from the other side of the sun.”

Matt glared at her. “You know this? I don’t. It has onboard nukes which I don’t want to see coming our way, even in a couple of months. And it can zap the other stations with its plasma cannon. No way are we going to leave it a minute longer than we have to. We’ll have to nuke it from the outside.”

“We don’t have—” began the Marine commander. Then he grinned. “We do now.”

“You’ll need someone to arm it,” said Ramona.

Matt and Telesnikov stalked off among the prisoners. After a few minutes in a clamor of raised voices, the two returned, to everyone’s surprise, with Volkov. His arms were in their grip and his wrists were cuffed at his back, there was blood on his chin and bruises were swelling on his face, but he still looked defiant and dangerous.

“He has something to tell us,” said Matt. “The others bear him out, for what that’s worth.”

“You’ve got all this wrong,” Volkov said. “The strike on New Babylon did not come from us, I swear. When you have time you can check the stations’ computers, check their arsenals, and you can verify what I say. All the nuclear weapons are there and accounted for. And none of them are small tactical nukes. They’re all multimegaton asteroid-busters. What hit New Babylon today was a large meteor traveling very fast, punching vertically through the atmosphere. Unless it was a quite extraordinary accident, it came from the gods. They are capable of that, we know they are, they can line up orbital instabilities over decades ready to strike at will. There could be more at any moment, or worse. You know they have been preparing something, you’ve seen the comets!”

“Why should they strike now?” Matt asked. “It seems another extraordinary coincidence that they should finally get around to hitting New Babylon decades after you started annoying them and just when we happen to be—”

He stopped. “Oh, shit.”

“Oh shit indeed,” snarled Volkov. “They know you’re here, and they’re fighting on your side.” He glared around. “Or you’re fighting on theirs—that’s what all my men concluded when you attacked the only defenses we have!”

“The defenses didn’t work today,” Susan said.

Volkov looked at her curiously. “They’re not much use against something that small and fast. They’re very useful indeed against something bigger and slower. Salasso can tell you all about major impact events.”

The saur responded with a thin smile.

“All right,” said Matt, “but if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t a nuke, why the hell didn’t you say so?”

“I have to admit that we were still considering whether we could wring some political advantage from the misconception,” said Volkov.

Matt let go of Volkov’s arm and stood back. “You know,” he said, “I can believe that. You haven’t changed.”

Volkov nodded. “Be that as it may, I can help you now. If you take me to any of the captured stations, I can use its comms to tell the remaining orbital station what is actually going on, and order them to accept your boarders without resistance.”

“They’ll do that?” said Telesnikov.

“Oh yes,” said Volkov. “One thing you got right, they’ll do what I tell them.”

“Even if it means handing over the station to the enemy?”

Volkov snorted. “New Babylon’s decapitated and in convulsions. Illyria is now the only power that can take charge of space defense—it’s our side, not the enemy.”

“Who is the enemy?” Susan asked. Quick, to record this, to get the history . . . 

Volkov’s eyes narrowed. “The Spiders—the Bright Star Cultures may be the enemy. We’ll see how that works out, and I would strongly recommend that these gentlemen”—he nodded at the Illyrian officers—“bear that in mind, whatever the tactical alliances of the moment. But the enemy of the moment and for the future, our certain and eternal enemies, are the gods. And we have good reason to think the gods have more of these strikes lined up. We have to hit back at them immediately and terribly, to make them aware that they cannot hit us with impunity.”

“How can we do that?” Matt asked.

Volkov grinned suddenly. “You were looking for someone who could arm a nuke.”


“This time I’m coming along,” Susan said.

Volkov had been to the nearest orbital station and back, and a positive reply to his message had come back after over an hour’s inevitable delay. They had used this time to mount an asteroid-buster warhead to one of the Investigator’s ship-to-ship missiles, and to download the location of an asteroid that, according to Space Defense, had an indwelling god. The plan was for Mr. Orange to plot a jump to within a kilometer of the asteroid, fire off the missile with a hacked one-minute fuse, and jump back instantly to ten thousand kilometers, just ahead of the light.

“You’re not coming,” said Matt.

“It’s not up to you,” said Susan.

Phil Johnson, with some reluctance, was persuaded. Susan followed him, Ann, and Matt aboard. The rest of the crew consisted only of Salasso, Volkov, Mr. Orange, and Obadiah Hynde the rocketeer.

Crouched in the cockpit, videoing through the window, Susan fought the sense of panic and strangeness at jumping from the ground in a human-built ship. The scene in the hangar, with soldiers and revenants and prisoners milling about in the dusk and skiffs blurring in and out of jump, was bizarre enough to make her queasy even without this. The cabin lights were out, so that they could see the asteroid’s night side.

“Coordinates set,” said Mr. Orange.

“Coordinates entered and checked,” said Matt.

“Missile primed and deployed,” came Obadiah’s voice on the speaker.

“Comms open and clear,” said Salasso.

“Jump,” said Phil.

The next thing that appeared in Susan’s viewfinder was a dim-lit wall of rock. The impression that it was falling on them was overpowering.

“Fuse set to one minute and counting down,” said Volkov.

“Release missile grapple,” said Phil.

“Missile released,” said Obadiah. “Holding fire.”

Phil and Ann looked at each other. The first ten seconds of countdown ticked away.

“I can’t make this decision,” said Phil. “Handing over command to First Contact Convener.”

“Nuke the fucker,” said Matt.

“Mr. Hynde,” said Salasso gently, “fire the missile on my responsibility, and on my mark. Is this entirely understood?”

“The missile trigger,” said Obadiah shakily, “is the red-handled knife switch on the left of the control panel.”

Susan was never able to tell from her recording whether it was Matt’s hand, or Salasso’s, or Volkov’s, that reached the switch first.




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