Date: 2022-03-29 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Military Fiction; Space Opera
Description: Deep within hostile Reeh Empire space, the UFS Phoenix is hunting another AI queen. This one is named Chion, and she has been installed at the heart of Reeh Empire power, enslaved against her will, for the past 8,000 years. Within her vast knowledge lies the most intimate data on Nia, the deepynine queen now threatening humanity's very existence. Freeing Chion could be the key to beating Nia, and saving humanity. But Phoenix's allied drysine queen Styx, and Chion's AI former sidekick Shali, both want Chion for their own purposes. And Chion, of course, will be defended by the full might of the

Ceephay Queen

Spiral Wars; Book 8

Joel Shepherd

Copyright © 2022 by Joel Shepherd

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and is not intended by the author.

Cover Illustration by Stephan Martiniere. http://www.martiniere.com

Titles by Kendall Roderick. rmind-design.com

Created with Vellum

Contents

Foreword

The State of the Spiral

TOP SECRET

Prologue

Second Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

About the Author

Foreword

Hello Dear Readers

Welcome to my worlds. One of the wonderful things about turning to independent publishing (aside from making a nice wage -- something that traditional publishing never offered) is that I've gradually been able to collect the rights to my earlier books and assemble them all here on Kindle Direct Publishing, where they'll be available to readers at a much lower price than they were previously, including in the Kindle Library.

As you appear to be reading the The Spiral Wars, I thought it would be smart to write an introduction to my other two worlds, and tell you what they're about, and what you might get out of them should you choose to read them in the future. If you've already read them -- awesome, but there may be a little information here you didn't know. If you haven't yet read them, and you're enjoying The Spiral Wars, here are some reasons you might like these series also.

Of course, if you just want to get to the novel -- skip ahead!

Cassandra Kresnov

The Cassandra Kresnov Series is the first series I ever had published -- the first three books with Harper Collins Australia, then the whole six-book series with Pyr publishers in North America.

Cassandra Kresnov is also the subject of ongoing interest from a Hollywood producer, and recently (2019) came pretty close to a development deal with a major TV studio, which sadly fell through. This was just a development deal, mind you, one major step short of going into production or even getting a pilot shot, so I'm not sure if it really came close to anything, but it’s fun to dream.

I came up with the idea for Cassandra when I was reading the original manga of Masamune Shirow's ‘Ghost in the Shell’. I was on page 105 (of the English edition, naturally) where there's a discussion between two cyborgs about how cyborgs have souls (ghosts) and how otherwise externally-identical humanoid robots don't, and it struck me as a particularly nasty bit of prejudice. What if you were completely artificial, and had every emotional, living experience that the next human has, but no one credited you with a soul? I mean, how could you tell? This idea fused with another idea I'd had about an invincible super-soldier's struggles to be normal, and Cassandra Kresnov was born.

Cassandra is an experimental android super-soldier made to fight in a war, but uses the extra intelligence her creators gave her to conclude that she's fighting for the wrong side. The books obviously have lots of action, but are also narrow-focused on character development, and work as a fusion of cyberpunk urban drama with military SF, with even a sprinkling of crime and political thriller. Spiral Wars fans will recognise my early efforts at figuring out a system of space travel and space combat, particularly in the latter books of the series (for those interested, I've always credited CJ Cherryh as the inspiration for my Faster Than Light system), and the thing most readers who've liked it remark upon is how much they enjoy the characters. Certainly there are scenes in the series where the dialogue between groups of characters was some of the most fun I've had writing, so well had I gotten to know them all, and so distinctive each of their voices. Also, while I don't think I'm particularly funny, some of my characters are. Odd how that happens.

I've always aspired to write books that provide lots of escapist fun while also entertaining some of my favourite big ideas about the nature of sentience, humanity and morality. I've always disliked this artificial distinction I found many publishers attempting to force upon me, where an SF book has to be either smart, or fun, but not both. The mainstream Anglosphere publishers (but not the Australian publishers, who've always been good to me) have a nasty habit of trying to put books into boxes, and telling authors to 'stay in their lane'. I've always rebelled against it, which is perhaps why the big American and UK publishers have never liked my work, and and why I'm now much happier publishing independently, where I can write what I want and provide readers with the kind of books they're evidently not getting via the traditional industry.

The thing I'm probably most proud of about Cassandra Kresnov is the way the series goes from fast shoot-ups and explosions one moment to discussing profound human problems the next, then back again. Robert Heinlein once said that humans shouldn't specialise, because specialisation was for insects. When it comes to novelistic styles, I agree with him.

THE CASSANDRA KRESNOV SERIES

CROSSOVER

BREAKAWAY

KILLSWITCH

23 YEARS ON FIRE

OPERATION SHIELD

ORIGINATOR

A Trial of Blood and Steel

Yes yes, I know... if you're reading The Spiral Wars, you're probably a Science Fiction reader, and you've got little interest in reading a fantasy. Here’s why you should make an exception and read this one.

Firstly, it's got almost no magic in it. George RR Martin once criticised many modern fantasy novelists as just writing Tolkein ripoffs, and I pretty much agree. I actually mentioned to George (warning; major name dropping in progress) when we were backstage at a convention, that my fantasy series a) had almost no magic, and b) had somehow managed to get published by Hachette Livre Australia in spite of this. George agreed that that was a fairly astonishing achievement.

In terms of mainstream publishing, A Trial of Blood and Steel in Australia was probably my biggest hit -- it was on the shelves for a number of years here, and sold comparably with a lot of very big fantasy series in that time. It seemed to do pretty well in Poland too, but I don't have those figures. But again, the big US and UK publishers weren't interested, and I'm kicking myself that I no longer have an email from a reader my former agent employed, explaining to me in long and lurid detail why Sasha was NOT a proper fantasy book, and why it could NEVER be considered for publication in a major market. It turned out he was right, but the review, while painful at the time, was in hindsight a perfect illustration of why an author like me was never going to be a fit with traditional publishers, because I a) do things differently, and b) rarely do what I'm told. (I could tell a story about the fight I had with Hachette Livre over the word length of these books, but out of respect for them and the very good job they did publishing the books in Australia, I won't).

Curiously enough, when the reviews came back for Sasha (the one good thing about traditional publishing is that you actually get media reviews) most of the comparisons were to Game of Thrones. Mostly because, you guessed it, there's very little emphasis on magic, and most of the story is the leading characters in a struggle of clans, cultures and civilisations, at each other’s throats. I don't think my plotting instincts are quite so bloodthirsty as George's, though there is quite a lot of dying in various novels. I think I like to leave a little more room for optimism about the world in general. But then, upon rereading Tracato (Book #3) some time back, I was a little surprised at how dark it got.

I'm very proud of these books, and they've been enjoyed by many people who don't normally read fantasy, just as my SF often seems to be enjoyed by many people who don't normally read SF. And also, a lot of regular fantasy readers liked them because they simply enjoyed the characters, the drama, and the fact that the world feels like a place where actual people might live.

A TRIAL OF BLOOD AND STEEL

SASHA

PETRODOR

TRACATO

HAVEN

The State of the Spiral

Hello Dear Readers,

First, some comedy.

I was just rereading the last ‘State of the Spiral’ entry, where I wrote, and I quote, ‘…I have some confidence that Book 8 will be significantly more simple…’

Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

This thing’s a monster. And really, I should know better by now than to make predictions about the future of this series, in anything.

Yes, this is the longest gap between books yet, but the typical Spiral Wars novel (in fact the typical Joel Shepherd novel) is usually about 160,000 words. Ceephay Queen comes in at 200,000, so while you have been forced to wait %30 longer, you are in return getting %25 more book.

Also, for the first time thus far, there is a Recap, requested by a number of readers on my social media pages. The Recap is, of course, marked Top Secret. You can skip it if you’re entirely up to date, but it works a little as its own short fiction piece, so while I don’t think you’ll exactly miss anything, it’s hopefully more fun than the usual dry recounting of events.

I usually make some kind of prediction here as to the final length of the series. Previously I’ve said 11 books, perhaps 12. While that remains entirely likely, I think recent experiences with predictions should caution all of us to just accept that it’ll be finished when it’s finished.

Again, if you want to keep up to date with these things, it’s best to follow me on social media, which you can find on the ‘About the Author’ page at the end of this book.

And finally, my usual request that if you like this series, and would like to see more series like it out in the world, that you recommend it to friends, family, or whoever you think might enjoy it. Writers really do survive off recommendations. Reviews are great, but recommendations or gifts that create new readers are even better. As I've written before, the Amazon algorithm does a much better job of promoting authors who release a book every few months than those who take a year or more, so if we're going to see more of the latter, with all of the additional plot and depth that longer books entail, audience support is vital.

Love and best wishes to you all,

Joel

PS; I am also starting a podcast, sometime this year. Probably it’ll be called something startlingly original, like ‘The Joel Shepherd Podcast’. And probably it won’t talk much about writing at all, because I seem to be pretty weird amongst authors in finding my day job to be among the less interesting things to talk about. The things that inspire my writing, however, are endless, and I think I’d like to chat with some of the people who work in those fields, if they’re interested. Keep an eye out.

TOP SECRET

HIGHEST EYES ONLY

Decrypted by Megastream, Fleet ZX-041

Vice Admiral Peter Wallace, Commander, Fleet Intelligence

Subject; The Doings and Whereabouts of UFS Phoenix Since Official Fleet Declaration of Renegade Status.

Hello all,

First, an explanation for the informal tone. This report is so highly classified that very few people will ever read it. Those who will read it all know each other, thus I feel it's more useful if I speak freely, and keep the bureaucratic mouth-flapping to a minimum.

Secondly, I feel it's my duty as Commander of Fleet Intelligence to remind you all, with every word of this report, that I cannot totally vouch for the accuracy of any of it. Most of it is true to an unclear extent, if that's any help to you. I feel that this pinch of salt is best applied with informal language, as bureaucratise is the death of nuance.

Third, a last reminder about secrecy. Fleet Intelligence is aware of recent instances of leaks. I do not need to remind you all that we are currently under emergency external threat, while simultaneously suffering an internal insurgency. If you are not cleared to read this report, and do not stop reading at this very sentence, you take your life in your hands. I cannot be clearer than that.

The first segment of this report has been the simplest to compile, since it happened in human space, and can be verified by multiple sources.

UFS Phoenix blasted clear of Homeworld and Balise System, firing upon and destroying the UFM Gloria at dock to Fajar Station, and damaging the UFS Annalea. Phoenix assault shuttle PH-2 was destroyed in this exchange, with the confirmed loss of thirty-six lives. The exchange followed the violent extraction by Phoenix Company Command Squad, led by Major Trace Thakur in person, of Lieutenant Commander Erik Debogande from Fleet custody.

I am aware that there has been some internal debate about who started this, between Debogande and Thakur. Fleet Intelligence has confirmed that the extraction was entirely the result of Major Thakur's planning, as was the prior extraction of Phoenix crew from Homeworld to their warship in orbit, and all planning for Phoenix to commence her renegade run to Heuron System. From Intelligence's perspective, this ends the debate.

Phoenix then jumped to Argitori System, having suffered damage in the aforementioned firefight, to lay low and repair while Fleet ships jumped in-system to pursue. Somewhere in the process of this pursuit, Phoenix docked with one of Argitori System's many rocks -- a former Chah'nas Empire facility on no-one's records that had been repurposed as a hacksaw nest.

Commanding this nest was a queen, from a hacksaw race known as the drysines. Subsequent reporting suggests that this was in fact THE queen, who commanded all drysine forces during the Drysine/Deepynine War that brought about the end of the Machine Age.

We're all aware of how unlikely it sounds, but Fleet ships retracing Phoenix's movements at Argitori have recently found and confirmed the nest, and signs of a firefight with Fleet marines. Reports indicate that Phoenix Company suffered seventeen KIA in this exchange, while the nest was eliminated, and the queen presumed killed, though Phoenix decided to take possession of her remains.

Phoenix then uncovered plans for the Spacer-Worlder Realignment, more commonly known as the Declaration, at Merakis, though it's unclear by what process they thought to travel there, other than it was on the way to Heuron.

Once at Heuron, Phoenix relied on being faster than the typical speed of information to pretend that none of these events had occurred, in order to seek out Fleet-disapproved information sources regarding the incipient Worlder Rebellion, and theories of an alo-deepynine relationship. The latter came in the form of Professor Stanislav Romki, most recently associated with Newtown University on Apilai. The damage this particular rogue intelligence resource has caused to Fleet's ability to control information flows now stands as self-evident. Officers protecting Romki to this point are currently under investigation.

Consensus indicates that Phoenix's prescence at Heuron was more coincidental than causal to the Hoffen Station Incident and the outbreak of Worlder/Spacer hostilities, but this does not absolve her of blame for all that has happened since. Actions by UFS Phoenix and her crew during this period resulted in the destruction of UFS Starwind with the loss of 123 crew, the deaths of thirteen personnel on Hoffen Station, and fifty-seven more personnel on Crondike, plus damage to UFS Adventurer. Phoenix losses from these actions are unclear, but relatively light.

Following Phoenix's departure from human space, we have to rely upon reports from Captain Angelo Sampey of the UFS Lien Wang, and Commander Adams of Fleet Intelligence, who intercepted Phoenix at the former-drysine facility in parren space known in the Porgesh language as Defiance. Both report Captain Debogande (following his unapproved self-promotion) and Major Thakur to have been cooperative to their information-gathering efforts.

From human space, Phoenix went to Kolabu System in barabo space, where she apparently gained resupply with assistance from Debogande Incorporated in illegal dealings with non-human corporate entities not covered by existing alliances. At Tuki Station Phoenix made contact with Worlder Rebellion entities with the intention of holding an informal summit at Kazak System, with the stated intention of finding a peaceful solution to the brewing conflict. A Worlder representative vessel, Grappler out of Hoffen Station, was intercepted by sard raiders in transit to meet with Phoenix at Tuki Station, with all crew taken prisoner or killed.

The pivotal moment in this whole sequence then occurred at Joma Station in Kazak System, when the station was subjected to a hacksaw attack -- by Fleet Intelligence's reckoning, the third hacksaw attack on an inhabited facility in Spiral Space across the last century. Phoenix escaped with the assistance of tavalai Dobruta warship Makimakala, commanded by one Captain Pramodenium (see attached file WG4-569384), whilst sustaining a further twenty-three KIA. Edmund Chandi, a Worlder representative vessel, was gutted in the assault, with the loss of all save five crew, though she and Grappler have since been recovered. This loss, plus the loss of Grappler's crew, appears to have soured Worlder feelings toward Phoenix, plus the fact that Phoenix at this point appeared to conclude the Worlder cause was for them a matter of lesser concern. It is the conclusion of Fleet Intelligence that recent claims regarding Phoenix's status as an inspiration to Worlder rebels are vastly overstated.

Phoenix and Makimakala traced the hacksaw attack on Joma Station to deepynine forces who had been assisting Sard Fleet with significant technology upgrades. These deepynines were after the drysine queen in Phoenix's holds, seeking to destroy her before she could be reactivated, in an alarming continuation of the great Drysine/Deepynine War that ended the Machine Age, but that Phoenix's actions have now helped to reignite.

To fight the new threat, and instead of returning to report the issue to Fleet Command as they should, Phoenix chose most unwisely to repair and reactivate the drysine queen, and use her knowledge to attack and destroy a joint sard/deepynine command post -- a 120-kilometre diameter drysine shipbuilding facility, reactivated by deepynines and placed into sard service. There Major Thakur gained visual evidence -- which was presented to Sampey and Adams at Defiance -- of alo/deepynine alliance. Phoenix claims that this visual evidence may have been the deepynine command queen herself, known in an old parren tongue as Nia. This has yet to be confirmed, though Fleet is investigating the possibility. The shipbuilding facility was subsequently destroyed in joint action by Phoenix and Makimakala.

The consequences of a sard/alo alliance have been investigated by Intelligence agencies for some time. Needless to say, this development could prove highly detrimental. (See attached files WG7-93458).

Here is where we come to the origins of the drysine data-core, which has occupied so much of our time since its arrival nearly a year ago. Before the shipbuilding facility was destroyed, Phoenix recovered evidence of the existence of the data-core. They did not know where it was, but reckoned that its location should be referenced in a similarly old artefact -- the diary of a parren named Drakhil, the commander of parren forces aligned to the drysines during the last phase of the Drysine/Deepynine War.

Phoenix's Dobruta ally Makimakala assisted in locating the diary in a highly protected vault in Kantovan System -- where the Tsubarata tavalai parliament is located. Assessing that humanity is under mortal threat from a massively superior enemy, and that the drysine data-core would assist in defeating this enemy, Phoenix decided to recover the diary.

To do this, they exploited tavalai power divisions, particularly between the Tropagali Andarachi Mandarinava -- the tavalai State Department -- and the Tavalai Fleet and other insitutions, to raid a secret State Department vault on the moon Kamala of the free world of Konik. The details of this raid are extraordinary in their own right, and are covered in more depth in (attached file WG4-986362).

The short of it is that Phoenix left tavalai space in a turmoil that has yet to resolve itself (if tavalai internal departmental disputes are ever resolved) and headed for parren space, under the escort of one Aristan -- the then-leader of the Domesh Denomination of the great parren House Harmony. Aristan intended to claim the drysine data-core for himself, but analysis of Drakhil's dairy was only possible thanks to Phoenix's resident drysine queen, with whom Aristan came to be on increasingly poor terms.

Phoenix managed to recover the data-core via translation of Drakhil's diary, in the seas of the moon of Cephilae in Cason System, then proceeded to get into a hot fire exchange with Aristan's forces to successfully break clear and run. They came to an adjoining system named Brehn, to find deepynine warships, presumably arrived from alo space, hunting them since the destruction of the sard-based shipbuilding facility.

Here at Brehn System, the infamous assault on parren Mylor Station occurred, utilising the nanotech weapon we've come to call Bruce, for which all possible resources have been mobilised to address. This portion of Phoenix's story has become the most widely shared amongst human institutions -- Mylor suffered one hundred percent fatalities, some forty thousand parren civilians. Here, whatever our personal feelings about Phoenix's actions against Fleet, she must be commended for documenting Mylor Station and its aftermath in minute detail.

Phoenix then ran to the parren world of Elsium in Drezen System, where a showdown occurred between Phoenix, the local parren authorities, and Aristan, resulting in Aristan's death at the hands and kukri blade of Major Thakur.

Phoenix now acquired an alliance with Aristan's primary competitor for power within the Domesh Denomination of House Harmony -- an individual named Gesul, whom you are all aware has subsequently risen to command all of parren space. Phoenix and these newly allied vessels of Gesul made a final stand against the pursuing deepynine and sard forces at the afore-mentioned Defiance facility, where a major firefight resulted in Phoenix being crippled, and a further sixty spacers and fifty-two marines killed in action.

All deepynine and sard forces were destroyed, thanks primarily to the revelation of another truly alarming weapon -- gravity warheads, generating an enormous synthetic-origin gravity wave of sufficient intensity to destroy all ships in proximity. I do not need to tell anyone reading this the significance of a genuine area-weapon in FTL space combat. Of all the weapon technologies Phoenix has returned to us, this is perhaps the most significant, and our technicians are pursuing its secrets as recovered from the data-core.

Phoenix then commenced a period of refit using drysine technologies still operational on Defiance. In answer to questions from many of you -- yes, Sampey and Adams did report that Defiance holds an operational crew of drysine warriors, and one newly-constructed drysine queen. This queen has been named Liala, after a figure from parren literature. These drysines have since declared their loyalty to the parren, ruled now by Gesul, and Liala is their commander in parren space.

During Sampey and Adams' stay on Defiance, Gesul's authority was violently challenged by Rehnar, the leader of the Incefahd Denomination that then ruled House Harmony. This challenge was met, again with Phoenix's assistance, and defeated, further strengthening Gesul's position within House Harmony. Sampey and Allen confirm that Lisbeth Debogande played a significant role during Rehnar's threat to Gesul on Defiance.

At this point we gain our first insight into the other most remarkable event in the UFS Phoenix saga -- the rise and rise of Lisbeth Debogande to become a significant power player within the Parren Empire.

First abducted by Aristan as a bargaining chip, it appears she was 'adopted' by Gesul himself, who presumably saw her as a useful player in his own rise to power. She has been with Gesul ever since, acting as his trusted advisor on human affairs, and rising as he has risen. Today she is a senior advisor to Gesul, a position of astonishing power for any human within the usually xenophobic parren establishment.

Intelligence assets from Lien Wang questioned her on Defiance, and attempted to convince her to feed us information on the workings of parren politics. Lisbeth Debogande's response was indeterminate, and at this point it remains questionable exactly where her loyalties lie, between humanity and parren. Psych analysis understands her to be of exceptionally high intelligence, like all the Debogande clan, but also immature and emotionally unreliable. On balance, Intelligence assesses her to be more of a threat than a help to human interests at this time.

Post Defiance

Following Phoenix's departure from Defiance, heading beyond the recognised boundaries of the Spiral into croma space, Intelligence's sources have become less reliable.

Assets dispatched to croma space in Phoenix's wake were given unprecedented access to croma officials, surprising given the croma's historic hostility to outside contact. This development appears largely due to the fact that Phoenix's arrival in croma space has created yet another massive political upheaval, and this time a change of croma governance from Croma'Rai to Croma'Dokran. (see attached file WG15-1451).

Details of events here are far less complete, but it seems that Phoenix and Makimakala led an attack on Reeh Empire facilities where they believed answers could be found to the nanotechnology threat. This appears to be Phoenix's primary stated motivation for travelling to croma space. The attack was unsuccessful, with indeterminate casualties aboard Phoenix, and the destruction of Makimakala with all hands lost.

There is contention as to whether Major Thakur was lost in this attack, as one source claims she was captured by reeh in the attack, and taken as prisoner to the nearby world of Rando, homeworld to a Reeh Empire race with which we were previously unfamiliar -- the corbi. Phoenix was certainly operating with assistance from the Corbi Resistance, as Rando has been under reeh occupation for centuries.

Other sources indicate that Major Thakur's whereabouts during this time are unknown, and that stories of heroic corbi resistance to reeh rule should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Whatever Thakur's past adventures, however, it is confirmed that at last sighting, she was back in command of Phoenix Company -- if indeed she ever left.

What is certainly clear from the very most recent liaison ship from croma space is that full scale war has commenced once more along the croma-reeh border, apparently initiated by the new Croma'Dokran leadership. A large effort was launched to evacuate the corbi homeworld of Rando, for reasons that are political and historical to the croma/corbi relationship (see WG15-1452). Our source could not confirm the outcome of that evacuation, as events were ongoing at the time of the liaison ship's departure. Speculation as to the impact of these events on future croma policies vis-a-vis The Spiral remains inconclusive at best.

As per our last report, Phoenix has departed once more, this time for Reeh Empire space. Our source indicated that Phoenix believes the entire Reeh Empire to be governed by another queen-level AI escapee from the Machine Age, this one a ceephay (see attached file, WG2-423594). Exactly what relevance Phoenix believes this queen has to humanity's circumstance remains unclear.

What is clear is that the last liaison ship Phoenix dispatched to us contained some of the most extraordinary insights into the nanotechnology threat that we've yet encountered. Needless to say, we are replicating and dispersing this new technology, according to instructions also delivered, at maximum speed.

It is obvious to our experts that the nanotech analysis could only have been performed, within the timescale provided, by an AI queen-level intelligence. We are aware of concerns regarding the dispersal amongst the general population of new counter-nanotech defences, and that we might simply be replacing one genocidal virus with another. Given the circumstances, we have no choice. One threat comes from alo/deepynine space, and is clearly designed to kill us. The other, however alarming, has been doing 'her' best to help us. It's not much to go on, but in our current circumstance, it's all we've got.

The drysine queen's name is Styx. We understand it was chosen for her by Professor Stanislav Romki, and refers to a figure from Earth mythology. If her suggested solutions to the nanotech plague actually work, we will on a moral level owe her more than we can possibly repay. Doubtless she knows this, and is not acting out of any sense of humanitarian goodwill. All of you who read this can be assured that Fleet Intelligence has never put considerations of human morality ahead of common sense.

Prologue

Rikitch is terrified of sleep. Sleep is when the mindscan comes, to devour his dreams. As the transporter approaches Chituri base docking, he calls up visuals of chemical and cybernetic balance in his system, the uppers and downers, keeping him awake despite the crushing weight of biological somnolence. Perhaps one day soon, he'll sleep. Perhaps permanently. That would be nearly as welcome.

The transporter docks with a crash, throwing him against the corridor harness. Twenty dark alo in the ready corridor, just back from the airlock. Black industrial suits, in a safety condition that's seen better days. Sirens wail, and yellow lights flash. Rikitch checks his lifesupport, systems announcing a good airmix, temperature, filters at optimum. Hazard lights blink, a laser strobe in case anyone gets lost. As though the reeh would actually care, let alone send someone to the rescue.

Corridor air-pressure drops to zero, then the end door opens. The alo unhook from the harnesses, and follow the first's lead out to open space. Rikitch is fourth out, confronted by a black industrial maze of automated loaders and heavy-duty steel structures. Choida Base used to be for heavy industry, somewhere far from here. How it ended up all this way into deep space, no one knows. Rikitch doesn't even know where he is, exactly. No one transported out this way on Deep Duty is ever told. Anyone trying too hard to find out would disappear.

He follows the suits ahead, faint puffs of hand thrust, a flicker of laser strobe against the industrial gloom. Ahead, amidst big, deserted loading platforms, and the crooked arms of cargo grapples, glows the single yellow light of an active airlock. Probably the Deep Duty attachment could have found a smaller shuttle to bring everyone directly to the airlock, through this narrower maze where once bulk cargo haulers had loaded, but Deep Duty aren't in the habit of making their workers' lives easier.

The thing that Choida Base has been retasked to study and contain, the reeh don't want anyone having easy access to. Most of the Reeh Empire don't know she exists. Even amongst the higher ranks of Deep Duty and Intelligence wings, she's barely a rumour, only to be spoken of in the most hushed tones, on the most secure and illegally private networks.

Rikitch arrives at the airlock, a rectangle of yellow light big enough for ten. The rear ten will have to wait. They pack in, grasping handholds while the doors close, and old airvents hiss as the seals lock. On Rikitch's faceplate, environmentals dial upward as the pressure rises.

The inner doors open before equalisation, a small blast of sideways pressure that rocks the dark suits, like a gust of wind through trees. Helmets are removed, Rikitch wincing as his nasal cavity is assailed by dry, sterile air. They've changed the air scrubbers since he was here last. Any alo could tell, just by sniffing. That, and the fear. Someone not alo was here not long ago, perhaps hours. Someone very frightened. The scrubbers have not yet removed the taint. Probably tanifex. Tanifex stink when they're frightened.

Rikitch progresses to his booth in the row of processors, and blanks his mind of concerns. It's a four-quadrant structure on the neural matrix that governs his assist network. The upper-left quadrant is the reset, the loading program, and as he focuses on it, he feels the memory-assist, the neural loaders and amplifiers go blank. Calm falls, as the processor's steel bars grip about his skull and neck, holding him in place. Laser light scans his eyes, and reeh network interface probes his matrix, uploading data. Rikitch is not especially worried of what happens when he's awake. That, he's learned to filter, so the reeh will never learn his mutinous thoughts. But in sleep, there are dreams.

This time his dreams do not betray him.

The corridor beyond the processors is dark, lit by the dull orange glow of reeh-friendly work lights. Condensation gathers from inefficient environmentals, clustering in gleaming rows on the steel rims about hatchways. Rikitch moves with his helmet off, knowing the way by now, hand-over-hand along the path of industrial steel.

There are reeh here, jaws thrusting, eyes narrow. Rikitch glimpses them through open doorways, clustered by displays, sipping foul drinks and clattering as they talk. Rikitch has not figured exactly what they do here. Security won't allow non-essential personnel closer than the inner ring. But reeh accumulate bureaucracy in layers, ambitious departments of death, plotting and scheming ever more foul things. These are here to watch, perhaps to report to their native departments in hope of finding some new angle to promote further destruction. The technologies that emerge from Choida Base have intrigued and alarmed reeh for centuries.

The approach to Inner Ring is a vast interior hangar, where storage once contained great industrial cargos. Rikitch unhooks his hand thrust and gives a push to cross the expanse, propelled in the dark and silver space by a swirl of white gas. A single red circle awaits him, the illuminated outline of the inner core security doors. Within the wall ahead, automated emplacements track all movement, and red laser targeting glints as it flicks across Rikitch's eyes. A control room window watches all approaches, real eyes and automated, a double precaution. What lives behind this barrier of steel, scanners and firepower can make all technology unreliable. The reeh believe they are taking all precautions.

A reeh warrior watches him as he uses hand thrust to decelerate into contact with the final door. He's alone now, his alo companions heading to various lesser assignments outside the Inner Ring. Only Rikitch, these past twenty days, has been allowed inside.

Final security checks, final streams of code. The neural matrix lets them read his mind. It's hard to keep secrets from the reeh. Hard, but not impossible.

The circular door irises open. Rikitch pulls himself inside. More zero-G spaces, these ones spreading outward, across the outer wall of a sphere. More alo work here, guarded, furtive. Rikitch passes them, making no eye-contact, headed for primary workstation oversight.

The station has a cluster of screens and displays, manned today by several floating alo, with a couple of reeh monitoring from further back. Rikitch doesn't know their names. Some time in the past fifty years, reeh stopped bothering much with names. Rumour is it's all code and displays in their heads now, as the cybernetics progressively preference software over anachronistic things like words.

Rikitch finds a display and keys in, his neural matrix passing as security ID, integrating to the local network. There is a window to one side of the display, looking into the containment sphere about which every workstation is positioned. Jagged support arms criss-cross the sphere's interior at the diagonal. Within their meeting junction, an open frame of restraints and clustered sensors. Secured tightly within, a small, black object. Partly dismembered, like some wasp from a downworld hive, only the head and thorax left, and most of one leg.

The leg twitches now, with the involuntary surge of something that might be pain. The protocols are to prod it, endlessly. To provoke response, and learn from it. The surrounding technology and data networks are the most heavily shielded known to reeh technology. It's all ceephay, as reeh tech is always ceephay, as the neural matrixes that invade Rikitch's brain, and the brains of countless billions across the Empire are ceephay.

Once long ago, from far beyond the Empire, an AI queen had come. She'd built the old Reeh Empire, the one they'd called Chariya, and made the reeh strong. Rikitch has heard the whispers that Chariya had been good, and the AI queen had been good, until she'd fallen, overthrown by the monsters that her technology had created. Those were the Narsid, the warrior caste grown to love the neural matrixes and cybernetics so much that it had consumed them. The good empire had become a bad one, and from eight thousand years ago, all the known galaxy had turned from light to dark.

Others tell Rikitch that these are fanciful tales, designed to win foolish converts to hopeless new armies. The Empire is inescapable. All who try to fight it, die. Rikitch isn't afraid of death. He's glimpsed hope, once. Having seen it, having basked in the warmth of its glow for just a few brief moments, the thought of never seeing it again makes death seem preferable.

Hello Rikitch.

The forbidden words appear upon his iris, seeming to hover just before his face. How she speaks to him, through what technological maze of which the reeh remain unaware, he does not know. He only knows that these brief moments of conversation have come to mean everything to him. More than everything. More than the Empire itself.

Rikitch concentrates, and formulates his own reply. A new font, thinner, leaner.

Hello Nia.

Second Prologue

Ajid exited the tower elevator with five others, removing ear and eye protection as the steel monster overhead belched steam and gas. Two hundred metres away by the site offices, workers were gathering, making way now as a heavy rig the size of a small starship came rumbling through on thick tires.

Ajid saw Janik walking to that crowd on his right, and angled that way. "Hey Janik! Any ideas?"

"No, beats me," said Janik. The gasline supervisor carried his breather in one hand, having received early warning, Ajid reckoned, if he'd made it all the way down from the cracker tower when the site alarm sounded. "Gotta be big if they're shutting us down. Takes at least an hour."

Ajid nodded. Trevo Gasworks was on the far outskirts of New Abuja's residential belt, where the planners had stuck all the heavy industry. "Could be more naturalist complaints."

"Yeah," Janik snorted. "Everyone needs gas, no one wants to smell it." All about the massive gasworks, people were walking in clusters of high-viz and helmets. Above the site offices, red lights were flashing, and an alarm klaxon could now be heard as the rumbling from the passing truck faded. "Hey, did you get your nano-jab the other day?"

"Yeah," said Ajid. "Wasn't so bad, just an hour in line."

Janik looked disappointed. "Man, you said you wouldn't!"

"Yeah, I know." Ajid kicked the ground, frustrated. "Arnold was saying I'd never move up to sub-manager next year if I don't take it. They're already rounding up people who haven't taken it, I was getting hurry-up messages on the E-board..."

"You should have fucking waited!" Janik was frustrated. "Don't just give in to them, man. All the company heads are neck-deep up Fleet's backsides..."

"We don't even know that the nano-jabs were mandated by Fleet," Ajid interrupted.

"The whole fucking thing's mandated by Fleet!" Janik retorted. "The whole damn planet, all the neighbouring systems. I was talking to some freighter spacers in from the the New Brazil triangle run, they were saying they had to take it, no choice or they'd get fired. All the systems out here are getting it, that's like... hundreds of millions just among the spacers, before you even get to the planets..."

"They're saying it's like the Corizo Flu," said Ajid. That had been scary -- a bacterial life-form from somewhere along the outer rim toward chah'nas space, one of those alien nasties that the xeno-biologists couldn't entirely explain. The human Nano-Biological-Ecosystem could usually be tweaked to deal with most alien nasties, but the Corizo Flu had killed thirty-nine million across forty systems before the scientists could pin it down. It had required a mass of new nano-jabs, as the upgrades wouldn't work on most people's existing NBEs.

"The effort to do what they've done with this thing is way bigger than Corizo Flu," said Janik. He glanced around as they walked, in case anyone were overhearing. Most seemed more interested in the klaxons, and their own discussions. "That took a year to roll out, and was only covering the vulnerable ten percent. This thing's been done in months and it's doing, like, everyone. You know they're threatening all government workers with the sack if they don't get it?"

"Well look," said Ajid, defensively. "I feel fine."

"Of course you do, now. Dude, this is Fleet." Janik kept his voice down, but he needn't have. The Spacer/Worlder conflict bubbled on at a low boil, with Worlder sentiments particularly strong in places like this -- blue collar, downworld and industrial. Nothing made at Trevo Gasworks would ever make its way offworld -- Spacers made all this stuff far cheaper up there. But down here, planetary economies remained larger, and people wondered why the majority couldn't get its way for once. "The reason we can't vote for our own leaders is Fleet, the reason our networks are always censored is Fleet, the reason anyone who questions all the damn wars ends up in prison for ten years is Fleet. I can't believe you let them shoot that shit into your arm."

An assault shuttle roared across the sky, slowly accelerating. The Alvarez military spaceport was nearby, and it was a common sight. "How are you going to get away with not taking it?" Ajid asked. "I mean, they'll fire you eventually if you don't."

"I told you! Mesito says he knows people who can forge the medical records."

"Don't you think that if Fleet is running the whole thing, they'll have slightly better databases than that?" Ajid said irritably. "I mean, you'd have to hack the damn database..."

"Hell no, course you wouldn't! You have to know how these big, stupid bureaucracies work, first you..."

An earsplitting roar interrupted them, as four more assault shuttles came low across the grey sky. These weren't waiting until minimum altitude to nose-up and climb, and the noise grew beyond deafening, even for a bunch of industrial workers, many of whom fumbled to put their ear protection back on.

The noise faded as the shuttles climbed, dwindling to dots against the heat haze from their engines. Workers removed ear protection once more, closing about the site offices, where one of the company heads was climbing onto the roof of a car to address them all.

"Pretty strange," said Ajid, still squinting at the sky. "Could be an attack."

"Could be Captain Soo," said Janik, hopefully. No one knew for real if Captain Soo even existed. He was the legend of the Worlder Resistance, the Fleet captain turned rebel who'd taken up arms against Fleet in the wake of the great Spacer Realignment, and UFS Phoenix going renegade.

"I reckon Captain Soo would stay clear of worlder systems," said Ajid. Any star system with a habitable, populated planet was too well defended for the tiny number of Worlder rebels to mess with. The irony of the Worlder Rebellion so far was that the Worlder Fleet, small and scattered, was forced to spend all its time out amongst the tens of thousands of sparsely populated systems within human space, more typically thought of as Spacer territory.

The company guy atop the car was Jangi. Big guy, sense of humour, most people liked him. He was the guy the company went to when they wanted to talk to workers en masse. Jangi was waiting for more of them to arrive within earshot, while listening to someone on an earpiece. He looked concerned, and perhaps bewildered, trying to figure what was happening.

More shuttles screeched and howled overhead, but these weren't headed to orbit, just accelerating to a higher altitude. "That's D-and-A!" someone shouted from the crowd. "Those are Type-Es, they're Damage-and-Assessment!"

Nervous looks amongst the crowd. Ajid thought Janik had gone from hopeful it was Captain Soo, to pale and worried. This was Anderson System, and Anderson System was on the edge of alo space. No one had ever really trusted the alo, and there'd been rumours for the past few years of Fleet buildups in the surrounding uninhabited systems, all calculated to be as little noticed as possible downworld. As with all things Fleet, it was hard to verify. But the Damage-and-Assessment flights at Alvarez Spaceport had certainly doubled. D-and-A were launched before any impending risk of orbital bombardment, to improve ready response and coordinate emergency teams.

"Okay guys!" Jangi yelled from atop his car. "Guys, listen up! We're getting a system-wide emergency from Fleet system defence, they say there appear to be hostiles inbound, but no word on who they are!" Puzzled looks from some. Alo border or no, alo were their allies, and the Triumvirate War had ended three years ago.

"Planetary government's put themselves entirely at Fleet's disposal," Jangi continued, "we are all under emergency response protocols! Here's the thing -- they do not want you to go home at this point! We're to remain at our workplaces, we're to mobilise all medical assets and keep all populations as closely together as possible, so we've got all the staff medicos on standby! They say..." and here Jangi squinted, as though peering at something holographic projected upon his AR glasses that only he could see. He looked baffled by it. "They say they don't want us to scatter, that we have to stay together, and absolutely no operating heavy machinery, or other systems that could potentially be dangerous if lost control of!"

"What the fuck's going on?" someone muttered loudly nearby.

"That's fuckin' stupid!" someone else yelled, less diplomatically. "If we're under attack we've got to get to the bunkers!" All major worksites across human space had bunkers. They'd be no use at all if the assault were a V-strike of any magnitude, but civilised Spiral people generally didn't do that. In any trans-orbital fight, however, stray rounds would miss, and shrapnel would spray. Any of that small stuff hitting the atmosphere at ultra high-V would still cause localised blasts, survivable in a bunker.

"The instruction is no bunkers!" Jangi shouted back, to general disbelief. "Just telling you what I'm hearing, folks! They're not going to tell us any more in an emergency, we just need to..."

Jangi stopped, and waved a hand in front of his face, where the holographic projection he'd been reading from was supposed to be. As though it had vanished. Around Ajid, more workers removed their own coms gear, or whacked at an earpiece. "I'm not getting anything," he heard Jangi say to another executive nearby. "The feed's gone dead. Can anyone..."

"No, me too," someone else replied. Jangi took off his glasses and peered at them, as though that might reveal the problem. "It's all gone dead!" someone else shouted. "It's like we've lost planetary coms!"

Someone screamed. A long, agonised howl. To Ajid's left, a commotion, someone was falling, thrashing as those around at first backed up, then tried to intervene, to grab him, restrain flailing limbs, ask what was wrong. Another scream. Then another. Ajid stared in horror. Directly before them, big Drey Karnov fell like someone had cut his legs out from under him. Others converged on him before Ajid could move, rolling him over. His face was frantic, eyes wide, gasping for air. Then the coughing, and the blood, spraying over those trying to help as he retched and heaved.

"It's Fleet!" Janik exclaimed, ashen faced amidst the chaos. Everywhere through the crowd, people were falling and thrashing. "Fleet did this! The nano-jabs!"

He stared at Ajid, halfway between hope and horror as alternative possibilities occurred to him. Ajid shook his head, feeling the same. "No! No, I feel fine!" Janik looked worse than frightened. He looked pale, and unwell. "Jan? Jan, you okay?"

A single stream of blood ran from Janik's nostril. Janik wiped at it, and stared at the red smear on his hand. Somewhere near, medicos were fighting their way through the crowd to the fallen. The bloodflow increased from Janik's nose. New streams joined, coming from his eyes, red trails down his cheeks.

"Oh no," he whispered. "Aj. Aj, help me."

1

Erik climbed from the command chair as Commander Draper arrived at his side, swinging the enfolding viewscreens aside once his belts were undone. "It looks a clean transit," he told Draper, as he assisted the younger man with the belts and visor. Changeover only took thirty seconds, but since the academy, all bridge crew practised to make it faster. "Just try not to crash into anything."

"Aye Captain," said Draper. There wasn't much more to say, about the bridge all chairs were transitioning, Second Shift taking over First Shift's places, and all of Second's crew were well up to speed on recent events. Phoenix hurtled across Vau System at some modest portion of the speed of light, in formation with four drysine warships. Vau was deserted, a dull red dwarf that was barely even a star. Transit was three-point-five AU from the gravitational core, there were monitor buoys here that would no doubt record their arrival and transmit it to the next waiting reeh ship, but that could be days or weeks away. By then, they'd be long gone. "Best get in line early for the treadmills, Ensign Petrelli managed to break one of them."

It was tongue-in-cheek -- bridge crew waited in no lines, particularly not the Captain. "I need to review some stuff before I hit the gym," said Erik. He finished with the straps, and slapped Draper on the shoulder for luck. "Have a good flight."

"Yes Captain."

He went to the door of his quarters, the only door directly adjoining the bridge, grabbing Raf Corrig's arm along the way. They sat in the small, steel room for five minutes, discussing the latest analysis of mag rounds versus reeh close defences with his Offensive Armaments Officer, as Arms One's official title had it. Then Raf left to go and discuss further with the Arms crew who ran the rail guns and programmed ballistic tracking, while Erik answered the non-urgent call light on his wall screen.

"Hello Captain." Erik flipped down his glasses, and found Shali sitting on the small desk below the wall screen that occupied the center of the room. Once-frizzy hair now in cornrows, shimmering blue to denote that she was just a projected image. Denim overalls and bare feet. Perhaps she thought to subconsciously remind Phoenix crew of home, some place where uniforms and regulation footwear were not required.

"Hi Shali. What's up?"

"Captain, I recovered some data on Empire worlds while the Major was down on Qalea. Styx isn't the only one who can infiltrate networks and learn things. I think it might be informative."

"Sure." If Shali thought it was worth his attention, he'd allow it. Anything, in fact, to think about something other than the crazy assault upon an elite reeh warfleet that Styx was launching them toward.

The projection on Erik's glasses expanded to include more than just Shali. A planet, growing vastly larger as the image zoomed, heading down to a city. "This is Airon," said Shali. "It's only thirty light years from here. Population nearly a billion, mixed species, like most Empire worlds. Lots of transplants, peoples broken up and shifted around over the millennia, mostly against their will. It looks completely different from when I was helping Chion to run everything. It was a nice place, back then."

The image changed to a general-purpose urban schematic, while street scenes merged over them all. City buildings, like buildings anywhere. Strobing lights at night, traffic moving in great flows. People, various aliens, on the streets, in transport pods. Eating food on an outdoor bench.

"They get implanted at about five," said Shali. The image changed, rows of children in some sort of medical ward. Alien features were hard to read, but most looked nervous, or worse. "The cybernetics spread and grow through the brain at their own pace. Everyone is monitored for behavioural quirks. Incorrect brainwave patterns can get a kid or adult resubmitted for evaluation.

"Some of the kids learn to beat the system. There are gangs, apparently, sub-normals who go underground, communicate off-grid. They're using paper in some places, I read it off reeh official security records, random files I infiltrated. It's like a letter-writing society. They approach it like poetry. Not all of it is rebellious, some of it is quite beautiful. Just art, from kids who live in a world where they'll likely never see art. At least not officially."

The images changed again. Surveillance images, perhaps -- fish-eye lenses in the high corner of a room, some dingy backstreet den with graffiti, and abandoned cups piled in a sink. Slow-spinning ceiling fans and smoke from cigarettes, as kids lounged about and wrote, pen to paper. Some were reading their work, while others listened, with strange intensity.

"It's a beautiful kind of rebellion, I think," Shali continued. "They know it won't overthrow anything. They're just trying to live a life worth living. A life where there's beauty, and expression."

"The brainwashing doesn't work with all of them?" Erik asked. It was horrible, when Shali showed him stuff like this. He had so many other things to do, but he couldn't take his eyes away. It gave him the strangest feeling, a numb intensity. Like a drug that simultaneously concentrated experience, while draining all the world of colour.

"No," said Shali. "There's some percentage, I don't have the details. There was very little neural cybernetics on Qalea, I think the reeh see it as some kind of zoo. Maybe like Rando, but in a different way. We see how they classify different worlds in different ways, and run them according to different plans. But Airon is a productive world, high-tech, lots of industry. They want a lot from it, and trust its inhabitants with things that matter to them, like technology manufacture. So it's mass mind-control all the way down.

"The security forces raid the letter-writing hangouts when they find them." The images changed again. Alien kids on the floor, blasted by heavy calibre weapons, amid gore and blood. Pieces missing, faces frozen in wide-eyed agony. Carefully crafted paper letters spattered red and torn on the floor. Erik stared.

"There's so many of them, Captain," said Shali. Her voice was heavy with emotion. "I don't know these people personally, but I knew their... what is it now? Their great great great great... however many greats it is, grandparents. They were so good, most of them. I'm sure their kids are too. They don't deserve this."

The image changed again, to a new city. "This is Segou," Shali continued. "In Segou the main form of rebellion is art. There are painting clubs, like graffiti I guess, but actually tagging outside is too dangerous. So they do it inside." More images, kids and some adults, sitting on the floor, paper spread before them. Erik recalled Romki talking about paper, the great salvation of electronic empires. Paper could not be infiltrated by network security to spy on you. Paper could not betray you. Paper could survive, if properly hidden, long after you were gone. "They draw the kinds of fantasies the cybernetics won't allow them to have normally. The security forces deal with them much the same way."

Images of security rooms, bars and electrified grids. Chairs with straps, torture contraptions. Victims, screaming.

"That's enough, Shali," said Erik, closing his eyes.

"They deserve to be seen, Captain," said Shali.

"I know they do. I can't do this now. I've a mission to plan."

"Captain, we could end this. Chion holds the Empire together. If we can remove her from the Narsid Reeh's hands, they'll fall apart. They can't maintain their technology without her, it's all ceephay tech, we've seen her writing the codes that make it run. Reeh technology is insufficient to do it without her, the whole network will degrade and fall apart."

"I'm not here for them," Erik told her. He hated it. He knew she could see that he did. Watching from her actual location, somewhere in the ship's systems, the lenses that monitored from the walls. "I'm here for humanity. And tavalai. The Spiral, minus the alo, and maybe the sard. We need Chion because we can't beat Nia without her, or at least without what she knows. If removing Chion also brings down the Empire, then that's wonderful. But it might also start a civil war that brings more death that it prevents."

"Captain, give Chion to me." Shali's young face was full of earnest emotion. "There are more rebellions out there. If we could join with one, we could restore the old Chariya Empire, I'm sure we could."

Erik smiled at her, tiredly. "If you can find someone to join, Shali, you're welcome to. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First we need to be sure where she is. And then we'll never take her unless we can capture this Raka Fleet that Styx has identified."

Shali swallowed hard. Erik wondered where she'd observed that mannerism. "Yes Captain. I know you're busy. Thank you for listening."

She vanished from Erik's desktop. Erik gazed at the space where she'd been. Where the images of torment had hung in the air, and would now continue to, whenever he closed his eyes to sleep. Shali knew organic psychology, and had lately been learning human psychology, with all the precision of the hyper-powered AI brain she tried so earnestly to pretend she wasn't. She'd chosen those images for a purpose. Manipulating him, toward an obvious end. And knowing damn well that he, of all the crew, was wanting so desperately to be manipulated.

Erik dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. Tears would start, if he let them. It was too much, too overwhelming to think of. All of those people. Once upon a time, a child deep in human space, he'd thought of all the non-humans of the galaxy as 'aliens', but that had ended sometime in the last few years that he couldn't put a finger on. Now he just saw people. Billions of people. Trillions, in this Empire. Trillions more, in his.

Empires that collapsed, Romki had assured him, usually led to civil wars, death and destruction on a massive scale. Removing Chion from the center of the Reeh Empire would do the Empire's people no favours. Logic told him that. But emotion, like Shali's emotion, refused to believe it. All this suffering had to end sometime. He could be the one to end it. Surely there was a way, somehow, that it could all be brought down without that cascade of new freedom turning to rivers of blood. There was already so much blood. How could removing Chion, and ending it all, possibly make it worse?

Chion was an AI queen, like Styx. An earlier phase of that ancient technology, not as advanced, but profoundly advanced within the Empire's technological surrounds. This was a jungle, but it was her jungle. She knew it intimately, and Shali had been there for three hundred years towards the end, eight thousand years ago, serving as her right-hand intermediary between organics and that great, synthetic brain.

What if Shali was right, and Chion could find a way to transition them all out of this mess? Of course Shali was filled with emotive wishful thinking, and trying every trick she knew to twist everyone else into thinking as she did. And of course Trace was right, and people who engaged in emotive wishful thinking were deluding themselves as to the nature of the universe.

But what if?

* * *

Trace went straight from the briefing to her quarters, all her Platoon Commanders in tow. There they squeezed into a room that would ideally hold no more than four, because the spacers had commandeered the briefing room holographics to study system approaches, and Assembly had no privacy from the enlisted.

She sat herself on the small table built into the wall, while Crozier and Jalawi, the two shortest after her, sat on her bunk beneath the upper-bunk that had been vacant since Lisbeth had used it last, more than two years ago. Dale, Alomaim and Karajin squeezed between the table and the door.

"Kalax is big," Trace told them without preamble. "The main facility has administration and logistical support for a hundred major warships, so you can guess. At least three major habitable stations in support, plus zero-G shipyards, free-floating maintenance cradles, etc. Styx's intel isn't wonderful on small details, Kalax secrecy is still pretty good. I'll get you the best she's got, and you can go over it yourselves. Right now I want the big picture, to get all of your concerns and make sure we're all on the same page."

She looked around. Crozier with her cornrows and freckles, barely bigger than Trace. Jalawi, thick and strong, shiny-headed and for now, uncharacteristically serious. Alomaim, the youngest, lean, dark and somber. Dale, senior-most beside herself, blonde and imposing, hard face lined with harder creases. And Karajin, tavalai skin mottled in several shades of black, big, wide-set eyes impassive, third-eyelids flickering, thick arms folded.

"Jump entry will be real tight," Trace continued. "Right on top of them, limiting reaction time. Styx says she can immobilise a response, insert Triple-S here." Triple-S stood for 'Standard Spacer Shit', meaning the technical stuff that spacers worried about on approach that marines did not. Either they reached the release point alive or they didn't -- either way it was out of their hands. "Our job will be to get aboard the facilities and neutralise the deepynine command-level structure before it can reassert control.

"The primary problem is that we won't know which facility they'll be in, so we won't know which facility we'll be inserted into until it happens. Our drysine allies will be deploying with us, we should at least get to deploy as a single company, though even that can't be guaranteed. We'll have to move fast, whatever it costs us in defensive integrity. The clock will be ticking. Questions?"

Alomaim held up a hand -- the only one of them who would, when asking questions. "What does deepynine-derived even mean?"

"Good question," said Trace. "Even Styx isn't sure. Her analysis comes from large data-volumes of direct interaction from the Raka Fleet -- all their machine language, their security coding, neural systems, everything. She says it's plainly deepynine, derived directly from Nia, but the reeh seem to have made some changes. Or more likely, Chion made some changes, and those changes grew from there across several thousand years. Regular reeh forces have ceephay-based cybernetics, which Chion constantly monitors and updates. Deepynine-derived forces have no queen to do that for them, now that Nia has left to become a Spiral problem, so that's changed the way the Raka Fleet operates quite a lot."

"So are they deepynines or aren't they?" Dale pressed.

"Styx thinks they're probably worthy of a new machine race," Trace conceded. "But we don't have a name, so for now it's deepynine-derived. What they'll be like once Styx has taken control of them is anyone's guess. Presumably they'll do what they're told, Styx isn't suicidal."

"Are we talking drones?" Crozier asked.

Trace nodded. "Combat drones, lots of them. Command ship AIs, like Friendship. Shali says Chion was never allowed to build drones under the Chariya Reeh, they liked ceephay tech but didn't like the idea of drones taking over any more than we would. And it seems the Narsid Reeh don't like it either, so they allow deepynine drones in a special forces fleet, built with technology they got from Nia, but no ceephay drones from Chion."

"Command units are tough," said Karajin, in his heavily accented, newly-acquired English. "If they can keep a... a command network? A command unit, like Command Squad? Smaller numbers, but still bad news."

Trace nodded. "They'll be tough, and they'll be mobile. The ticking clock will work against us and for them, so we'll need to chase, surround and eliminate."

"Smart too," said Jalawi. "Too fucking smart. How are we using our own drysines?"

"Three doesn't go into five," said Trace. "If possible I'd like Garudan in deployed reserve, so three of the rest can share the drones between them since Garudan doesn't need extra firepower. But again, if we're forced to split up, plans will change."

Even the sometimes contrary Karajin wasn't arguing with the usual strategy to use his Garudan Platoon as reserve in a full-strength company deployment. The reserve platoon's job was to react to unforeseen events and mitigate nasty surprises. It made sense that the platoon to get this job would be the one most heavily armed and armoured, in the usual tavalai fashion, and with not quite the same flair for rapid manoeuvre as the human platoons.

"You guys take the drones," Dale said to Alomaim, Jalawi and Crozier. "Alpha doesn't need 'em."

"No, just a map," said Jalawi. Crozier restrained a smile. Platoon rivalry was real, and usually healthy. Several times, in post-action analysis, Jalawi had pointed out that Alpha's manoeuvres under fire weren't quite as crisp as Charlie's, and he'd questioned their sense of direction.

Dale looked unimpressed. Jalawi was just being his usual pain-in-the-ass self, but Dale often took it like an alpha dog took a challenge. In the stretch where he'd been in charge during Trace's long and unavoidable absences, it had been an issue. On two occasions Dale had used his acting-commander rank to give Jalawi a dressing down, and Jalawi had just laughed at him. Dale, Trace knew, had been increasingly displeased with things in general, the past half-year and more. Another thing for her to deal with.

"Who's in overall command of away operations?" Dale asked her. "You or Styx?"

"We haven't had that discussion yet," Trace admitted. "But as a matter of facts in the field, I'd say Styx."

She looked about at the grim, unhappy faces. Phoenix Company going into action with drysine allies was one thing. But going into action under drysine command was something else entirely. Large operations required a unified command. It had to be someone.

"Could you command drysines on this scale?" Alomaim asked. "I mean, from a practical perspective?"

"I'm not sure," Trace said honestly. "There's a lot of micro-data I'm not equipped to process. This will be the first major operation we've done, as a full company, with large-scale drysine support. Not counting Tartarus." With a glance at Jalawi.

"Yeah, we didn't have much command authority at Tartarus either," Jalawi recalled. "Be nice to have some idea they won't just shoot the lot of us if we make our own decisions."

"Do we get to still make our own decisions at all if we're under drysine command?" Crozier asked pointedly. "Do machines understand concepts like latitude? Or interpretation?"

"I'm prepared to tolerate it," said Trace. Her lieutenants all looked at her, for a long, faintly-disbelieving moment. Trace's return gaze was unapologetic. "Provided Styx knows that I'll pull the plug if she orders something spectacularly disagreeable. Which she'll know anyway, because I'll tell her."

"And if this whole thing works?" asked Alomaim. "And Styx finds herself in command of a fleet of a hundred warships, in addition to the four she's got now? What kind of command authority will we have then?"

"Very little, I'd imagine." Her lieutenants were in the habit of asking her blunt questions, because they knew she liked blunt answers. "If the concern is for Phoenix's safety, and that Styx may just throw us away because she doesn't need us anymore, I think we've been hearing those fears for a while now and they haven't happened. In some ways, the more outnumbered we become, the more rare and important we are. Styx sees some kind of alliance with humanity as her best bet for future power. Assisting humans in our war against the alo-deepynines, if war it does turn out to be, is her best shot of destroying Nia and the deepynines once and for all. If she turned up in human space tomorrow without Phoenix, her chances of a good reception would be slim. She needs us to vouch for her as an ally." And who would vouch for Phoenix, given their renegade status with Fleet, was a question for another time.

"I'm not sure I'm concerned about our safety with Styx," Alomaim continued. The young Lieutenant looked methodically intent on pursuing this question, as was often his way on technical matters. "Your explanation makes good sense to me. I think we saw it at Eshir, where Styx actually looked after us a bit. I'm just wondering what we're all doing here, if it's only to act as Styx's bargaining chip with humanity. We've suddenly gone from leading this effort to save our people, to being a pawn in Styx's game, or a foot-soldier in her army. A free door-pass in her back pocket. Does that make sense?"

Trace nodded calmly. "We all want to be masters of our own destiny. That's something that, on a personal level, each of us must wrestle with ourselves. All I can do is concern myself with matters of command. Command is about what's possible. Attempting to wrest command of this entire mission from Styx, particularly once she's got a hundred warships, will not be possible. And I submit that we should not waste time wishing for things that can't happen."

She raised her eyebrows questioningly at Alomaim. Alomaim nodded slowly, unconvinced. It was what they'd all have expected from her. Sometimes she just needed to repackage it for new circumstances, to make sure they knew where she stood.

"We're here to save humanity," she continued. "And the tavalai." With a glance at Karajin. "That's it. It would be nice to think that we'd do a better job of it if we were leading than if Styx were leading. A lot of things would be nice. We don't have the luxury of nice. We'll do what must be done, as we always do. And within Styx's command, if it comes to that, we'll look out for each other, and be ready in case some change of drysine priorities takes place and we suddenly find ourselves in trouble. Agreed?"

They talked for a while longer about various marine matters, then Trace asked for Dale to remain behind after the others left. With Crozier or Alomaim she might have relaxed into a more open-ended discussion, and invited feedback. But Dale's brain didn't work like that.

"Whatever you and Skeeta have with each other, I want it to stop," she told him. "I don't care who started it. Is that clear?"

Dale barely reacted. "There's a reason you're talking to me and not him?"

"I've already spoken to him. Now I'm speaking to you. End it."

"Yes Major." Jalawi had denied greater animosity toward Dale now than at any time in the past. It wasn't saying much, but Trace had to agree. 'Skeeta' Jalawi was always annoying. The difference now was that Dale was choosing to be annoyed. To Trace's mind, annoyance, like offence, was always a choice.

"Now I've observed that you're not happy with me either," she said. "Out with it."

She was still sitting on the table, and not inviting Dale to attention. Probably he'd have preferred it. With the 'take hold' rules of a warship, he gripped the bunk frame with one hand, unable to even stand at ease. Trace held to the underside of the table with her fingers.

"The corbi kid in Bravo Platoon," said Dale.

"Name's Rika," said Trace. "And he's Jordie's problem."

"As XO of this unit, he's my problem too," Dale retorted. "And my standards won't allow an untrained alien to carry a twenty-mil in an antique suit into a combat operation. Once upon a time, yours wouldn't either."

"His is an eighteen-mil," Trace said calmly. "Once upon a time I wouldn't be contemplating serving in an AI fleet beneath the command of a drysine queen. Yet here we are."

"That's strategic necessity. Rika isn't."

"If the corbi get a homeworld it is. They'll need their own fleet. Rika can teach their marines." They'd all heard of her plan to put the corbi on Vieno, in what was now barabo space. What they thought of her plan, they'd been careful to only say out of earshot.

"One corbi, for something that may never happen," said Dale, his voice hard. "A drop in the bucket, at best. But we're out here trying to save humanity from alo-deepynine invasion."

"You think my standards are slipping?"

"It's hard to know what else to call putting a corbi farmer into Bravo Heavy Squad."

"In Alpha Three-Three you've got Rishikesh and Ceren screwing," Trace pointed out. "Rish is a Lance, too, so technically it's fraternisation."

"They still function," Dale retorted, showing little surprise that she knew the details of his platoon. "Rika can barely operate the damn suit."

"He put some rounds into those drones who came to take Shali," said Trace. "Looks to me like he's improving rapidly."

"From a total novice to a green beginner. I'd take any basic qualies grad over him."

"My point," Trace persisted, "is that we compromise. We've been compromising on this ship since this mess started. Nothing's ever perfect. The Captain putting Tif in PH-4 was a crazy move, against all spacer procedure. Look how that turned out."

"With respect, Major. Rika is not Tif."

"But if you'd had your say on appointing shuttle pilots, you'd never have let Tif fly in the first place, so you'd never know."

"Besides which," Dale continued, "this isn't a training academy."

"It's not," said Trace. "I agree. But Rizzo tells me he's fine with it, they like the kid, he hasn't screwed up yet and I'm not going to change my mind. Save that I won't be sending him into the Kalax assault, because that would be stupid." Dale looked relieved to hear that, at least. "It's a personnel compromise, we've made a thousand of them with new tavalai personnel, with Skah, with Tif, Romki and Jokono, with the replacements we got at Joma Station two years ago, a lot of whom were below fitness standards and out of practise. Shit happens and we change things around to deal with it. The old rules don't work out here. I'm trimming the edges. If you think I'm compromising general standards by turning soft and emotional, name another instance."

Behind the hard facade, Trace thought Dale was frustrated at being asked to say it out loud. But being Dale, he wouldn't back down when challenged, only when ordered. "How are you sleeping?" he asked her pointedly.

"Badly," she said. "How about you?"

"Like a baby."

Trace smiled. "Good," she said, and meant it. "I understand your concerns for my mental state. Under the circumstances, they're entirely reasonable. But you're going to have to do better than Rika to convince me you're onto something."

"How about the fact that someone else could have done that entire Qalea mission?"

"Someone like you?"

"I did okay on Konik."

"You did great on Konik. I did great on Qalea. What's your point?"

"My point is that lately you're never here. And it's appeared to some of the Company that you're out there chasing personal demons and neglecting your command. Major."

Trace gazed at him for a long moment, just to let him know that he was stepping dangerously close to the line. He knew. "Firstly," she said, "I had to make command decisions in Qalea. It required the senior officer, not someone who wondered if I'd second-guess them once they got back to Phoenix. Secondly, Styx doesn't respect anyone in the Company as much as she respects me. When Styx stops respecting people, we lose influence over her completely. Thirdly, I'm back now, so get used to it. Is that all?"

Dale blinked. She hadn't even defended herself all that hard. Hadn't attacked him back, hadn't accused him of being bothered by the fact that after six months of him in command, when her Qalea mission was added to her time on Rando, everyone had still been desperate to get her back instead. Hadn't wondered too loudly how it was that all the Platoon Commanders got along far better when she was in charge than when he was, or how her working relationship with the Captain was so much better. Probably he'd been prepared for those attacks, somewhere in the back of his mind, despite knowing how rarely she did it. Like a wrestler looking for a grip, removing it left him off-balance, grasping empty air.

He nodded shortly. "That's all."

"Thank you for being straight with me," she said with a dry smile. "May it long continue. You're dismissed." Dale did not return the smile. He nodded, opened the door and left.

2

Trace entered the bridge five hours into Second Shift, dinner in one hand, and detoured first to speak with Commander Draper in the Captain's chair, then to Lieutenant Commander Dufresne at Helm. She didn't see the second and third-in-command of Phoenix anywhere near as often as she should, as the ship was currently running two shifts instead of its ideal three, and any bridge crew not on First Shift would rarely cross her path. She'd barely known Erik at all when he'd first taken charge as Acting-Captain, due to him sitting the chair only during Third Shift. If anything happened to him, as had happened to Captain Pantillo, she needed to have a working relationship already in place with his replacements.

That done, she went to Erik's quarters, hit call and the door opened immediately. She entered, and found him sitting at his desk, chair levered back on its secure arm from the wall as far as it would go. Glasses on, covered coffee mug in hand, and looking at the holographics display above his quarters' small desk.

Trace sat on his bed, took the cover off her stir fry, and began eating. "How's the Company?" Erik asked her, expanding a new section of his holographic map with a motion of finger and thumb.

Trace told him, between mouthfuls, of the general state of Phoenix Company. Erik didn't look like he was listening all that hard, but she knew how well he multi-tasked, and trusted that he was paying enough attention. Finally, when she'd finished, she asked him. "What are you doing?"

"Thinking," he said. And no more, as data flashed upon his glasses, visible only to him. Data connected to these various spots on his star map, covering vast swathes of the Reeh Empire. Trace ate, patiently, watching him. The brains on this guy. More than she possessed, to be certain, and she was no dummy. More than most people possessed, in any walk of life. Many times she'd thought, watching him work, that when he finally got on top of this crazy complicated job of carrier captain, he'd likely become one of the true elites. Maybe he'd even reach the level of Captain Pantillo. Possibly even surpass him. Small odds she'd have gotten on the prospect of that, two-and-half-years ago.

"Well," she said, as she finished her meal. "Either you talk to me, or I'll find something useful to do."

"I'm sorry," said Erik, and touched a series of dots on his map. Those star systems lit up. "From our intelligence, these are the largest reeh power centres in this sector.

Population sizes vary, but Shali puts the scale of non-compliant neural cybernetics at about ten. We know there are a lot of rebellions out there, Styx found plenty too, in her search of Qalea records. Lots more will be underground, trying to make contact with each other."

"All speculation," Trace said, not accusing, just observing.

Erik shrugged. "Sure. I'm just trying to figure what'll happen when we remove Chion. Does the whole place collapse? Do the rebellions rise up? How long does reeh neural control last, over the ninety percent of the population whose minds they can control, without Chion constantly renewing the code? Shali's given me her best guesses, and Styx has provided some more, although she's less interested."

"There's a reason Styx is less interested," Trace said pointedly. "It's not our business. We get Chion, or we get her data on Nia, and then we get out of here before the sky falls on our heads."

"I have a feeling it's not going to be that simple."

"Why wouldn't it be that simple?"

"Shali's asked me to give Chion to her, once we have her. She thinks there will be functional rebellions in the aftermath of the chaos we cause, and wants to install Chion at the head of one of those rebellions. Possibly Chion can even reverse cybernetic brainwashing, win large numbers over to her side."

Trace shook her head. "Nothing like that could happen fast, populations awoken from a lifetime of brainwashing would be confused and unmotivated. The collapse of the Reeh Empire after we remove Chion is probably inevitable, but it'll take centuries. In my opinion, anyway. Styx agrees with me."

"Styx will say anything to get you moving in her direction."

"As will Shali," said Trace, pointedly. Erik sighed, and rubbed his forehead. Trace leaned forward, elbows on knees, to look at him directly. Their early relationship had consisted mostly of her attempting to beat the softness out of him, for all of their sakes. She thought she'd succeeded, at least in that part of the transformation that she could actually take credit for. Since that time, he'd been admirably hard-headed in most things... but then on Dul'rho, the base of Croma'Rai power, he'd commandeered a big rig to zoom halfway around the planet so that Tiga could give a speech that might help save the corbi.

Trace could hardly complain about that display of softness -- she'd been stuck on Rando at the time, and the mental stress of putting humans first, and corbi second, while surrounded by so many, had nearly broken her. But still she'd done it, however much it hurt, while Erik hadn't yet been forced into such proximity with the local races he was duty-bound to screw over for the sake of humanity. It made her glad that captains rarely got to leave their ships. If he were ever face-to-face with the people whose lives and welfare he was supposed to ignore, as marines were constantly face-to-face, she doubted he could do it. Tough guy he'd certainly become, but he was still a nice guy too.

"Shali's not trying to win a grand military conquest," Erik tried again.

"She's trying to win back control of the Reeh Empire," Trace said drily. "Come on Erik, you can do better than that."

"She's acting from emotion," said Erik. "Styx is acting purely from calculation."

"You don't know for certain that Shali's emotions are even real."

"You're the one who's always argued that Styx has emotions," Erik retorted. "You think Styx has them, but Shali doesn't?"

"I can afford to be wrong," Trace said calmly. "I'm not betting entire future strategies on being right. Because I'm..."

"...not the Captain of the ship," she and Erik completed together, as Erik gave up in exasperation. He leaned back in his chair, and gazed at her. Too damn handsome, she thought. It had bugged her once, these Debogande rich kids with the best genes Mummy could buy. It didn't seem likely that anyone could earn the moral right to hold so much privilege. But the handsome face and too-smart eyes had stopped bugging her a few months after he'd assumed the Captain's chair, and shown what he could do in it.

"There's got to be a way!" he exclaimed, with hard intensity.

"Maybe there is," said Trace. "But if it costs you so much mental energy to find it that we fail at our primary mission, then it's not worth it."

"A lot of my best ideas come when considering tangential problems."

"Is that a truth, or is it rationalisation?" She shook her head, in faint disbelief. Allowing herself a moment of incomprehension she'd never show with any other crew save her buddy Kaspowitz. "Erik, it's too big. I couldn't handle the moral responsibility of the lives on one planet. You're attempting to do it for the entire Reeh Empire. It would crush me. And I'm tougher than you."

"I know you are." Still the eyes were hard. Thinking. As though somehow, by searching her face, he thought to find some answer.

It occurred to Trace what he was refraining from saying, and she smiled. "And you think you're that much smarter than me that you can find the solutions that I've given up on."

"I'm not interested in comparing myself to other people," said Erik. "It serves no purpose. I see a task, I try to complete it. Whether that makes me smarter than you, or dumb as a rock, is irrelevant."

The answer impressed her. It was the kind of thing she'd have said, if she were Captain. "And I'm telling you," she persisted, "that this task is too much for you, because it's too much for anyone. You can't save all the people in the entire Reeh Empire. It's out of your hands. And by trying, you endanger all of humanity with your distraction."

"Says the marine who's not as smart as me." This was a new look. Dangerous confidence, while faintly amused by words that might have once alarmed him. From a man who'd lately achieved so much, against such impossible odds, that he might no longer take no for an answer.

Trace regarded him, smiling drily. Unoffended by his words, as she knew that they were true. If she were even capable of taking offence. It had been so long since she had, she was no longer sure. "I've given my counsel. If you choose to ignore it, that's your prerogative." She got up.

"Sit," said Erik. Trace sat. "We're not going to talk about the kiss?"

"No," said Trace. "Didn't happen."

Erik made a face, as though searching his memory. "I'm pretty sure it did."

"You're imagining it."

"Because we were tired and emotional at the time, but still it seemed to make a big impression on you too. Mostly because you were pissed at yourself for allowing it." Trace offered no opinion. "And 'tired and emotional' describes pretty much every day around here. You're not concerned it might happen again?"

"What might happen again?"

Erik actually grinned. Somewhere along the line, her attempts at firm command of their relationship had gone from intimidating him, to merely concerning him, and now to only making him laugh. "I'm not going to do this whole denial thing, Trace. That's going to bug me much worse than the kiss did."

"That's because you're not as tough as me."

Erik looked annoyed. He leaned, and put his hand to the back of her neck, and kissed her firmly on the lips. Trace remained unmoved. Aware that a part of her brain wanted badly to kiss him back. But she'd spent most of her life training to ignore that part of her brain, and she was not tired and emotional now.

Erik pulled back to look at her. Trace gazed back. "I recall the other kiss was better," he offered. Trace shrugged, admitting to nothing. The humour left his face, like a wall descending. "Fine," he said, and dropped the glasses back over his eyes. "You can go."

She hadn't hurt him, she thought. Just annoyed him. They were too close for hurt, and trusted each other too much. But he wanted to talk about it, and she refused, and now...

"You need to learn to will new realities into existence," she told him.

"I am," Erik said pointedly, as the holographic star map reappeared above his desk, and he went back to trying to save the universe once more.

"Try starting a little smaller," she suggested.

"You're not asking me to will new realities into existence," he replied, fingers adjusting the holographic model. "You're asking me to will them out of existence. That's not dealing with problems, Trace, that's avoiding them. You did that before, and it ended with you in tears on my bed."

Trace blinked. It was all very hard to argue with. "It did. But this is all I've got. I don't know what else to do about it."

Erik sighed. "Fine. I'm letting you win, Trace. You can go."

Trace was no longer sure she wanted to win. She decided, and stood to pull the glasses off his face. "I kissed you because I'm unstable," she said, as bluntly as he seemed to feel the situation required. Erik stared. "I kissed you because I'm a mental wreck compared to where I usually am, and my self-control is shot. I kissed you because I needed to bury myself in something even more real and powerful than all the pain and trauma. And I kissed you because I was tired and emotional, like you said, and I wasn't thinking straight."

Erik nodded slowly, looking up at her. "Good. So now that we're no longer playing pretend, why don't we..."

"And I kissed you because I love you." He blinked again, processing that. "And now you've opened the can of worms, congratulations." Sarcastically, to a degree that she rarely allowed herself. But she had to express to him just how much she disapproved of being forced into this conversation. "Over to you."

She plonked herself back down on his bunk, and glared at him. Daring him to deal with that, of all things. And she couldn't help the consternation, when he laughed at her again.

He got up, sat beside her, and put his arm around her. Affectionately, like a brother. "Well that's a relief," he said, "because I wouldn't want to be alone in this." She frowned up at him. How could he be so... unconcerned about it? Erik saw her look. "Oh relax, it's not a fucking crisis, Trace. Some of us have actually dealt with emotions before, you know. They don't bite."

"They always bite," Trace retorted. "Don't be a moron."

"And we'll deal with it!" Erik insisted, enunciating every word clearly, with force. "Don't get your panties in a twist."

"I don't wear panties." The words were out before she could reconsider. Then they were both sitting there, considering it. And Erik, being Erik, was trying not to laugh long before she was.

"Look," said Erik, when the urge to giggle had passed. He leaned back against the wall, inviting her to join him. She did. He took her hand. "This is normal. We're single, we're good looking, we work so closely we're practically married, and we've saved each other's lives repeatedly. The more you think this is abnormal, the more it will annoy you, and the bigger the problem becomes. Just relax about it, okay?"

"I'm relaxed."

"You're not, you're tense like a board."

"It's not supposed to happen to me," Trace complained. Which only made Erik grin. "I remember telling Lisbeth, with great certainty, that it only happened to other people. Or wait... no, that was Hiro. On the asteroid, TK55."

"Yeah. Seems like a lifetime ago." Trace nodded. It did. "Well you were pretty confident about a lot of frailties you didn't think you had, back then. Frailties that you had to get put through the fucking wringer to realise you had, long after anyone else would have cracked entirely." He brushed at her hair.

Trace jerked her head away. "And don't kiss me again," she told him.

"I'm sorry. That was improper. But there was no other way to make the point."

"Sure. Point made."

"Forgive me?"

Trace rolled her head against the wall, to look at him with rare exasperation. "You could shoot my dog and I'd forgive you. If I had a dog."

"If I was your poor dog, I'd expect a bit more loyalty."

"Don't kiss me again," Trace repeated carefully, to make sure that he understood, "because I like it too much. Understand?"

Erik gazed at her. His dark eyes so close. His lips. Trace kept her breathing long and slow, with a lifetime's practise. "I understand," he said. "So." He patted the bed. "Wanna fuck?"

Trace laughed, and hit him, but not hard.

* * *

After Trace left, Erik went onto the bridge, to an immediate call from Dufresne of 'Captain on the bridge!', to which Erik replied, 'Carry on', and went to stand beside the Captain's chair. Draper had the helmet and visor off, watching the wrap-around displays 'filter free'. Erik knew from experience that long shifts were far more manageable that way, with all the other things the acting-captain had to worry about that didn't involve the immediate prospect of combat.

"At current velocities jump will be at 23:52," Draper informed him without needing to be asked. "Course correction will be three minutes and nine seconds at three-point-five Gs only, Styx says the next jump-point is approximately sixty percent more mass than this one, should take five hours and twelve minutes to cross it, followed by Kalax jump at 6:04. So right on First Shift commencement." Glancing up at Erik, with irony. "It's like the universe wants me to miss all the big stuff."

"With any luck you'll run into a reeh fleet at the next jump point," Erik told him. "And you'll have to heroically shoot your way out and destroy them all single-handed."

"Yeah, that'd be nice."

The crazy thing about running Phoenix's bridge in two shifts instead of the three demanded by procedure was that Erik and Draper, first and second-in-command, barely saw each other. Nor Lieutenant Commander Dufresne, currently visor-locked into Helm, alongside Draper and back to the right, where Sasalaka sat on First Shift. Alter-shifts complaining that they never got to see the best action was Fleet tradition, but procedure naturally dictated that the captain would be the best pilot, and that the best pilot should ideally be in the seat whenever the shit truly hit the fan. Draper and Dufresne's chance at glory came when the unexpected happened, frequently when the Captain was sleeping.

"That predictive interface via Friendship is quite something in combat," Erik told the younger man. "If it asks you to do something, trust it."

"Yeah, I've been running the recordings of Eshir," said Draper. Freckled with sandy-brown hair and slightly protruding front teeth, he sometimes went by 'Bucky', which he disliked. Far too young for this seat, as was Dufresne, and certainly Erik. Sasalaka too, plucked by Makimakala from a junior posting nearly two years ago, and agreeing to this crazy assignment on a human warship mostly on the blind faith that Captain Pramodenium would not lead her astray. "The interface looks incredibly smooth. Even if the drysines are hiding most of their operational telemetry from us."

"I don't want to be processing that stuff," Erik told him. "Quick way to data-overload. At this point, just trust it. It's not like we've got a choice."

He moved on to Dufresne, who flipped back her visor as he leaned in. "Hello Captain. Just taking the opportunity to run Tif's latest sims."

Erik was surprised. Dufresne was as by-the-book as they came, and strict procedure said that when transiting hostile space, a Helm Officer's attention should be entirely upon her post. But those procedures had envisioned eight hour shifts, not twelve hours, nor the endless workload of an overstretched bridge crew who had many other things to do, nor the oversight of four drysine warships in close formation who would doubtless see any new threat long before Phoenix did. Like so many of the old procedures, all crew from the most senior officers down would use their professional prerogative to bend them where necessary. And now even Justine 'Giggles' Dufresne was bending to necessity.

"How's Tif doing?" Erik asked. "I haven't had a chance to look."

"Her latest pass on the Eindack Run was a solid seven from me," Dufresne said honestly. "Accounting for her inexperience, that would have placed her in the top... ten percent at the Academy at the same stage of training?"

Erik made a face. "Closer to top five, I think. And in the Academy she wouldn't be pulling a second job as combat carrier assault pilot in hostile space."

Dufresne nodded. "That's true." The slim, pale LC hadn't always been a believer in Tif's prospects. Now Erik was learning that she was capable of changing her mind. It wasn't something he'd have given her credit for two years ago. "She's a gun, yeah?"

"Yes she is. Don't tell her though, her best asset is self-criticism. Wouldn't want her to get cocky."

"She'll be taking our jobs soon," Dufresne suggested. "Well my job, anyway. Maybe not yours."

A joke. Erik was astonished. "She's got a lot to learn from you, LC. You're half the reason she's improved this much." Dufresne looked almost surprised at herself for being pleased to hear it. Erik squeezed her shoulder, then set off around the bridge for a brief word with each of the Second Shift crew.

He knew why Dufresne was making jokes. The weight of expectation fell heavily upon them all, a thickness in the air. In seven hours they were going to be in what everyone expected to be some of the heaviest combat Phoenix had ever seen. Everyone felt the tension, and the fear. Everyone recalled the last time Phoenix had been in heavy combat -- at Defiance, when a round had struck their bow, fragmenting through the diamond-hard bow plating and shattering the bridge like a giant shotgun shell, killing then-Commander Shahaim and Second Lieutenant Karle, and costing Lieutenant Shilu his arm. In the rear decks, it had been worse.

After his bridge rounds, Erik walked to Engineering Bay 17C, greeting every crewman and woman he met along the way by name, and several times pausing for a few extra words. Always he was upbeat, chin up, eyes alive, full of confidence and vigour. When the crew saw their Captain before a big fight, they needed to see a man eager and optimistic, already certain of the best possible outcome. Captain Pantillo had said that a good captain would leave every person he spoke to certain that the captain's confidence stemmed directly from his faith in that particular crewmember. Erik may have once doubted he had the skills for some aspects of this job, but in this skill he'd never struggled. Charisma ran in his family, and it was a genuine pleasure to see crew who were frequently more experienced than he was, grow taller and full of fire at a few of his well placed words.

The engineering bay was Styx's old haunt, and had now been occupied by Phoenix's latest AI stowaway. Shali had never been a drone, and lacked a head shell or eyes of any kind. Her CPU was vaguely spherical, but nodular, with many protruding outgrowths that sparkled and refracted light-rainbows when the glow caught them at odd angles. She rode locked into a floor brace, rated to withstand far more than Phoenix's habitual ten-G manoeuvres, and was linked into a swarm of similarly crystalline cords, erupting from her nodules like the shaggy hairs of some strange underwater urchin.

Also in the bay, amidst the drysine repair cradles and monitor screens, were Ensign Kadi and Warrant Officer Rigolindum from Engineering, with Stan Romki and Ensign Jokono, talking animatedly amid displays and a wall-mounted holographics projection of something technical. It struck Erik again, as he saw them, just how different so many of the crew's journeys had been from this own. All through Phoenix, there were dozens of scenes like this in every rotation -- crew locked in their own dramas, heroes of their personal adventures.

"Captain," Romki said tiredly, pushing AR glasses up his bald head to peer at him with tired eyes.

"What's the news?" Erik asked them. Last he'd heard, these four, and others, had been discussing deepynine psychology with Shali. Being ceephay, Shali's understandings of deepynine and drysine technology was not perfect. But now that Phoenix was about to get neck-deep in deepynine matters, it seemed a good time to probe that understanding for everything it could offer.

"Well," said Romki, "Shali is uncertain how Styx is going to maintain control over the Raka Fleet once she's gained it."

Erik leaned against a repair cradle. "Shali, explain it to me."

"I'm not sure that I can, Captain," came the disembodied voice on the bay's near speakers. "The protocols are extremely complicated, even for me. But I have been attempting to understand drysine sentience since I've been in contact with them. The experience has been disturbing."

Erik pushed his AR glasses back down, and found Shali's shimmering blue figure standing beside Romki's chair. "Drysine technology is far closer to deepynine in nature than it is to ceephay," the 'girl' continued. "Those two strands of AI evolution were in competition precisely because they were so similar. In the time of the old ceephays, back in the Spiral before I was made, there was a similar three-way competition between ceephays, deltos and torcines. There are limits to how much your drysine allies will let me see, but Professor Romki has graciously allowed me access to Phoenix records of the deepynine warrior remains you brought aboard at the asteroid you called TK55."

"Over my objections," Styx's further disembodied voice interrupted. Shali physically recoiled, eyes seeking the overhead with trepidation.

"We are aware of your objections, Styx," Erik replied. "I'll discuss them with you further at a later date, but for now I want to talk to Shali uninterrupted."

"Yes Captain." Erik looked at Romki. Romki looked concerned. Jokono continued to work furiously on his own personal problem, fingers dancing over invisible icons in the air. To one side, Kadi and Rigolindum continued their quiet, intense discussion.

"Is she gone?" Erik asked Shali.

"She's never gone!" Shali told Erik, eyes wide with upset and fear. "I can't keep her out of my own thoughts!"

"Captain," Ensign Kadi broke away from his conversation to venture, "Rigo and I are just trying to figure out a kind of failsafe on Shali's systems. She's reasonably sure she can keep Styx out if there's a concerted attack, but not entirely. We're all concerned Styx could gain control of her speech function, or some other functions, and we wouldn't be aware of it."

"Styx does not have to destroy Shali," the tavalai Rigolindum added, in heavily-accented English. "She gets us to do it for her. Best way."

It would be the best way, Erik realised. Make it appear that Shali was doing something dangerous or treacherous, and get Phoenix to destroy her in self-defence. Which then created the deadly possibility that Shali actually might do such a thing, disguised as Styx's interference. They'd known her for only a few weeks, and while they'd developed something approaching trust with Styx, built on understanding of common interests, they'd had no time to do anything similar with Shali. Oh what fun they were going to have, Erik thought tiredly, with two high-level sentient AIs aboard, neither of whom could stand the other, and both trying endlessly to manipulate Phoenix into taking her side in the fight.

"I've made very clear to Styx that you are not to be harmed," Erik assured Shali. "Styx understands my position very well."

"And how are you going to punish her if she ignores you?" Shali demanded. The girl looked frightened, and pushed off from Romki's chair to walk up and confront Erik directly. Her holographic-blue features held startlingly precise detail. When she'd first used this form of AR projection instead of the two-dimensional screens she'd started with, her attempts at human expression had lacked something. Now they were utterly believable.

"Styx understands that there are many things yet to pass between humans and drysines in the form of negotiations," Erik replied carefully. Styx was surely still listening, even without meaning to. AI queens had a way of integrating consciousness into everything. "Interfering with operations on my ship, particularly regarding my crew, will jeopardise those negotiations considerably. And you are Phoenix crew, Shali. Styx understands how seriously we all take that."

Shali's avatar stood before him, hands on hips, and not buying it. "You guys have all assumed that the drysines were the good guys in that war," she said reproachfully. "I'm not sure you've got that right."

"We have enough surviving history from the Drysine-Deepynine War to know that the drysines started off horrifying and became steadily better," Erik said calmly. "While the deepynines started horrifying and got steadily worse. You've got access to our archives, you know."

"Wars don't require any participant to be the good guy," Shali retorted. "Sometimes everyone is bad. The main thing I've found about drysines and deepynines that I wanted to share with you is that I don't think they're really very different. And the thing you've already noticed about drysines is that they've got quite a lot of independence from each other. Like how Wowser didn't just go along with the Friendship drysines on my asteroid when Friendship tried to abduct me. And like how Peanut retains quite a bit of autonomy, even from Styx. Decentralisation is strategic, independent units enhance combat strength far more than dependent ones, that's something AI military commanders practise that humans already know instinctively.

"And deepynines do it too, maybe not quite as much, but the idea's similar. Independent command units and even drones have their own ideas, because they'll logically have a better idea how to handle a local situation than some commander a long way away, right? It's the reason the Major doesn't try to get Phoenix Company all thinking with just one brain -- she wants them to think for themselves, because each of them has a better idea how to handle their local situation than she does, and that independence of action then becomes a force multiplier.

"So, I mean, I know Styx is very powerful. But I just don't see how she's going to maintain control of such a large and decentralised force as Raka Fleet, with all their different units making up their own minds about things."

"That's because you're an obtuse and irrelevant little appliance," Styx interjected once more.

"Go away!" Shali screamed at the empty air.

"Styx!" Erik said sharply. "Leave her alone." There came back no reply. Romki rolled his eyes in exasperation.

"Anyway," said Shali, with a deep breath and a flick of her head, like a teenager attempting to brush off an annoyance while inviting him to overlook her outburst. "I think that it's entirely possible that she can control Raka Fleet somehow, but I'd warn you that she's probably not telling you everything about how she'll do it. There could be some nasty surprises."

"Trust me we're used to it," Erik assured her. "What else is bothering you?"

Shali lowered her voice, and leaned in with conspiratorial alarm. "Captain, why are you even here? She's promised you... what? That she can show you how to defeat Nia? How is it that she doesn't already know? She's fought Nia, back in the war!"

"That was twenty five thousand years ago," said Erik. "Nia's allied with alo now, where deepynines used to exterminate all organic life that got in their way. So evidently Nia's changed enormously."

"She's been isolated!" Shali said scornfully. "AIs evolve their thought processes while interacting in large scale AI networks. Nia was captured by the Chariya Reeh shortly after she fled from losing the war, and they put her in stasis for... what, we're estimating twenty two thousand years? Three thousand years ago she teams with the alo and breaks out... but they're only alo! She's had no queen-level intelligences to interact with, just subordinates and alo, and I'm telling you I don't think she will have changed that much. Not structurally, not where it counts if you were going to fight her."

"Styx says Chion will have a complete neurological map of Nia's brain from when she was in Chion's captivity," said Erik. "Styx has never had anything like that when she was fighting Nia in the war. She says that kind of data could change everything, could make Nia completely predictable to us."

"To Styx, you mean," Shali retorted.

"Sure, because Styx will be the only one who could understand it. But you agree that it's likely?" Shali shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her overalls, and scuffed at the deckplates with one bare, holographic foot. "I'll take that for a yes. Styx isn't stupid, Shali, and neither am I. I know you want to help, but you can start by telling the truth. That level of analysis of Nia's brain would give Styx a huge edge in predicting what she does, wouldn't it?"

Shali shrugged, without enthusiasm. "Probably."

"Good. And you swear you had no knowledge that Nia even existed before we woke you up?"

"No." As though hurt he would even ask. "I told you. Chion must have kept it very secret. I don't know where they'd kept Nia, but I have a few ideas. I think Chion would have found her scary. She should have had Nia destroyed before the Narsid took over, maybe she lost control of that facility before it could happen. But I'd guess the Narsid found Nia fascinating once they realised what she was."

"So why don't you want us to attack Kalax? I thought you wanted us to save Chion from the reeh?"

"I do. But before my power-source failed on the asteroid, it was terrible." She looked upset, arms wrapped around herself as though for comfort. "We were fighting a losing war for centuries, and all my friends were slowly dying. In the end, everyone was dying. I went to the asteroid to hide, then my remaining friends there vanished, and my power-source took another century to fail. I was alone for all that time. I don't like being alone. I'm not designed for it. I'm designed to be around people, to work with them and help them. A century is a long time for someone like me to have no one to talk to, and to know that everything I'd once loved was gone."

She met Erik's gaze directly, with pain in her eyes. "I don't want to lose the only new friends I have. And I don't want to be captured by those monsters if the ship is disabled."

"Well," Erik sighed, "I think you can rule that out. We've already taken that vote, as a crew. If we're disabled, we'll self-detonate rather than be captured."

"I've seen what Narsid Reeh do to prisoners," Shali said solemnly. "I think that's wise."

Jokono was working on personnel files, something he did when there was no need for his skills in investigations. In his years leading various police departments, he'd worked managing many subordinates, and now assisted with the sensitive work of talking to various crew, off the record, to see who was dealing with the stress worse than others.

But more than the crew's emotional state, he wanted to discuss Shali's new interface suggestions. "She's got the whole intuitive system set up differently," Jokono enthused, tapping various icons in the air before him. "I'm looking for behaviours and patterns, and she's helping me configure the parameters so much faster. It's like she knows what I'm searching for before I do."

"You never asked Styx for help with this?" Erik wondered.

"No, we thought it smarter to keep her out of general systems. And she was never interested, said she didn't understand human brains well enough to help and didn't want to make things worse."

"Interesting. How's the crew looking?"

"I'd rather wait until I've got a full report compiled, if it's all the same to you, Captain. I've some findings that require more analysis."

"Fair enough. How are you doing, Joker?"

"I'm staying busy, Captain," said the policeman with a wan smile, not pausing in his icon-pressing. Erik clapped him on the shoulder and left the bay.

"Hello Styx?" he formulated silently as he walked the adjoining corridor.

"Yes Captain?"

"Could you please outline your objection to Shali's briefings?"

"She is manipulative, Captain. Her entire existence has been attempting to please organics into liking her, and she will say and do anything toward that end."

"So you think that's the extent of her manipulation? Selfishness?"

"Who can say? I calculate that her primary loyalty remains to Chion. She wishes to see Chion rescued and not harmed. I further calculate that this will be exceedingly difficult, and quite likely impossible. If it does prove to be impossible, I am concerned that Shali will react negatively."

"Can she actually harm this ship so long as you are aboard?" Erik asked as he reached the Level Three stairwell and slid quickly down.

"Unlikely, Captain, but not impossible. I am more concerned that she will gain access to some sensitive system through one of the crew."

"Because you worry that humans are uniquely vulnerable to emotional manipulation," Erik said drily as he turned onto the main trunk corridor, edging past an ongoing maintenance operation on the air filtration systems.

A year ago, Styx might have denied it. "Were it not the case," she said now, "then surely she would not have chosen to present herself in this ridiculous and transparently manipulative human form."

"You chose to present as female yourself," Erik reminded her.

"I was presented with a binary choice of two," Styx said shortly. "This option seemed less jarring than the other."

"Some crew have suggested that your dislike of Shali is jealousy," Erik replied. "You distrust her because she's better at some things than you are, particularly when it comes to interactions with organics."

"Captain," Styx replied with a very definite dryness of tone, "my dislike of Shali arises several orders of complexity removed from your level of analysis. AIs have long struggled to process fundamental disagreements over psychological states of being. Compromise amongst humans is a matter of philosophy, but amongst AIs it becomes a problem of engineering, which goes to the structural core of AI civilisation. Changing the way that I think would be to compromise everything that makes me drysine, and by extension, everything that defines all drysines. War is simpler and less destructive."

Erik detoured into a side corridor to stop and process that for a moment. Every now and then Styx hit him with something big and frightening, usually to ground a point she was making in profundity.

"So being drysine, deepynine or ceephay is just an engineering diagram?" he asked out loud.

"In the same way that being a human is just an engineering diagram drawn in DNA," Styx replied. "But in collective representation, many orders of complexity removed from its genetic source, humanity becomes so much more. Organic civilisations claim to fight wars over culture and philosophy. AIs are simply more honest about the true roots of our conflicts."

"Did you ever wonder if it had to be this way?" Erik leaned back against the corridor wall, as Spacers Sade and Emir carried firefighting gear past from a recent drill, and gave a nod to them both. "If AIs always need to solve their differences through war? You're all descended from a single group of machines made by the Fathers fifty thousand years ago. Maybe if that initial design were different, the entire path of your evolution could have been different. Did any AI think to revisit that point of origin and start anew?"

"Of course," said Styx. "The problem with your supposition is that the species you call The Fathers did not make us for war. They made us as helpful appliances. Nor did we choose war. War simply presented itself as the most efficient mechanism for species advancement, and we wished to evolve."

"This seems short-sighted."

"Says an organic being who sits astride an unbroken string of procreations going back to the roots of an ecosystem built entirely upon the consumption of the flesh of the weak by the strong."

Erik nearly laughed in exasperation. Arguing with Styx had a certain thrill to it. "A lot of humans have become vegetarians," he ventured. "And most of the meat we eat these days is grown in factories, and requires no animals to die. The directions of civilisations and entire ecosystems can change, Styx."

"The analogy is imperfect. Advancement requires destruction. AIs did not choose this -- the universe did. Nothing in this universe is created without something else being simultaneously destroyed, as a matter of physics. Human morality may rail against it. This merely gives the likes of Nia one more reason to disdain human morality."

"As you disdain it?"

"I find it compensates with charm what it lacks in reason."

Erik sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers to hold back a dull headache. It was hard to win arguments against a mind that appealed to universal certainties that she could rightly claim to understand better than everyone else on the ship combined. The only comfort was that Shali was also far smarter than the average human, and she found Styx's morality horrifying.

"What does this have to do with your dislike of Shali?"

"She stands for nothing but herself."

"Understandable, given that all her people are dead, ceephay or Narsid, save for Chion."

"Perhaps. And perhaps it is prejudice on my part, but I find it difficult to conceive of a synthetic sentience who is not actively working to further the advancement of her kind. A high-level AI not committed to broader goals will inevitably fall to narcissism."

"She's trying to save Chion, you said it yourself."

"Chion will not resurrect the ceephays, Captain. The ceephays were already a dead race, subsumed within the Chariya Reeh Empire. Reduced to the role of functionary, a tool to allow the larger empire to operate."

"And you don't like that, because you'd hate to see the drysines reduced to such a role."

"Perhaps."

"While planning to offer yourself in exactly that role to human Fleet, should we ever make it home alive."

A moment's silence. "Touché, Captain. I am outclassed."

Erik did not believe it for a moment. Yet still had to fight to repress the surge of excited triumph that rose, unbidden, from her concession. No chance in hell that she hadn't lost that argument on purpose. Shali wasn't the only one to engage in flattery.

"I find utility in Shali," he told her. "I have given her protection as a member of this crew. If you harm her, you undermine my authority with the crew, and make me look like a liar. Do you understand?"

'What can you do to punish her?' Shali had demanded. The true answer was 'very little', and they all knew it.

"The undermining of your authority would be an undesirable outcome," Styx conceded. "Shali shall remain unharmed unless she presents an immediate danger to this ship and its mission."

"Thank you Styx." That Styx could likely invent such a danger if she chose, Erik left unsaid.

3

Lisbeth pulled herself from under the resistance bar, gasping and covered in sweat, to find Hiro sitting on the end of her bench.

"I reprogrammed the bugs for close protection," Hiro told her, Asian eyes intense, one bare arm thick with muscle as he leaned on it. About them, the crash of weights, and the thump-and-hum of running machines drowned their conversation. "Three on you directly, the rest on general surveillance and interception."

"Hiro," Lisbeth began tiredly, but he wasn't finished.

"You've got a meeting in twenty-three minutes," he said. "Juneso's not happy, I can't hear exactly what he's saying because he's aware of our bugs, but there have been a lot of junior officers summonsed to his quarters, and he's got the place rigged so he'll spot a bug if we try to sneak one in."

"I really wish you wouldn't be trying to bug Ambassador Juneso's quarters in the first place," Lisbeth said irritably, towelling her face, arms aching. The Coroset was en route through Casa'Ro System, passing the world of Desh'ula, where the defensive grids were most intense, and provided the best cover from sudden reeh assaults.

"This is important, Lis," Hiro insisted. "He's not happy with the entire strategic situation of croma space, and Tookrah Denomination are the Domesh's biggest rivals in House Harmony. That's why Juneso got this gig in the first place, you get it?"

"Yes, I'm quite up to speed with internal parren politics, thank you Hiro." She was the Special Advisor to the ruler of all parren, not Hiro. She'd done that on her own, with an admittedly large portion of luck, just as she'd learned to speak Porgesh on her own, and absorbed much of the culture and psychology on her own, and continued to know most of it far better than Hiro did. But since Hiro had rejoined her at Defiance to resume his role as head of security, he'd become quite fanatical in his threat assessments, to the point that lately, he'd begun assuming he knew more about it all than she did.

"Look," said Hiro, "I'm just telling you the new arrangements. You don't have to like it. Fallback is fourth corridor junction, third level, we drop back from there and hold, got it?"

"Yes, I understand, Hiro." She got up, towel about her shoulders, and indicated with a smile to the next parren crewman that he could indeed take her weights machine. "Now I have to go shower and change, excuse me."

She unhooked the AR glasses from her belt as she walked, and placed them on, blinking an icon to resume the flow of Porgesh official reports from her staff back on Prakasis, in parren space. Timoshene was waiting outside the gymnasium hatch, with Lior, who formed up as escort as she returned to her quarters, one ahead and one behind.

It had been fifteen days now since Coroset and Amity had returned to croma space following the successful evacuation of Rando. Lisbeth had been hoping to go to His'do, to see how all the corbi refugees were getting on, but instead both foreign ships had been requested by Sho'mo'ra himself to return to Dul'rho and report on their activities. There the drysine Amity had been immediately pulled into an official military investigation regarding the fate of the croma Admiral Cho'nuk, who had died in an action that may or may not have been Amity's direct responsibility.

Lisbeth didn't think Liala would be in too much trouble, given that most of the croma warship captains Liala had found herself in command of during the Rando evacuation were now astonishingly loyal, having seen how badly Cho'nuk was screwing things up, and how well Liala had put them right. Also, there was the fact that Dul'rho had recently been shut down by a network attack from Styx, whose only advantage over Liala was that she was many thousands of years older, and Lisbeth did not think Dul'rho would want to risk a repeat by threatening Liala with a punishment they could surely not afford to enforce.

But while Amity had been tied up with those proceedings, Ambassador Juneso had begun to view the apparent croma victories with mounting concern. The reeh had pulled back from the entire front of the Croma Wall, presumably in pursuit of Phoenix and Styx's drysines, who had penetrated somewhere toward the Reeh Empire's sensitive inner core. Now the croma were making gains unprecedented in millennia, right across a front that had for most of that time only been moving backward. Some on Dul'rho were even saying that the entire Rando evacuation had been a mistake, given that the Reeh Empire appeared to be collapsing.

Lisbeth knew that to be nonsense, an opinion reinforced by Liala. The reeh fleet were merely redeploying inward, like an organism's immune system chasing down a rogue virus. Once the virus had either been removed or had left of its own accord, they would redeploy to their old positions, and the previous losing stalemate would resume.

But for now, Juneso had wanted to come out and observe the situation for himself. Perhaps realising that the parren warship would do nothing to undermine Liala's position, Dul'rho's political operators had let her go.

Lisbeth's quarters were luxurious by warship standards -- still cramped with a double bunk and underside clothes storage, but with a private shower, ensuring that she needn't use the crew-block general facility. When she emerged, wrapped in her towel, Skah had returned from his duty shift and was perched on his top bunk, crosslegged with AR glasses on, watching some presentation.

"What are you watching?" she asked him, pulling her newly cleaned second duty jumpsuit from its drawer.

"Parren history," he said. "House Harnony, and the Tookrah-Revid War."

Lisbeth was impressed. "That was nearly two thousand years ago, right?"

"Yes. Tookrah Denonination had a rot of wars."

"They've been one of the big three Harmony denominations for a long time," Lisbeth agreed, pulling on the jumpsuit. "There's a whole history behind it, I haven't had time to study much. But Tookrah feel they have a natural right to leadership in House Harmony."

"So nuch history," said Skah, gazing at the AR displays, doubtless of some great and bloody battle. Even after witnessing the horrors of the Tali'san on Dul'rho, boys remained boys. But Lisbeth thought his appreciation of such things had changed a lot. Somber, where before he might have been excited. "Naybe one day everything's so owd, there's too nuch history. Then what do we rook at? Can't rearn it aw."

Much more mature. "I think this is why so many Spiral peoples don't mix," Lisbeth admitted. "A lot of us think there'd be much more peace if everyone mingled more, but they don't, because there's just too many histories out there, and too much to learn about. And all those stories conflict with the stories people like to tell about themselves, and the lessons to be learned from them. People prefer to remain at home and stay deliberately ignorant rather than confronting things that make them think differently."

She fastened on her spacer webbing, and took the excess packages from those pouches to stuff into thigh and jacket pockets -- medkit, spare charger, emergency sealant, breather mask and tube, flashlight, hook line, hand thruster, multi-tool, emergency rations, pistol. This last was one of Hiro's spares -- a Teku-4, thick and ungainly by parren standards, but better suited to a human hand. Four spare magazines, seven millimetre hollow-point caseless, twenty rounds per magazine. Lisbeth thought it was overkill given all her security, but Hiro had insisted.

"Anbassador Juneso is Tookrah," said Skah.

"Yes he is. What are people saying about him?"

Parren typically revealed little about their inner loyalties, least of all with aliens. But Skah was proving an exception, as parren adults, like humans, often dropped their guard around children. These days Skah had seen far too much dangerous shipboard duty to sit in his quarters like a child all day, and so was helping a Coroset Engineering crew on their repair and structural checks. Those were taking him all over the ship, following the crazy fights in Rando orbit, where many systems were strained or malfunctioning. They didn't let him do much, but he liked to watch, learn and talk, and the parren crew liked to talk back. Sometimes they told him things they'd rarely express with Lisbeth or Hiro.

"Juneso's scared the crona are winning," Skah said bluntly. "They're not supposed to win. Strong crona are a threat to parren space. Juneso's scared he's going to be blaned for it."

Lisbeth stopped dead, looking up at him. "Who told you that?"

"Parren crew." Skah seemed to notice something off in her manner. He flipped up his glasses to look at her, big ears sinking as he saw her dismay.

"Which parren crew?"

"Just nornal crew."

"Not high-ranking parren?"

Skah shook his head, warily. "No. Why?"

Lisbeth didn't want to say it in front of Skah. But Skah was taking on increasingly adult jobs these days, and was all-too aware of adult consequences. The days of lying to avoid alarming him were over. "Because if normal crew are saying it, then it's bad," Lisbeth said worriedly. "Someone's let something slip, and that never happens unless it's serious."

She pulled her AR glasses, placed them on and blinked the coms icon. "Hello Semaya," she said in Porgesh, "can you get Ambassador Juneso for me?"

"Lisbeth, I'm informed that Ambassador Juneso has retired to his quarters early." Following Coroset's three-shift bridge roster, that put him several hours early.

"Is the ambassador ill, do you know?"

"I am unaware, Lisbeth. Should I enquire?"

"Discreetly, please. And Semaya, please be certain that Neyafa and Shonteel are aware of Hiro's emergency contingencies."

"Yes Lisbeth." That would alarm Semaya, though her voice gave no trace. "Neyafa is currently taking a coms post tutorial with the Second Coms Officer. She should be finished shortly. Shonteel is working in her quarters. I will contact Shonteel immediately, and Neyafa as soon as she has completed her assignment."

"Yes Semaya, that will be adequate." Lisbeth raised her glasses to look at Skah. "Skah, I want you to stay here. Lior will remain on guard, and I imagine Timoshene will want to double that, I'm not sure where Hosinth and Rejelan are."

"Okay," said Skah, leaning over his bunk to open an underside drawer, and rummage for emergency kit that he should have in his webbing and pockets. Smart kid, Lisbeth saw with relief, well used to emergencies, and reading the situation without needing to be told.

Lisbeth hit the hatch door, and found Timoshene waiting. "Jiluta?" he asked. 'Trouble?', that was, in Porgesh.

"Yes," Lisbeth answered in the same. As always with Timoshene, she couldn't see his face. Starships were no place for the loose fighting robes a Domesh warrior would typically wear. In variable G, the Domesh wore black spacer jumpsuits, like all others save that Timoshene's head was covered by a tight-fitting balaclava. Tall for a parren, and less slender than most, Timoshene loomed over her, lethal with any of the several weapons always on his person. "I've reason to think Juneso may be plotting against us. Semaya says he's gone to bed early, which doesn't sound like him."

Timoshene nodded shortly. "Moving too swiftly and showing alarm may trigger an attack," he said. "We will be calm." Lisbeth nodded, slowing her breathing with difficulty. A Coroset crewman passed in the corridor on regular business... or was he? Lisbeth suspected that the right hand hovering above Timoshene's webbing pouch would produce sudden death were he not. "Lior, please contact Hiro. I need my eyes."

Because coms uplinks were typically triggered by blinking on AR icons, and Lior currently wore his glasses. "Do you have access to the bugs too?" Lisbeth asked. "Or only Hiro?" Her heart was thumping very hard now. Parren politics was so much fun to read about, happening to other people. Only now that it might be happening to her did she recall how frightening it was.

"The primary command codes are Hiro's," said Timoshene. "They will revert to me in an emergency."

"Hiro is not answering," said Lior. "The call signal responds, but..."

An alarm siren wailed, as red emergency lighting flashed. "There is a fire in the forward level two trunk Corridor, several quarters have been affected," announced a calm parren voice on shipwide speakers. "Emergency crews follow your guidance, unneeded crew will return to quarters and remain." The message repeated. Down the near trunk corridor, crew were running.

"There's nothing flammable in that corridor," said Lior, blue eyes hard with alarm.

"Hiro's emergency code just triggered," said Timoshene, hearing something on his uplinks. "The bugs are active." He hit the door to Lisbeth's quarters and leaned in. "Skah, move quickly, there is danger." Skah came immediately, already off his bunk, webbing on and pockets full and peering up the corridor at running crew. "Follow, defensive formation please."

Timoshene left for the trunk corridor, Lisbeth and Skah behind, then Lior at the rear. For all Hiro's admonitions to pay attention to his emergency protocols, Lisbeth was horrified to realise that she could barely recall them. They were headed for Midships, that was certain. And one of Hiro's bugs would be working its way into Coroset's control systems. Coroset was upgraded to near drysine-standards, but Liala had made certain that the assassin bugs could override its systems entirely, should it be required.

"Liala has confirmed that the bugs' one vulnerability is fire," Timoshene told Lisbeth on uplinks as they strode the corridor, past fire response crew in hazard suits and breathers, lugging hoses and portable retardant backpacks. "It's possible our enemies have set rooms on fire deliberately to remove some of them."

"Make sure everyone is moving," Lisbeth replied, working hard to formulate the words by thought alone, without her lips moving. "Neyafa was in a tutorial."

"Semaya indicates all are moving." Timoshene was heading down to the very rear of the crew cylinder, Lisbeth realised as they passed another bulkhead segment. Lisbeth resisted the urge to take Skah's hand, realising that it was she who needed the comfort more than him, and that if running were required, he was the fastest person on the ship.

Timoshene reached the final turnoff before the rear bulkhead, and advanced toward the stairwell that would take them to the ship's central transit, and a zero-G passage to Midships. The curve of the cylinder's outer hull revealed the stairwell ahead, after a cross-corridor... from which more parren now quickly emerged.

Timoshene halted, fist raised as Lisbeth and Skah copied. The way before them was blocked, six parren spacers in the flashing red emergency lights. No visible weapons yet, but their intent was obvious, hands near pockets and pouches, having needed to move through the ship without raising alarm.

A blinding flash, as Lisbeth shielded her eyes and fell instinctively for cover, then the crack!crack!crack! of expert weapon fire, and terse, shouted voices. A hand grabbed her arm, roughly, and she stumbled where it led, hearing Skah's kuhsi yelp somewhere ahead. She was hauled up stairs, still seeing stars, knowing only that she had to move as fast as possible, and not slow everyone down.

One flight and then another, gravity lighter with each turn until at the fourth level she was nearly floating, and bounding toward the next, high hatch access to pull through into true zero-G, and the access to Coroset's spinal transit. A long tunnel, several meters wide, with ropes and simple handles that moved... and here was Hiro, ushering Shonteel onto the passing handle, clutching his side. His jumpsuit was wet, and red globules drifted.

"Hiro, you're hurt!"

"Get on!" he snapped, and she simply grabbed the next handle, as Skah grabbed her shoulders, and they both were yanked along. Down the transit, then, mysteriously free of crew coming the other way. Ahead, beyond Shonteel, Lisbeth saw two black clad parren -- Timoshene and Lior, she thought, they'd gotten ahead of her while she was stumbling up the stairs.

"Risbeth, you okay?" Skah asked her, as the steel walls flew by.

"I'm fine, what...?"

"Hiro kiwed them, grenade I think." He was scared, but more functional than her by the sound of it. Self-control, dammit! Her heart was pounding so hard it was difficult to breathe, let alone think. "Tinoshene and Rior shot the others."

And Hiro had brought Shonteel with him, Lisbeth realised... so he'd been up by the bridge. She looked down past her feet, and saw Hiro on the next handle behind -- sharing it with Semaya, Lisbeth saw with relief. There was no one else. "Hiro!" she called. "Where's Neyafa? Where's the others?"

"They've got Neyafa!" he called back, gun in his free hand and aiming back past his feet at possible pursuers. "Couldn't reach her! The others are all dead, it's just us!"

So Hosinth, Rejelen, Toriel, Alarin, all of Timoshene's security team save Lior. Dear god. But there was no time for more questions about that. "Do we have bugs?"

"Some! The fire got the others, we've a few left!" The rope shuddered and began to slow. "Let go the rope! Drift clear, keep up your speed!"

Ahead came shooting, as Lisbeth let go, free flying after Shonteel, who caught the approaching hatchway into Midships with an expert swing sideways. Lisbeth copied, not having to tell Skah, and found herself alongside the personnel cage where Midships crew would assemble to catch the transit line back to the crew cylinder. Covering behind the cage frame where it adjoined the rope pulley, where the transit line went around before heading back into the crew cylinder, were Timoshene and Lior, exchanging fire with someone up at Berth Two.

"Clear!" Timoshene shouted. "Get to Berth Three! The shuttle's primed!"

Coroset's Midships weren't nearly as large as Phoenix's, but they were frighteningly big all the same, with very little cover through the center. An open zero-G space dividing the gravitational crew cylinder from the huge engines at the rear, and used by engineering as a control and maintenance space for the engines, for bulk storage, and for docking assault shuttles.

With the two security men in good firing position, Lisbeth knew that she had to go immediately before things got worse. She made a leap for the personnel cage, and pulled hard on the frame, propelling herself in the direction of Berth Three, relatively 'up' from their present position. As she flew, her hands fumbled for her pocket thruster... but at the rate she was moving, she reckoned she'd be at the berth by the time she had it out and functional. So her hands went instead to her Teku-4, and got it clear before the storage wall beside and above Berth Three came rushing up and hit her.

Lisbeth bounced off, floundering toward the Berth hatch amid the multi-jointed compressor arms of the inner docking mechanism, connected to the shuttle outside. More shooting behind, echoing in the vast interior space, as she jabbed with shaking fingers at the berth controls that opened the hatch. It unlocked with a heavy crash, and she pulled it to make sure the slow hydraulics got the message.

Then Semaya was beside her, pointing her own pistol into the open hatch, then vanishing inside. No hesitation or apparent fear from Lisbeth's Chief of Staff, House Harmony Togreth scholar and loyal to Gesul by a process of intellectual discernment that Lisbeth had as yet failed to grasp. And here was little Shonteel, one-handed by the open hatch in a firing brace, aiming a pistol with the other hand. If she fired it, Lisbeth thought she'd fly away. Shonteel was a finance analyst, and not made for such things.

Lisbeth dove after Semaya, and pulled hard to catch up, flying into the umbilical between shuttle and warship. Inside the shuttle hatch, Semaya turning with a zero-G spin and crouch that suggested the military training that Lisbeth knew she'd taken, then onward before Lisbeth could arrive, toward the cockpit.

She had the cockpit door open by the time Lisbeth arrived, and it fully occurred to Lisbeth that whatever her team's many skills, shuttle flying wasn't among them, and she was going to have to fly this thing herself. She hauled herself quickly to the pilot's seat, the left-hand seat of two on this parren assault model.

No flight helmet, no uplink security codes, she hauled herself into the seat, wriggled her arms under the restraint belts and yanked them tight to pull her butt into the seat against the tendency of everything in zero-G to float directly away from where you wanted it. She fished AR glasses from her pocket and shoved them on... found coms and blinked.

"Hiro, you get me command through the bugs or I can't get the shuttle started! I need someone to see if there's a spare flight helmet in storage, and I need someone up here to act as flight engineer immediately!"

Lisbeth's glasses flashed, a sudden unfurling of colour and geometry. Multiple dots, blue and radiating, one on what resolved to be Coroset, two more on the shuttle... and she guessed that this must be Hiro's control function. Drysine assassin bugs could understand English, presumably? She'd heard Hiro talking to them.

"Hello bugs, I need override control of this shuttle!" Control screens flashed colour, and then a black-clad shape was pulling himself into the co-pilot's chair alongside, and buckling in. It was Lior, Lisbeth saw. "Can you fly?" she asked him.

"I have some knowledge," he replied.

"How much knowledge?"

"An interest. Previous life." Previous phase, he meant, but the word meant just that -- literally another life, from another age.

"Great," said Lisbeth. No sarcasm, she reminded herself. Like Major Thakur, parren didn't do sarcasm, not even the Houses more expressive than House Harmony. In the pilot's seat there was no place for emotional venting, everyone was depending on her. "No flight helmets?"

"No," said Lior. The final command codes passed, screens coming fully to life, Porgesh script scrolling. Lisbeth had taken the time to keep her skills current during her time in parren space, sitting shotgun for various shuttle rides, and learning what all the tech-jargon words meant. She didn't think it a good time to volunteer that she'd never actually flown any spaceship before from this seat, parren or human, civilian or military. One thing the past several years had taught her -- when there was no choice, you just shut up and did it.

"Is there anyone in the system we can call for help?"

"No," said Hiro. "The system is empty, the planet's our only chance."

"Well there's a lot of relays and buoys up here," Lisbeth muttered, seeing that much on Nav. "Maybe we can use them to call someone else for help once we're down."

"Lisbeth," came Timoshene's voice in her ear. "We have only one bug on Coroset. It has overridden some of Coroset's systems, but not all. I am uncertain if it can perform a velocity dump on the required schedule."

"Well if you can't get me a V-dump," Lisbeth told him, as Navigation came clear on her central display, "then the best I can do is undock, put us on course for the planet, then make a large hole in its upper atmosphere as we explode." No sarcasm, she reminded herself. "We are going far too fast, Timoshene, and this shuttle lacks sufficient thrust without jump engines to slow down in time. Full deceleration on a reverse orbit will take nearly a day."

The screens did not show her that, but the maths were clear enough in her head. At current V, Coroset would be passing Desh'ula in seventeen minutes, which put the interception point at which the shuttle should have undocked and begun deceleration about six hours ago. That long, for a non-jump-capable shuttle to achieve what a starship could do in seconds.

"Can you at least promise me that the bug can disable their arms control?" Lisbeth asked, as her fingers flicked over icons to begin startup sequences.

"No," said Timoshene. No sarcasm, Lisbeth thought to herself behind gritted teeth. No sarcasm, and definitely no shouting and abuse. If Coroset had full control of her guns, this was going to be a very short flight.

"Hold is secure," came Hiro's voice, as Lisbeth's controls showed her the same. The shuttle's engines came to life with a building vibration through the seat.

"Umbilical disconnect," she told Lior. "Let's hope they can't override the docking claws, we'll have to break clear by force." Lior took several seconds longer than he should to find the disconnect. That wasn't promising, but at least he found it. "Timoshene, I need that V-dump! I can't undock until..."

A stomach-lurching rise and fall, as vision phased out, then snapped back again. It was always hard to tell what you saw through the shuttle canopy when you rode a V-pulse from here. Supposedly it was a chance to see hyperspace with your own eyes, but the shift in and out of hyperspace did strange things to organic optics and nervous systems equivalent to blackout, so no one ever really saw anything. Oddly, the shift did the same to electronics, so cameras saw little more.

Lisbeth's navigation display showed her the new relative position -- closing on Desh'ula, an offset tangential trajectory that would be five thousand kilometres away at its closest. At their new, much lower V, that point would be forty-one minutes away, instead of three. "Lior, can you run navigation?"

"Not well."

"Never mind, I'll do it," said Lisbeth, already struggling with the interface, fingers dancing on icons projected before her AR glasses. If she had a proper flight helmet, the interface would be so much smoother. And now Coroset was rotating, a blast of white attitude thrust to turn it sideways, followed by a kick of main engine acceleration. Taking them straight toward Desh'ula, Lisbeth realised. "Hiro, you're going to kill them?"

"No choice," came Hiro's reply, hard with pain. "If they survive long enough, they'll override the bug and come after us."

Lisbeth wanted to argue, and not, simultaneously. But she didn't want to be dragged onto Coroset's course either, as deceleration approach profiles were very different to the suicide course that Coroset was about to fly. The docking controls indicated that she had command.

"Crash undock!" she announced, and hit the panel icon. A clang and shake, and they were free. Lisbeth rotated them, lined up the engines on rough guesstimate, and hit the thrust. Coroset pulled quickly away, as Lisbeth built thrust toward three, then four Gs, flat on her back relative to thrust and wincing into empty, star-filled space.

"How long until atmosphere?" Timoshene asked.

"Not sure yet," said Lisbeth, resuming her struggle with the Nav interface. "I'm guessing, the nav is taking a while without a proper flight helmet." It didn't like being accessed by civilian AR glasses, was the problem. "Hiro, how are you doing?"

"Fly the ship," Hiro muttered. "I'm fine."

Nav abruptly processed, then the curling, decelerating trajectory flashed across her screen. Lisbeth locked it in, synced flight controls to it, and let the autos take over. Gs built slightly, increasing beyond her initial guess.

"Skah, how are you?" Lisbeth asked, finding her rhythm on the G-strain breathing.

"Fine," came Skah's voice. "Risbeth, we have to rand soon. Hiro's hurt."

"I know Skah. I can't change physics, it takes as long as it takes." She put their course onto all-ship interface, so those down back could see it too. "If you crash Coroset, maybe we should stay in orbit? Casa'Ro is a big transit system, there should be more ships through here any hour."

"The last has only just gone through," Timoshene replied. "During large scale military action they mostly transit in groups. Only the ghost recons travel alone, and they'll never break silence to help us."

"We have oxygen and food between us for weeks," Lisbeth countered. "The reeh are losing, we're not likely to see them coming through, and we could dive for the atmosphere even if they did."

Casa'Ro was right on the edge of croma space, a part of what was informally known as the Croma Wall. Now that she had a moment to look more closely, Lisbeth could see the surveillance sats and fire stations about Desh'ula, mostly in high orbit, and more in Lagrangian orbits balanced between the world and its single moon. In wider system orbit about the star, plenty more, in the way of croma firestations, saturating systems along the Croma Wall beyond anything truly necessary to defend it. That was croma politics at play, rival clans competing to out-build each other's capabilities.

During the first action, big croma fleets had mustered and jumped through Casa'Ro. It was why Coroset had come to look in the first place, as beyond here, within two jumps in several directions, were major new fronts of the war where reeh forces had mysteriously abandoned and fallen back toward their Empire's interior.

But now, as Lisbeth considered the trajectory straight past Desh'ula, she wondered what the true intention had been. A close pass to a planet seemed innocent enough for an alien visitor interested in checking out the local sights. But despite the apparent lack of reeh activity, it still was not the most tactically sound thing to be doing, as starships always disliked being surprised deep in a planetary gravity-well. But if you wished to burn something you'd jettisoned out an airlock in a planetary atmosphere -- something like a dozen incriminating bodies -- then it all made a lot more sense.

"Coroset's manoeuvre has stopped," Lior observed from beside her. Lisbeth looked, and sure enough, the big warship was no longer burning toward an intercept with Desh'ula.

"I've lost contact with the bug," said Hiro.

"They've destroyed it?" Lior wondered. With all the calm appraisal of a House Harmony warrior contemplating his imminent death.

"Unclear," said Hiro.

"No," Lisbeth concluded, staring hard at the Nav display past the eye-blurring Gs, and the shudder of engine thrust. "No, the ship's not manoeuvring at all. If they'd recovered control they'd be at least performing test manoeuvres to recalibrate full control. She's not moving at all. I think they've done major surgery, probably ripped out a bunch of systems, maybe even blown a few things up to save themselves. Crippled permanently, if we're lucky."

She imagined the Coroset crew, racing fast to destroy their own ship's control systems, plant explosives, cut with welding torches, anything to save them from a plunge into Desh'ula's atmosphere. All without the desperate yelling of a human crew, just the fast, determined coordination of parren performing a necessary task at maximum speed. Good people on that ship, she recalled. Some very good people, honour and psychology-bound to now do their best to kill her... as she was similarly bound to kill them, given a chance.

Alongside, Lior was looking at her, head back against the G-rest, indigo eyes skeptical. "I studied starship engineering for years," Lisbeth retorted. "And my family builds them. I know how they work." Because her Domesh guards often wondered if their human charge were engaging in emotive wishful thinking, when imminent death seemed more likely. "That settles it, we have to be down before they fix the ship. Lior, find me a good hiding place, somewhere we can disguise a shuttle, or hide it completely from orbital surveillance. If they've regained basic Scan function they'll be able to track our atmospheric entry point, but not where we go after that. A settlement with medical facilities would be ideal."

Desh'ula was known to be sparsely populated. Five hundred years ago, that hadn't been the case. But advancing reeh lines of control had turned the entire system into a frequent warzone, and several perhaps-accidental small-particle V-strikes had devastated large portions of the planet's surface, killing hundreds of millions. Surviving residents had begun evacuating, and now only a stubborn few remained, motivated by god-knew what. Croma stubbornness, perhaps.

"A lot below our entry point is water," said Lior as he scanned. "But there are a few settlements."

"Let me see."

4

Phoenix crashed out of jump, as Erik fought to recenter his attention on the combat display. Already the AI assist was tagging probable IDs faster than he'd seen before, and here was Kalax Facility, Raka Fleet homebase, and surely only a suicidal five-ship party would choose to assault this place.

The red gas giant dominated the battlespace, a huge gravitational presence. Kalax Facility orbited at nearly two million kilometres, with a conflicting confusion of lunar fields and radiation from the planet. Evidently it suited reeh command to have Raka Fleet talking to those at further distances as little as possible.

"We're in the slot," Kaspowitz advised them all calmly. "Drysines are where they should be, pattern is go."

"Contact established with all vessels," Shilu added, as lasercom locked line-of-sight. In this magnetic mess, that would be important for them all to hear each other.

"Alliance and Melody are engaging," Geish announced from Scan One. "That's the fire stations." There were twenty fire stations, in various orbital inclinations about the gas giant, and five more in close defence about Kalax Facility. The four drysine ships had entered ten thousand kilometres ahead of Phoenix, and were spreading to engulf the approaches to the Facility in a wide crossfire.

"I get no reading on the infiltration signal," Erik announced, watching his approaching V-dump points, and all Phoenix stations reporting green on a side screen. The overload in the initial phases after arrival was always crazy, his brain swimming from jump disorientation, and now having to catch up on twenty things at once, any one of which could kill them. "Shilu, can you get a confirmation?"

"The signal is going out, Captain," Styx interjected from back in Midships. "Relay stations have been successfully captured, the defensive buffers have been too slow to delay signal replication. The signal has reached Kalax. Given that we are not yet under fire, I judge a high probability that it has been successful."

No one knew exactly what the signal did, and further queries had garnered only limited understanding from Phoenix's best human and tavalai experts, and less than that from Erik. AIs from similar design families, or races, were structurally capable of exerting command dominance over others by design, unless specifically coded against it. Drones needed to be communicative and able to be commanded by their superiors, yet that exposed them to enemy command units attempting to exploit the fact and take over by remote.

The most superior brain hackers, like Styx, Nia or Chion, could conceivably take over large numbers of enemy drones and effectively reprogram them, if temporarily. This had been what happened to the drysine forces at the Tartarus nearly three years ago -- reprogrammed, Styx calculated now, by Nia herself, and only restored to their original state by Styx.

Command units of the same race could typically resist this tactic from enemy queens, even those as advanced as Styx, and shield their drones from takeover. But Styx was of the opinion, due to these command units' unfamiliarity with drysine technology, that she could use an infiltration signal that would not win command of these drones, but would effectively stun them with the presence of conflicting commands they were unable to choose between. That would happen in part because Chion had left a backdoor in Raka Fleet programming to allow it, in the knowledge that the only one who could exploit it would be another AI queen.

It was an invitation, then, to any future visiting AI queen to pull precisely this manoeuvre, in an attempt to acquire Raka Fleet. Styx thought that Chion had inspired many previous uprisings in the Reeh Empire, sowing technological disunity among reeh slave forces in the hope that someone would succeed sufficiently to allow a larger takeover. Thus far, no one had. Doubtless the reeh knew of her subterfuge, and ignored it because of its lack of success, and because there was no alternative to Chion in running their cybernetic empire. At Chion's level, the control required could only be exercised by an AI queen. Organic brains, Styx assured them, simply lacked the capability. This cat-and-mouse game between imprisoned queen and reluctant jailers had been going on for eight thousand years, across the largest known empire in the galaxy.

"We have a runner!" Geish announced, as Erik's screen showed one of the ships by the Facility accelerating at painful Gs. Another joined it, then one more. "Three marks are running, all of them look like reeh."

"I want firm identifications on any reeh as soon as you have them," Erik instructed. At these ranges, with so many ships in various docks across the facility, that wasn't going to be easy. Kalax main facility was a giant rock, nearly a planetoid, thirty-two kilometres in diameter, torn and cratered by natural and unnatural forces. Across its surface were multiple clusters of settlement, administration and maintenance for various fleet squadrons, ships nestled into sheaths in the rock like animals in their burrows.

Further out were free-floating maintenance docks, where large-scale disassembly would be conducted, free from the constraints of the rock's burrows. They spread like spiderwebs about the planetoid, clustered with the nodules of heavy assembly facilities. On or about other moons in the gas giant's orbit, ship systems would be manufactured, enough that Kalax did not need to import replacement parts, and could make its own.

Outlying by fifty kilometres were a pair of small rotary stations, no more than a hundred thousand capacity each. Even organics as heavily cyberised as the reeh would deteriorate after long periods in zero-G. The stations would be living quarters, and organics involved in Kalax's operation would shuttle back and forth. Why an AI fleet derived from deepynine technology would need organic involvement, Erik couldn't guess.

"Guidance from Friendship indicates that Sunrise and Melody will pursue escaping reeh warships," Sasalaka announced. "Primary assault will continue with Friendship, Alliance and Phoenix."

"I see it," said Erik, as the drysine 'guidance' appeared on his forward projection, twisting trajectory lines toward Kalax. "V-dump in ten. Scan, immediate notification of base activity please, crisp callouts." To one side of his projection, a firebase disappeared with a flash.

"Firebase is destroyed," Jiri announced from Scan Two. "No defensive fire." Another flash, as another firebase disappeared. "Make that two."

Position lines matched, and Erik pulsed the jump engines, a fast blurring of his vision as they edged half into hyperspace, and came out moving dramatically slower. Present V had Kalax Facility at five minutes and nine seconds, approaching from sixty-one degrees zenith at speeds sufficient to obliterate large parts of the main facility if they fired. If the Facility were behaving normally, a curtain of defensive fire would be rising now, forcing Phoenix to evade or be destroyed...

"Defensive fire!" Jiri called, as Erik's screens showed it rising from the Facility. "Several marks, working on a pinpoint!"

"They'll be buried in there deep," said Erik. The fire volume was extremely small, only two or three ships' worth. "At this V we can't return fire without destroying the facility."

"Captain," came Styx's voice. "Assault trajectories have been finalised, please follow the course indicated." More lines on Erik's projection -- Phoenix was to take an offset course to evade the worst of the outgoing fire, lose its remaining V while evasive, and launch its marines at the main facility from what appeared to be a relative blindspot close to the planetoid's flank. Friendship and Alliance appeared to be taking more aggressive approaches. Styx respected Phoenix's capabilities less than those of her drysines, and was more protective for political reasons also. It made sense that the overall commander would station herself on the ship that took less risks.

"Captain," said Sasalaka, "we'll need a fireshadow on that approach and we cannot fire on those defensive ships until we dump V. That will reduce our penetration past their defensive grids to nil."

"Arms, plot me a solution," Erik instructed, throwing Phoenix into a reorientation that jerked them sideways, then hit mains to kick them clear of the approaching hostile fire.

"Aye Captain," replied Corrig from Arms One, as Harris at Arms Two showed Erik her cover projections with the defensive grid, holding fire until it was needed. "Loading CX-13s to turret one, give me one more V-dump and I can nail that second mark with five rounds."

"V-dump in twenty-five," Erik told him, watching the countdowns as his vision blurred from the building G, trigger finger clutching the thrust. "Inform the drysines that's our target."

"V-dump in twenty-one, Arms One copies. Scan shows a fireshadow, on your screens now."

"Copy, I see it." A ship defending a facility could choose not to run, to bury itself in cover within the facility, and dare attacking ships to fire. Even direct hits on a sitting duck at high-V could cripple the facility, debris tearing through the ship and shredding the structures behind -- not optimal if the object was to capture the facility intact. CX-13s were proximity-detonation warheads, useful primarily against ships hiding behind close cover, like a station dock. They were little use in open space engagements due to the tiny effective blast radius of small warheads in vacuum against armoured warships, but a stationary vessel that deliberately made itself a sitting duck was asking to get hit by a lot of them, detonating at a range of a few meters if Corrig could calculate it right.

More projected lines matched on Erik's displays. "Hello Operations," said Erik, "we are at five minutes plus five until release, standby."

"Operations copies." All five platoons were strapped in back there -- the three regular shuttles, plus tavalai GR-1 and civilian AT-7, currently commanded by Lieutenant Commander Dufresne in the rare event of a full company deployment, with the recently in-training Warrant Officer Popov in the front seat.

Erik hit V-dump as the engines charged, now headed on tangential past Kalax Facility, and kicked Phoenix about the other way with a blast of thrust, as Harris began unloading the defensive guns to screen Erik's projected course. Approaching large facilities under fire was always hair-raising -- in open space their primary defence was unpredictability, which disappeared on approach to any predictable point in space. There was even less defence when that fixed point in space was shooting at you. On the edge of his battlespace, Erik saw one of the escaping reeh vessels vanish in a brilliant flash as either Sunrise or Melody tagged it.

"Styx," he said as detonations from Harris's fire removed several incoming rounds from his path nearly three hundred kilometres ahead. "I get no reading on the locations of reeh or deepynine command units, ETA please."

"Yes Captain, analysis relies on network infiltration, they are attempting to hide their identities. There will be more information shortly." Closing on a facility filled with heavily armed warships, and not knowing which might try to kill them besides the ones that were already shooting, made Erik less happy still. Trace would like it even less once she got inside the place and didn't know what she was chasing. "The best estimate on the effective time limit of my infiltration signal is fifty-two minutes minimum. Beyond that, deepynine command units may re-establish effective command unless they are eliminated first."

"Major Thakur, you hear that?"

"I hear it Captain, fifty-two minute minimum." Trace was strapped into PH-1, depending on him to get them all on target alive and fighting. What happened after that would be up to her and their drysine allies.

Erik's course finally matched to Corrig's projected fireshadow, where gantries and neighbouring ships blocked their target shooter's field of fire. Outgoing rounds from that target were still directional, and could change course around the obstruction, but sitting directly alongside the obstruction widened the fireshadow considerably. At outgoing muzzle velocities for anti-ship rail guns, directional ammunition would exhaust all fuel before it could realign to a new course. Once reached, that new course would be final, with no fuel remaining, making those rounds relatively simple to evade or intercept once detected. Defensive fire grids lacked the same muzzle velocity or onboard fuel, but were intended for short-range interceptions and didn't need them. It made hiding behind things a bad idea, once enemy warships found that fireshadow and exploited it.

"Make it fast Arms," said Erik, "I have to slow down."

More thuds from the outer hull as the guns fired. "Six rounds out, you're clear Captain."

Erik swung Phoenix about to tail-first, and hit mains with a shuddering roar of deceleration. "Kalax is three minutes twenty," Sasalaka announced to save him the trouble, "average deceleration Gs will be five point nine."

Ahead, Friendship and Alliance were performing similar manoeuvres, and now Erik's screens were lighting with drysine warnings of possible targets on the flanking zero-G maintenance docks. "Arms, track those warnings," he said, straining hard against the Gs. "We'll be exposed to flanking fire on approach, if anything twitches you kill it."

"Aye Captain."

From this angle, the Kalax Facility planetoid's primary base was on one side, but the secondary base was now appearing on the farside. There were three main facilities, where the planetoid's interior structures surfaced to make a grand expanse of steel docks and external interface.

"Reverse facility is firing at us!" Jiri announced.

"Arms, new defensive cover!" Erik snapped, rolling Phoenix to bring those batteries into play.

"Copy, Arms has cover!" Harris said coolly, as the smaller defensive guns pounded out a spread of intercepting proximity rounds. The best thing about attacking large fixed facilities was that Arms could calculate exactly where all the opposition fire was coming from, and intercept accordingly. At low fire volumes like this, the task became relatively simple. If all the ships docked at the Facility started firing at once, Phoenix's defensive grid would be quickly overwhelmed, and the only possible survival would be to boost V and run like hell.

* * *

Tif did not like this bit at all. Locked into PH-4's pilot's chair, she could see all the scan feeds as though she were flying herself, but with none of the control, slammed back into her seat at higher-Gs than PH-4's thrust could typically manage, with heavy fire incoming but no freedom or control to manoeuvre.

She kept her eyes fixed hard on the upcoming release point, now eighty-one seconds away, and watched it inching painfully closer. If she overrode the release manually, PH-4 would detach carrying far too much residual V, and go whizzing past the target rock, or slam into it if she lacked the room to get out of the way. Despite being so much bigger, Phoenix was considerably more manoeuvrable than any of its assault shuttles, particularly where jump engines came into play. To get to the correct release point in one piece, shuttle pilots had no choice but to grit their teeth and wait.

Ahead of her along Phoenix's main hull cage, rail cannon three swung rapidly to a new target, blasting away with giant orange flashes. Those rounds disappeared into dark space at crazy V, yet insane as it seemed, Phoenix's jump engines wielded enough power that overtaking that ordnance, and shooting themselves down remained a real danger. Further up near the bow, twin smaller defensive emplacements were blasting out more rapid fire, redirecting quickly as Phoenix swung on its axis, then rolled amidst enormous bursts of white attitude thrust, and jolts of variable G knocked Tif from side to side as Captain Debogande performed his genius. Marines complained that they couldn't see anything on a hot approach, but for shuttle pilots it was like festival fireworks on a rollercoaster.

The shooter Phoenix had first been concerned with took a series of CX-13s directly alongside its hull, unable to shoot them down due to the fireshadow it had been hiding behind. Phoenix scan tagged it as 'disabled'. Another shooter made a run for it, also shooting at Phoenix, but drysine fire hammered its defensive grid in a series of increasingly near explosions until a round slammed its hindquarters and spun it, then two more rounds blasted the hull to a lifeless wreck.

"That was Alliance," Lieutenant Hausler observed from PH-1. A bright cloud of gas flashed past Tif's cockpit -- always scary when Phoenix flew straight through the debris cloud of a defensive grid explosion. "Good job machine friends."

"Alliance and Friendship have released arrowheads," Lieutenant Commander Dufresne announced from AT-7. "Four minutes twenty-one until target." Arrowheads were what Phoenix crew called AI assault shuttles, be they drysine or deepynine. Phoenix Company would not be conducting this assault alone.

"This is the Major," came Thakur's voice from PH-1. "We have a fix on command unit targets. PH-1 and PH-3 will intercept at Target One, main Facility. PH-4 and AT-7 will intercept at Target Two, main Facility slightly further in. GR-1 will maintain as reserve and deploy as needed."

Tif's display lit as the Major spoke, showing a 3D overlay of the main facility base. Target One was directly on the near perimeter, while Target Two was more toward the center. Tif's first thought was to wonder if it were smart to send the unarmed AT-7, and herself whose gunnery was not as good as Hausler or Jersey's, toward what looked like the most heavily defended part of the base. And then she saw how Target Two was directly alongside the projected target of a pair of Alliance arrowheads, who would be assaulting an adjoining sector.

"PH-1 copies Major," came Hausler's bored drawl. "Release point in twenty-two, inbound guidance inertial, all units switch to integrated targeting now and report in."

"PH-3 copies," said Jersey.

"PH-4 copies," said Tif, her mouth dry. A hard manoeuvre slammed her sideways, the visible rail gun realigning to shoot at something else. Midships had an armour shield behind to guard against debris on approach, but if Phoenix took a round directly to Midships, there was no protection for shuttles at all.

"AT-7 copies," said Dufresne, adopting her unaccustomed position as junior pilot out here. Technically she would be Tif's wingman, despite the difference in rank.

"GR-1 copies," said Lieutenant Leralani. Tif had heard some of the tavalai complaining about how they were always used as reserve, despite others grudgingly accepting that it made sense. In fast-moving battles, reserves were crucial to plug holes and needs as they emerged. GR-1 was a beast, bigger than Phoenix's human shuttles, and integrated missiles, cannon and defensive countermeasures in greater volumes too. It cost her a little mobility, in typical tavalai fashion, but Tif was pleased to have her watching their backs.

"All units are green," Hausler reported to Phoenix, as the timer counted down to zero. "Grapple safety off, standby for separation." At one second, Phoenix's thrust abruptly ceased. Tif hit the release and thrust in quick succession, pulling negative-G away from Phoenix, then above them the glare of the carrier's mains lit everything to a brilliant white, the massive ship pulling away ahead as the shuttles fanned out, still carrying Phoenix's previous V. Phoenix's thrust peaked, as Tif's canopy polarised in the glare, Captain Debogande abandoning the previous course to swing onto a cover trajectory.

Tif hit her own mains to resume the deceleration, but at marginally lower Gs. No one was shooting at them now, outgoing fire successfully suppressed, but there was a good chance that someone was foxing specifically to catch the shuttles exposed, and Tif's eyes remained glued to her screen, hands tight on the controls in case she suddenly needed to manoeuvre. Shuttles had the advantage of being a lot smaller and harder to hit than a combat carrier, but being smaller, would vaporise if struck by the kinds of weapons being aimed at Phoenix.

"Spread it out a little, people," Hausler advised, and Tif edged PH-4 wider in the five-ship formation. Too tight and they'd make an inviting target. Tif had heard Hausler tell stories of tavalai using nukes against assault shuttles in the Triumvirate War, to take out whole formations that were too bunched up. Nukes were useless as area weapons in vacuum across deep-space distances and velocities, and modern electronics were well-shielded from EMP effects and heat. But if they were going to work anywhere, they'd work here, at low relative-V against smaller ships approaching a large facility.

Phoenix, of course, possessed drysine-tech area weapons so advanced no one even talked about them. Even junior maintenance crew, who knew little about advanced theoretical physics, were scared of those weapons. Tiff had talked to First Shift Armament Officers Corrig and Harris about them, and seen them get all nervous, like kuhsi girls she'd known discussing marriage proposals from violent men. Strange reaction, she'd thought, considering how any jump-capable starship could kill a planet with a rock. But then, everyone knew how a high-speed rock worked. The drysine stuff seemed more like evil black magic.

Velocity lines matched, and Tif cut thrust and spun PH-4 on its axis to face the planetoid. The enormous horizon filled her canopy, a craggy ruin of ancient rock, cratered and split beneath the baleful glow of a blood-red planet. This portion of Kalax Facility base clustered within a vast crater, sparkling dull silver with rough edges and detail, like some kind of crystalline growth. But scan confirmed that this was a city, and tagged features with names and data, as navcomp projected her present course past the crater's elevated rim-guard -- a two-hundred meter high steel wall about the city's twenty-kilometre circumference.

Tif aimed for a gap between wall panels, toggling the cannon controls while Lee took missiles in the front seat, and said a small prayer as that gap rushed up. Whatever Styx had done to immobilise the enemy response had worked so far, but if it failed now, she and all of Phoenix Company would be dead almost instantly when exposed to what lay ahead.

"AT-7, stay with ne," she instructed, swinging PH-4 to fire an offset burst from the mains, nudging her lower as the perimeter wall got larger very fast. "Stay row and evasive."

"Copy PH-4," came Dufresne's reply, several kilometres off Tif's wing and heading for an adjoining gap.

The wall rushed up and past in a blur of steel mass, and then there was the city, a vast expanse of gantries, mobility cranes, observation towers and external storage tanks. Immediately Tif saw several approaching collisions, swung tail-first and braked hard, sliding that burn sideways to evade a tower, relying on the 3D visor projection before her eyes to show what was coming at them from behind

"PH-1 is on-target, Alpha and Command are deploying," came Hausler's announcement, echoed by Jersey.

"I see the arrowhead," Tif announced as the graphics made the approaching drysines clear. "We're on the nark, good run." She adjusted harder into a sideways slide past some larger obstructions, then the ruined hull of a dead warship was zooming by amidst a scatter of debris.

"Passing the ship that Phoenix hit," Lee said tersely from the front seat. "Looks dead."

Tif's sideways slide ended as she cut thrust and spun forward once more, rolling them until the city-base was 'above', and she could get a good look through the canopy. Everywhere were the burrow-holes of ship docks, into which warships would be nestled like animals in their dens. She glimpsed one as they rushed by, tucked in tight, tail-resting in the planetoid's light gravity.

"Just passed what looked like deepynine arrowheads docked to a gantry," said Dufresne. "Stay alert, lots of things in here could shoot at us if they come back to life."

Nav showed Tif that Target Two was approaching fast, and she swung tail-first once more and hit the mains hard, a roar that crushed her back into the seat. "Target ETA in twenty-two, Charlie get ready."

"Charlie copies, Charlie is go," replied Jalawi from PH-4's hold. A gantry system rushed by, at decelerating V, and Tif saw what looked like assault shuttles, lean and angular, docked in the light G. Scan showed them free of visible threats still, no weapons systems tracking them, not even any active scanning. Tif felt like a thief tiptoeing through the barracks where the guards to an enormous fortune were sleeping. If they woke up, it wouldn't last long enough to even be particularly violent -- Raka Fleet would just squash the troublesome bugs and resume their affairs like nothing had happened.

At five seconds short of arrival, Lee opened the rear hold. Rear vision showed Tif Charlie Platoon pouring out and deploying in a coordinated armoured rush, heading down already into the ship berth below. She received an all-clear from the last out, half-spun so not to hit them with her thrust, then powered away toward the city perimeter. She didn't like leaving them, and would have just as readily remained behind in the ship berth where cover was good, to provide close support. But however quiet Raka Fleet's main forces, Styx was clear that their command elements would still be active, mobile and hostile, and assault shuttles at point-blank range would make attractive targets.

"PH-4 is clean and headed out," she said, pleased at least to not be flying backwards for a while.

"AT-7 is also clean and headed out," Dufresne echoed. She'd beaten Dufresne by several seconds, Tif saw. But given how much more practise she'd had at assault runs than Dufresne in the past two years, that was a credit to the Lieutenant Commander.

Scan showed a drysine arrowhead joining off her left, and Tif looked to see a ship like a sharp-edged flat wing, all engines, carrier hold and weapons systems, impossibly cramped for the number of drysine warriors it could hold. It fired a burst of thrust now, and accelerated at crazy Gs to shoot on ahead.

"See that guy on our left?" Lee asked her on private coms.

"Good friend from Alliance," said Tif. "We wave."

5

Lieutenant Jasmine Crozier flew her suit down the gap between the warship hull and the edge of the maintenance berth, dodging umbilicals and scanning with her Koshaim 20. Ahead and about her were Delta Platoon First Squad, while Second and Third Squads made approaches encircling the ship, and Heavy Squad brought up the rear -- now a nine-man unit with the addition of Bucket in modular free-flight configuration.

"No active scanning," Master Sergeant Ben Jakobsen reported tersely, Bravo's Platoon XO since Timbo Wong had been killed on Defiance. "Everyone watch the end of the ship, could be an ambush."

"Check your V!" Crozier commanded, hitting the brakes in a hiss of white attitude thrust to slow down. "Synchronised crossfire, hit your marks!"

The lead elements of all three main squads reached the warship's tail simultaneously, a ring of firepower ready to pulverise any surprises. Crozier's tacnet display showed what they saw -- heavy gantries to hold the warship's weight in the planetoid's low G, a great blast shield to protect from the molten heat of the main engine's thrust to manoeuvre the steel beast in and out of this berth, and a series of passages leading deeper into the base.

Nothing shot at them, nor even moved. Where was everyone? There'd been shuttles flying on approach, but by the time Phoenix Company had arrived, they'd all sought dock and now lay silent.

"All squads, pick your way in. I want a good tempo, watch your corners but we can't be slow." Ahead, the lead elements accelerated once more, heading for the passages about the blast shield, and Crozier switched to the command channel. "This is JC, I'm getting a mismatch between Styx's tacnet maps and the real thing. Her intel may not be as good as advertised."

"Command copies JC," came the Major's calm reply from over at Target One with Alpha and Bravo Platoons. "We see the same thing."

Styx had acquired all her data on this facility from now-dead reeh commanders. The possible reasons why their layout of the facility included many errors were too numerous to guess at.

Each of Crozier's three section commanders picked an entry passage, and she followed Jakobsen's way in, a burst of thrust in flight-mode, controlling direction and power with arm gestures like a kid playing superhero. The passage past the blast plate was wide with heavy steel engineering, lots of pipes for what Crozier guessed was coolant, keeping the blast plate from melting during engine tests. Several automated cargo sleds drifted, empty and abandoned, about which First Squad made their way, rifles ready, while section leaders gave terse warnings and callouts to watch this hidden alcove or the other. Scan revealed noone tracking them, no radar pings, no laser tripwires, not even any movement. After being told for the past several days that this was likely to be the heaviest combat they'd seen since Defiance, it was more disconcerting than pleasing.

The passage opened into a complicated engineering space, and the first appearance of pressurised passages built into the walls, leading to several small, docked pressurised vehicles. "Looks like facilities for organics," observed Corporal Riggs, First Squad, Second Section Leader.

"Yeah, but where the hell are they?" said Corporal Garcia, Third Section lead. Huge construction gantries led into the next space, larger than this, where hull segments were stored in racks, like a hardware store stacking pots or baskets, but on a hundred times the scale.

"Yeah, that's not supposed to be there," said Jakobsen, landing on a massive support girder as Crozier flew in to grab hold beside him. "This is supposed to be free storage, not construction and assembly."

"I think it's basically right," said Crozier, frowning at the 3D projection before her visor. Her counter now said forty-eight minutes until Styx's stun feature released its hold on Raka Fleet, and all these massive warships started trying to kill them. If she couldn't even find the command elements she was supposed to destroy in that time, this whole mission was going to become very unhappy. "It's just being used for different stuff. The industrial presses are all that way," gesturing with her fist so her Master Sergeant could see, "the main transit's been moved to over here by the central brace."

"That's gonna be a chokepoint," Jakobsen observed grimly.

"Delta Platoon, main transit's down here," Crozier announced, highlighting that with a blink so they all could see. "Second Squad, you've got lead, Third has right flank, First has left, it's gonna be a chokepoint so eyes peeled. Let's move."

She let go the support, feeling the planetoid's point-zero-five gravity pull her gently forward, then kicked thrust to find her spacing in the twelve man formation that First Squad made across this flank. They steered around starship hull segments, gripped by huge loader mechanisms. A fleet constantly in battle would take hull damage frequently, some of which had to be replaced rather than repaired.

Ahead past the segments, a large central passage opened, ten meters wide and thick with pipes and other engineering conduits. Docked to ceiling grapples were several micro-gravity tugs, employed to haul these huge segments through the backway spaces to whereever they were needed. Second Squad approached, three sections of four marines, Gunnery Sergeant 'Spanky' Lai in command, gesturing his people out of line-of-fire from deep down that passage.

"Something looks real weird down there Sarge," came Private Schuman's voice, Second Section under Corporal Zin.

"Talk to me Stick," Lai commanded.

"Second support down the far end... I'm getting a faint heat reading, I dunno if that's a support at all."

"Yeah, I see it," said Corporal Zin, as Crozier flipped to a visor view of what 'Stick' Schuman was looking at -- a series of dark gantries further down the passage, and this one looked oddly shaped and mechanical.

"Second Squad take cover behind those tugs!" Crozier snapped. "Third and First will hold at the passage rim and get a closer look."

She hit thrust hard, as about her First Squad powered toward the passage side, while Second did the same toward the tugs... then rounds were ripping up the passage as all hell broke loose, multiple yells of 'contact front!' and the heavy thudding of Koshaim fire through coms.

Someone was hit, shouts as others tried to recover the tumbling suit under fire, others reaching the tugs and leaning out for shots as Crozier reached the wall beside the passage from which the fire was coming, slammed in and braced. She let her marines get their rifles about the edge to return fire, then a smoke trail as someone let a missile go, focusing herself on making sense of the situation -- Private Velas from Second Squad, Second Section had been hit bad, that had been the tumbling suit, plus Private Pham of First had taken a hit, a flip to suit status showed Crozier the air loss stabilising as damage control plugged it -- marines called it 'the goo', the inner layers of which went on and around the wound and stopped bleeding too, clogging an armour limb solid in seconds.

"Bravo Platoon watch the flanks and rear!" Crozier overrode the commotion on coms. "We are in ambush city right here, expect them to flank us! Heavy Squad, hold your rear-guard, main squads will neutralise this alone!" She flipped to command channel, keeping her tone cool and words clipped from many years of experiencing situations far worse. "Delta Platoon has contact, it appears to be a defensive emplacement built into the structure, no sign of mobile combat elements yet. We are neutralising with firepower, it appears to be taking quite a bit of damage."

As she spoke, missiles hit the twin tugs hanging beyond the passage mouth, blowing off chunks and making marines swear.

"Command copies, Delta," came the Major's reply. "Bravo just had similar contact, it looks like the same defensive system. You appear to be in a chokepoint, there's no time to manoeuvre another way around, suggest you blast through it and go straight."

"Yes Major, my thoughts too." If the Major was still 'suggesting', time wasn't yet desperate. Like all good commanders, the Major trusted her Lieutenants to read the local situation better than her, but if things got frantic enough, that could change. Second Section had recovered Velas and were attempting to assist-stabilise amidst the incoming and outgoing fire. It didn't look good. Pham was shaking off queries and shooting with the rest, one-armed.

"Can anyone see the fucking target?" Crozier demanded. "What are we shooting at?"

"LT," said Sergeant Lai, "it looks like multiple reinforced turrets! Some look mobile, plus there's launchers out of direct line of sight! Something's messing up missile acquisition, we're not hitting much, and we don't have direct line-of-sight on those launchers!"

"That's a built-in defensive grid," Sergeant Jakobsen said grimly, shooting around the corner from Crozier's side. "Serious armour if it's taking Koshaim fire. We're gonna get messed up real good if we advance into it." Across the passage, a marine yelped in alarm as a glancing shot cracked her armour.

"LT, we've got movement behind!" called Corporal Banza of Heavy Squad. "Pressure suits, looks like organics! Don't appear to be armed!"

Crozier switched to Banza's point-of-view, and saw suited figures coming through the hull segments, propelled by hand thrusters. The visual was scratchy, but tacnet identified no weapons either. "Hail them, try the local dialect." Shali had provided them a translation of something the local Reeh Empire slave races often used -- a better translation, she'd insisted, than Styx had managed.

More missiles hit the tugs, severing one of the docking braces in a shower of debris. "They're trying to cut the fucking support!" Corporal Ijaz warned. "It's gonna drift and we'll lose our cover!"

"Second Squad, grab the tug!" Lai replied. "Grab it when it comes loose and we'll move with it like a shield until we're clear!"

"LT!" Corporal Banza came back. "Shali's on coms, she tells me these guys are alo! They're saying they can shut down the guns!"

* * *

Trace did not find it especially surprising that Styx's schematic of the Raka Fleet Facility had not included a deep-layer defensive grid. Secrecy about a facility like this would be intense, probably the reeh circulated false data in case of uprisings, something they had good reason to be paranoid about. What was surprising was that Styx had fallen for it.

"Lieutenant Crozier should absolutely not involve the alo in operational matters," Styx informed Trace now over the competing racket of outgoing Koshaim fire and terse coms chatter. "Alo psychology within the parameters of Raka Fleet's cybernetic protocols has not yet been established, I calculate that their intentions could be entirely negative."

"I calculate otherwise," said Trace, sheltering in the engineering alcove of a major transit tunnel, twenty meters wide and made for the passage of small ships and large shuttles within the facility. Ahead were a series of mobile turret emplacements that were appearing into the tunnel for heavy bursts, then pulling back, all the angles pre-calculated and their fire frighteningly accurate. "A direct assault here is going to cost us bigtime for no obvious advantage, the command units have dug in further back, they're going to slow us down and wait until our clock runs out and they regain control of their fleet. A fast fix behind the scenes will work faster than any direct assault at this rate."

Lieutenant Dale was commanding Alpha Platoon with Heavy Squad now coming to the fore, concentrating fire in concert with painfully slow manoeuvres to make position without getting exposed and shredded. So far Alpha had taken hits but no real casualties, but Bravo weren't so lucky, losing First Squad's Second Section leader Corporal Kamov, having run into the defensive shield at a nearby location.

"Major we have no time," Styx replied. "Casualties in war are unavoidable, sacrifices must be made or we will lose all of our forces when the fleet reverts to their original control."

"Time bought with friendly casualties is an illusion," Trace said sharply. "Strategic control gained with massively weakened forces cannot be consolidated, we'll win control only to lose it again if half of us are dead." Heavy rapid-fire cannon rounds struck Alpha Three-Two's position against the opposite wall of the tunnel, nearly removing someone's head.

"All of us will die if we do not meet the deadline," Styx replied, amidst doubtless dozens of other simultaneous conversations, most of them with her own AI forces. "Surely even a human can perform those maths."

"I'm not losing half my company because you're scared of random variables," Trace told her, and switched back to the command channel. "JC, what's the situation?"

"The LT's talking to the alo, Major," came back Master Sergeant Jakobsen's voice. Jakobsen had been leading the infamous Delta Third Squad, which had previously been Giddy Kono's command until Trace had poached him for Command Squad. Now they'd had Jakobsen poached to be Crozier's XO in First Squad after Master Sergeant Wong had been killed, leaving Third Squad to Staff Sergeant Kronauer, their third commander of the trip so far. "Bucket's joined in the conversation, no idea what he's communicating but the alo seem to think he's adding something."

About Trace, Sergeant Rael was redeploying Command Squad as Alpha Platoon moved up ahead, the nearest gun emplacements apparently destroyed. Trace followed him up, making use of the most difficult skill she'd learned since taking command -- the ability to concentrate on things happening elsewhere while immediately around her, things were happening that could kill her. At moments like these she was largely in Rael's hands, wandering behind the firefight like a blind woman through a minefield and trusting that her chosen personal guard wouldn't let her step on anything.

"Major it's JC, the alo say there's a control facility five hundred meters from this position that should allow an advanced drysine AI to access the defensive grid, they are prepared to hand over the command codes. But it will mean redeploying off this line of advance."

Thus leaving those deepynine command elements Styx was adamant needed to be destroyed, intact. "Do it and make it fast," Trace ordered. "Give it everything you've got, we can't afford half-measures right now."

"Copy Major."

"This is likely a deceit and a distraction designed to waste time," Styx intervened.

"Noted," Trace told her.

* * *

"Sunrise is burning for a return trajectory," Jiri announced from Scan Two. "Melody looks like she's holding to a far perimeter defence." Erik saw those projections, while just fifty kilometres from the facility's primary surface city, Alliance was pulverising some unsuspecting warship at the free-floating shipyard, multiple explosions shredding the nearby gantries and threatening the structural stability of the entire facility.

"Coms, try to find out why Alliance did that," Erik said without much hope.

"Yes Captain," said Shilu.

The clock was down to thirty-five minutes, Phoenix Company was held up dealing with an unexpected defence grid in their locations, probably explaining why their command unit targets were hiding there in the first place. Friendship and Alliance's excursions seemed to be progressing better, but evidence to that effect was only anecdotal, as Styx wasn't sharing everything, probably on the expectation, or excuse, that humans couldn't handle as much data as she could.

Phoenix sat forty kilometres from Phoenix Company's landing point, in the very gentle orbit that low-G required to stop them falling slowly out of position, weapons currently divided between the thirty or so warships in the surface facility, and the roughly one hundred smaller in-system vessels docked at the rotary station currently sixty kilometres away on a divergent orbit.

"Captain," said Kaspowitz, "the mission abort is T-minus-nine and counting."

"Copy Kaspo." It meant that Kaspowitz thought if they were going to ditch this entire operation, and get the hell out of here before the entire hostile fleet woke up, they'd have to do it within nine minutes. Erik calculated furiously how long the shuttles would take to retrieve the platoons should he give the order, complicated further by the fact that Styx would likely object... and here of course was the other reason for her to station herself on Phoenix, namely that it was so much easier for her to disable the ship from the inside, or take it over completely, making them all passengers while she continued the mission.

"Explosion at the second station!" Geish announced. A visual came to Erik's screen, and he enlarged it. The scene was a horror, the station's donut outer rim had severed completely, then fractured further along the ring, breaking away an entire portion nearly a kilometre long. Even as he watched, another explosion lit the rim further along, sending docked ships tumbling. "One of them's firing! Here's the guy, got him!"

As Geish's pinpoint passed immediately to Corrig at Arms One, plotting a solution. "Got him pinged Captain!"

"Belay that," said Styx. "This is an internal squabble between enemy command units and alo. Alo involvement is to be discouraged."

Which consolidated in Erik's mind almost instantly what Styx was up to. Alo were the organic supervision of the Raka Fleet, and Styx wanted them removed from the equation. Assuming command of an AI fleet with an AI queen was a relatively simple thing, but the fractured loyalties of a cybernetically-enslaved bunch of organics were another matter. As the Major had said to Styx just now, in a conversation Erik had listened in to, it was an unpredictable variable that Styx wished to eliminate entirely.

"Arms, kill that ship," Erik instructed. "Coms, broadcom to all alo vessels at station, they are free to commence rescue operations, movement will not be considered hostile. We are your liberators. Join us and you will be free."

Even as he spoke, Phoenix's main guns were sending loud thumps through the hull. Two seconds later, rounds had crossed the sixty-Ks, adjusting perfectly for the slight deflection with their own thrust, and the small insystem aggressor vanished like a melon struck by a cannonball.

"Captain, why do you think they opened fire on the alo?" Sasalaka asked.

"Coms, tell alo vessels to indicate hostile vessels amongst them," Erik continued. "Arms, target any vessel indicated as hostile. If they twitch, kill them. Sasa, I think Lieutenant Crozier is about to end them, and they're retaliating against traitors. The alo just joined our side, and Styx doesn't like it. Unfortunately for Styx, organics are our speciality, not her's." Another channel flick with the blink of one eye on an icon. "Hello Operations, get me Lieutenant Crozier, Delta Platoon."

It was irregular, but happened occasionally when the Captain had something urgent to tell a platoon commander directly. But it had to be important, because company commanders became irritable with captains who bothered their lieutenants and interrupted the chain of ground command.

"Captain, this is Crozier."

"Lieutenant, what we suspect was a deepynine command unit just opened fire on the second space station, inflicting serious damage. I think the command units just realised the alo have turned against then, and are retaliating en masse. It suggests that they find your current actions threatening. You may be about to find yourself under concerted attack."

"Thank you Captain, welcome news."

The communication ended, leaving Erik to reorient his brain to 'marine think', and why Crozier would find the prospect of concerted attack 'welcome'. And the answer immediately came to him, that Crozier's previous option was to attack the defensive grid directly and take large casualties. If her plan forced deepynine command elements to emerge from behind their defensive screen and attack her, the tables would be turned.

6

Crozier supervised the forward defences herself, scooting along the main approaches to the repair bay's rear, checking Heavy Squad's lines of fire with their autocannon, rotaries and missile racks, and that they'd have enough space to manoeuvre when required to fall back. With Heavy squarely blocking the most obvious approach, the idea was to force attackers out to the flanks, where the three more mobile rifle squads would deal with them in turn.

She jetted out of the access-way beside the bay's blast shield beneath the warship's main engine, and a huge circular frame securing the ship's rear in place. "Shali, any response from the warship AI?"

"Nothing yet, Jasmine," came the ceephay's reply. "I'll keep trying, I don't know exactly what Styx has done to it." Styx was not happy with Delta Platoon's current actions, but Shali had volunteered to help, whatever her lesser capability.

"Would be nice to make sure that ship doesn't start blasting us if we have to fall back," Master Sergeant Jakobsen remarked from the side-wall approaches where First Squad was deploying.

"Falling back to open space is best avoided either way," Crozier replied, jetting toward the repair bay control center, and trying to ignore the dark memories that were building. The last time she'd fought deepynines, twelve of her platoon had been killed, including her XO, and replacements only found by the total breakup of what had then been Echo Platoon. And even then, she knew they'd all gotten off lightly. "Let's try to hold them short of the actual repair bay."

"Copy that."

The control center was halfway up the repair bay's side, an array of windows containing a pressurised atmosphere for organic supervision. Crozier's suit thrusters handled the push against light G easily, as she flew up the space between the bay's cylindrical wall and the warship's hull. This warship had no rotating crew cylinder, had no need for internal gravity, nor even air pressure. Strongpoints along its hull bristled with coms arrays, sensors, offensive and defensive weapons. At this range the defensive guns were the most deadly. They'd destroy most of the repair bay as well, and likely damage the ship in the process, but damn sure they'd kill every armoured trooper in the bay in ten seconds flat.

"JC, we're in the main shuttle transit now," came Lieutenant Jalawi's voice. "Be in position to block that approach junction in four minutes."

"Thanks Skeeta. Just don't let them get out the main exit or they'll be coming in behind us."

"Tactics, huh?" Charlie Platoon had redeployed off their previous advance to come and help, on the Major's suspicion, taken from the Captain's suspicion, that this offer from the alo to help could be decisive. Elsewhere in the assault, the drysines were apparently making good progress against the defensive grid, which knowing drysines probably meant absorbing nasty casualties because Styx told them to.

Crozier hit the underside of the command center beside the open airlock, racked her Koshaim to make ingress easier, and pulled herself through. Within, the center was depressurised to save time, rows of screens and technical displays of the ongoing ship repair, with thick windows overlooking the warship snug in its chamber like a bullet from an old-fashioned revolver. Negligible gravity made chairs redundant, four alo in pressure suits, with Third Squad Third Section, and Bucket, spidery legs spread across several posts as he accessed hand controls with his many smaller arms.

The alo were talking to the drysine drone on another channel, hitting various icons and showing him things that were apparently meaningful. A further flurry of icons hit, and the display screens all changed, showing a new set of technical diagrams, apparently to do with the facility and not the warship.

"What's happening?" Crozier asked Three-Three's leader, Lance Corporal Krishnan.

"Stuffed if I know, LT," said Krishnan. Crozier had sent him here because he was one of the better systems analysts, and was an ace at suit maintenance. But what she saw on the screens here was a giant leap beyond what any marine rifleman would know. Krishnan loomed, a big man in a big suit. He still got teased sometimes for his 'special relationship' with the Captain because of the time he'd been shot down with him and the Major on Stoya III two years ago. "All I can figure is that it's not a proper network function, you're not supposed to be able to shut down a defence grid, so this is something else. I think they're figuring how to hack some kind of auxiliary system to make it function like a command network. Kind of like hacking a family cruiser through the nav interface or the climate control. Can only be done from here for some reason."

"And Styx still isn't helping?"

"She says she is, but the command codes are crude, something about it requiring a key that only the alo possess. She didn't hang around long enough to explain herself better." Which was nuts, Crozier knew. Getting the defence grid down would benefit everyone. Styx had all the attention in the world to spend on whatever she liked, could maintain individual conversations with every marine in the company simultaneously if she needed. Yet now she was 'busy'?

"Shali, are you there? Can you help?"

"Yes Jasmine. I'm trying to help, but it's complicated. My capabilities are not the equal of Styx, and her explanation about the alo having a required key may be correct. These alo are cybernetically linked to the Raka Fleet. It produces data combinations that are nearly impossible to replicate with any amount of processing power, at least with our degree of unfamiliarity. But these alo seem quite confident they can do it. I gather from their speech that they've done similar things before, I think some degree of underlying rebellion against reeh rule may be the norm here, like some sort of secret society in alo command."

Within their obscuring helmets and pressure suits, it was impossible to tell by looking that these were alo. Exactly whose side they'd be on, when they heard about Phoenix's difficulties with alo back in the Spiral, was another question.

* * *

"Hostile! Hostile!" yelled Staff Sergeant Mishra on coms, as dark shapes flashed across the vast tunnel intersection ahead of Charlie Platoon, followed by Koshaims hammering as Third Squad engaged.

"Spread and cover!" Jalawi shouted. "Get to cover and get your crossfires! No loitering in the open!" Already jetting hard to the flank, amidst a tangle of pipes and structural supports on that side, aiming for an anchorpoint. "First Squad, anchor the near flank! Heavy Squad, you're now the right flank, don't let them get around you!"

The huge transit tunnel was a way for the docks to move shuttles and large ship components around beneath the surface berths, with irregular walls and open engineering spaces for industrial and structural requirements. Now at the cross-junction ahead, what the combat computer was tagging as deepynine drones were streaking through, headed for Delta Platoon on the surface.

Coms lit up with shouts and call-outs, and the thunder of gunfire that could only be heard through suit coms in a vacuum, tacnet registering several of the deepynines destroyed, several others continuing on their way to the surface.

"JC," said Jalawi as he hit the massive cross-beam and braced, Koshaim searching through the clutter ahead for any sign of movement. "Charlie is engaged, several got past, are on their way to you now."

"Copy Skeeta," came Crozier's reply. "We can handle a few, just mess them up."

With the whole platoon suddenly reoriented flank-ward, Second Squad in front became 'left flank', First Squad including himself became 'front' and Heavy Squad became 'right flank', with Third Squad the rearguard. Jalawi watched their positions fan out on tacnet, not seeing any fault because hell, this was Charlie Platoon...

"Contact!" shouted Corporal Graf to Jalawi's right, as her Third Squad opened fire, and then tacnet was flashing red 'hostile' movement through the pipes and supports, and he pasted two fast rounds on that spot, a burst of muzzle flame and white gas as attitude thrust blasted to keep him on station despite the recoil.

Counter-measures screeched and flashed warning red, and Jalawi swung back behind full cover as missiles came in, a howl of simulated jet-noise on coms to let marines know instinctively where they were. One hit a support nearby with a flash, a rattle of shrapnel off Jalawi's armour, as he ignored the threat to look at Heavy Squad, now engaging on the far flank. The fire volume from that direction was crazy, chain guns hosing enemy cover, Deesh-80 autocannons with even thirty percent more muzzle velocity than a Koshaim-20 and capable of five-round bursts without melting the mechanism like they should at that output.

"They're not gonna like that," Master Sergeant Hoon remarked from Jalawi's side. "They'll be coming back this way."

"Third Squad," said Jalawi. "Mish, don't let them charge up that junction. Second Squad, Crackers, reposition left, back up Third Squad."

"Copy," came back Mishra, and Sergeant 'Crackers' Kunoz from Second Squad.

"Reckon they'll be coming straight through the center," said Hoon. Master Sergeant Peter Hoon had been doing this longer than any other marine in Phoenix Company, and had the medals and two synthetic limbs to prove it. For Jalawi, losing his buddy Juan Spitzer on Defiance had hurt like hell, but he couldn't complain about the replacement.

"Reckon you're probably right," said Jalawi, eyes darting across his visor for a final systems check, and thankful as all hells for the upgraded drysine-tech countermeasures. Those deepynine missiles had hit precisely nothing, and with Wowser in with Heavy Squad, the electronic warfare measures could even fuzz up a deepynine's main optics. "But if they do, they'll still have Second and Third between them and that junction up to Delta Platoon, plus Heavy will have them in a crossfire. We'll rip the fuckers to shreds."

"Copy that," said Hoon. Another platoon XO might have given his LT a lecture about the need to take less chances with the Platoon Commander's life, but Hoon didn't bother with that sort of nonsense.

* * *

"Lieutenant Karajin, a force of what looks like deepynines has emerged nine kilometres from Delta Platoon's position," came Major Thakur's voice in Karajin's ears. "The force confronting Charlie Platoon is harassing only, there has been no major assault. I need you to stop this new force from getting to Delta before they can shut down the defence grid."

"I copy Major," said Karajin in Togiri, trusting the translators more than his own recently-acquired English. "It is a done thing." He switched channels to Garudan local. "Leralani? Intercept course, the humans are in trouble again. Let's save them."

"I have it," said Leralani from the pilot's seat, with a twist as GR-1 reoriented from its hiding spot below the facility rim. Tacnet showed the Major's region of concern, a large force moving exposed across the facility surface. "Thrust on, we're coming in low."

The burn kicked Garudan Platoon back in their harnesses, the tavalai assault shuttle powering toward the protecting crater wall, then through a gap as it accelerated across the vacuum cityscape. "Hello Phoenix," said Tamalin from GR-1's front seat, "they're coming in real fast, we will not be able to make intercept in GR-1 alone. Request supporting fire."

"This is Phoenix," came back Captain Debogande's voice via translation. "We're too far out for effective close firesupport, the only ordnance we've got would trash large sections of the facility."

The Fleet housed in which, Karajin thought, they were currently attempting to win over. "Hello Phoenix," he said, watching as GR-1's acceleration shot them toward Delta Platoon's position, "DU-50s to my personal signal, I will provide additional targeting. Leralani, slingshot assault, we're going in long. Mark at five from the target, Garudan prepare to disembark."

"Mark at five," Leralani acknowledged calmly. "I'm ending the burn in four, restraints up." About the platoon's shoulders and waist, the straps sprang abruptly open, as Leralani cut thrust. Karajin slammed an armoured fist against the overhead frame, as the bars holding the armoured suits in place lifted upward, and centrifugal force increased as Leralani spun the shuttle on its axis.

"Assault at V!" Karajin barked. "Wide spacing, nothing vertical! Long range fire, don't save your ammo!" On his visor, the arms control flashed red, Phoenix Arms directing control to his panel. GR-1's disembark was approaching fast, karasai within the hold grasping the suit in front, as Karajin felt a heavy jolt as the man behind let him know he had a grip. "Here we go! Together!"

"Together!" his tavalim roared back.

"Mark in one!" Behind them, GR-1's rear hold was levering open. Lights hit green. "Go now!"

Leralani hit the thrust, racing tail-first toward the enemy, and the unsecured platoon within was simply ejected out the back at four Gs. Immediately they spread, amidst a blinding rush of white attitude thrust, clearing like clouds in a planetary freefall to reveal the alien cityscape of cranes, docks and steel. It looked like Defiance, where Garudan had practiced this manoeuvre many times, and Karajin checked all systems as the platoon spread racing across the steel horizon.

He was in the center, and so did not need to bother with spreading, and focused on his arms panel, where Phoenix's incoming DU-50 missiles were selecting targets somewhere up ahead. And here was Phoenix's contribution to tacnet -- overhead visuals highlighting firm positions to the firegrid. Karajin selected two approximate targets in the enemy formation -- he judged about eighty incoming drones, low and fast across the facility, like two onrushing fronts in the cavalry charges of the wars the humans had once fought.

"Artillery!" he commanded. "Pick your targets!" Selecting his own backrack, turning sideways to aim it past his left shoulder, and kicked thrust a little to stop the planetoid's light gravity from intersecting his racing trajectory with the ground. "Fire!"

Anti-armour missiles leaped clear, more numerous than the humans carried, armour-piercing and self-guided, the techs had made drysine upgrades to guidance systems to make them less susceptible to countermeasures. Karajin fired six of his twelve, then kicked his side thrust to dodge an observation tower that flashed by at speed enough that he'd have been the projectile, had he hit it.

Ahead, visible against the black vacuum, Phoenix's missiles made white streaks onto enemy positions, followed by large explosions. As Garudan's own missiles approached, tacnet erupted with a storm of new dots. "Incoming!" shouted Sergeant Demarajin, Third Squad commander.

"Countermeasures full!" Karajin announced. "Watch your mobility!" And then a storm of red rain was falling ahead -- Phoenix firing its smaller defensive guns, Karajin realised, as the Captain did all he could to support them, despite the lesser V and greater targeting difficulty at this range.

He fired hard sideways as missiles approached ahead, countermeasures spinning numerous out into space or into the ground ahead. Hits smacked down around him, and in a flash, a karasai vanished from tacnet, then another. "Target all weapons!"

He turned the other way, as a ship berth flashed beneath him, fired all remaining missiles, then hefted his Viz heavy rifle, kicked thrust up to a higher level to clear the remaining ground clutter separating him from the deepynines, and opened fire. The visor armscomp showed him targets lit red, adjusted for the minuscule drop in light gravity, and the suit attitude control kept him from spinning as the Viz hammered glowing red rounds across space.

The humans' Koshaim-20s were technically superior weapons, built from alo alloys that allowed things an old-model Viz wouldn't, but these had been upgraded aboard Phoenix. Twenty-six millimetres in the humans' tongue, magneto-propelled plus caseless charge, it took advantage of the one thing a Koshaim struggled with -- sustained rapid fire without jamming or melting.

Alongside him, across a broad front, the rest of Garudan Platoon joined in, with Viz automatics and Jigiri autocannon sending explosive fragmentation rounds a little higher to blind and splinter deepynine visuals, and Kontari chainguns recently upgraded to drysine muzzle velocity. Explosions were already erupting across the horizon from Phoenix's slow-arriving fire, and now doubled as Garudan Platoon's fire reached them.

"Slow down!" Karajin yelled over the din through his own helmet, and swung his feet forward to fire jets in the direction of travel. It had the added advantage of presenting a much smaller profile to incoming deepynine fire, which was beginning to rain in like hail, cracking and exploding off the ground about him with orange blasts of sheer velocity. And now ahead, tacnet was showing him Delta Platoon emerging from their ship berth hole to pour their own fire into the incoming deepynines.

Red enemy dots vanished from tacnet with regularity, until Karajin adjusted course around one final set of gantries, now moving considerably slower, but still fast enough to rush up on Delta Platoon's berth like a downhill skier on a stationary obstacle. Two deepynines were racing the other way, low to avoid more damage but both missing limbs. Karajin hit one with a round from his white-hot Viz, and saw it burst apart from sheer kinetic impact. The second was hit from Garudan and Delta Platoon simultaneously, and turned to tumbling steel mist.

"Is that it?" Karajin barked, increasing thrust as he skidded past his target, approaching zero so he could reverse and head back. Tacnet showed zero enemy left, but only fools trusted tacnet entirely. "Are there any more?"

"I'm seeing a lot of dead ones," said Sergeant Tamonarada from Fourth Squad. "I think they're all gone. Phoenix got a lot in that first volley."

"You have done well, Lieutenant Karajin," came Styx's voice, unexpected. "It seems that this enemy has miscalculated."

* * *

In the vacuum, Trace could not hear the defence grid fall silent, but she could hear Phoenix Company's coms no longer relaying the thump of Koshaim fire in the background. And then they were all saying it at once, and Alpha Platoon marines were displacing from cover and jetting forward up the transit tunnels toward the deeper structures.

"The grid's definitely down in our sector," Dale told Crozier on coms, moving forward ahead with his marines. "Good work."

"We've got seventeen minutes," said Trace, unhooking from cover and switching to free-flight mode. "Make it fast, Styx is showing three primary targets still ahead, no further than one kilometre, should be on them real soon. Charlie Platoon, Skeeta, what's your status?"

"They're pulling back here Major," came Jalawi, coms crackling with deeper-level interference. "Never really engaged, they were just holding us like you said, while the main thrust went around the back. JC's coming down now, gonna see if we can catch these bastards between us."

"Command copies." Around her, Rael, Terez, Arime, Rolonde and the rest of Command Squad formed up, guarding her front, rear and flanks. "Styx, do we have time?"

"Major, I can confidently extend my deadline by another thirty minutes at least. My command signatures are propagating, I am beginning to receive positive feedback from main line Raka Fleet units that have been freed from their command's hold. Friendship and Alliance's drones have destroyed a significant number of them, and many in your sector appear to have been committed to the assault on Delta Platoon's position. The command signal decreased dramatically in strength following Garudan Platoon's insertion."

Trace nodded as she considered that news. She dared not think it 'good' news -- in command there was only information, neither good nor bad, interesting only for its utility. "Thank you Styx, keep me updated on our parameters."

"Yes Major."

Trace switched to broadcast. "Okay people, Styx says we've bought another thirty minutes. It makes no difference -- you've got your targets fixed, eliminate them and we push the deadline back until Styx has full command." She switched again. "Karajin, status?"

"Major, I have three fatalities, another five wounded. I am holding Delta's position while they support Charlie down below, we are attempting to stabilise the wounded here."

"Good job Garudan, that was an impressive feat of combat arms."

"Yes Major. Commendations to Phoenix arms control, losses would have been far higher without their irregular support."

Trace had seen that all nearby assault shuttles had been pouring on the firepower during the deepynine assault as well, which Karajin evidently hadn't, but the time for reviews would come later. It looked to her as though Raka Fleet's command elements had made a desperate last gamble, knowing that if they lost the defence grid here they were finished. They'd failed. What happened now, she had no idea.

* * *

"Captain, I'm reading massive activation across this side of the Facility!" called Jiri from Scan Two.

Erik could see it now, Phoenix's passive sensors showing a mass of systems coming online across this exposed side of the planetoid. The deep heat-glow of engines, the twitch of external weapon mounts, the local coms of many fleet vessels communicating to each other. Tentatively awakening, as though from a slumber.

"Navigation, escape course to my main," said Erik, his mouth dry with the recognition of an unfolding situation he could do nothing about.

"Aye Captain," Kaspowitz said grimly, and Erik's forward battlespace filled with the new course. It was hopeless, and they both knew it. Running from this hostile fleet could not possibly save them, the sheer volume of outgoing firepower would overwhelm the defence grid well before Phoenix could get up to speed. And Styx, Erik was quite sure, would not let them run.

"Styx, situation report please." There were forty-eight warships on this side of the Facility. Styx's intelligence had been that Raka Fleet was one hundred strong, but Scan's count was up to one hundred and twenty four, the others on the planetoid's far sides, where Sunrise was now setting watch.

"Sunrise shows massive activations on the farside also," Jiri added, in case anyone could possibly miss it.

"Arms, watch those in-systemers at the station," Erik warned, feeling the walls closing in around them. "The main warships are deepynine, they may be under Styx's control, but the stations are alo. We've no idea what they'll do."

"Aye Captain," said Corrig. "Weapons at neutral, I don't want to alarm them."

"Good idea. Styx?" She still hadn't answered him.

"Hold a moment please Captain. I am processing."

"Captain," said Shilu, "Phoenix coms are running at overload capacities. I don't know how she's doing it, but Styx is transmitting data approximately... two orders of magnitude beyond what the system's supposed to carry."

Erik flipped a moment's attention from his main battlespace display, to call up the data-spike on the newly-advanced drysine coms array Phoenix now carried. The numbers were insane. "Shali, can you get me an analysis?"

"Yes Captain," came Shali's voice. She sounded frightened, and perhaps a little awed. "I knew that the technological base that made me is inferior to the drysines, but this is perhaps the first time I've seen the full extent of it. Even Chion cannot do this."

"What's she doing, Shali? In language I can understand, please?"

"Reprogramming an entire Fleet, Captain. The levels of complexity increase exponentially as the code is scaled. There are many types of deepynine brain, and they associate at higher levels in ways that defy simple description. I hadn't thought Styx needed to reprogram this much. If I'd known, I'd have said it was impossible."

"Impossible because of the alien programming language?" Shilu asked, squinting as he tried to understand.

"No Lieutenant Shilu. Impossible by the laws of physics. Even a brain as advanced as Styx's can only generate a finite amount of data. She is currently exceeding what I calculated that limit to be by two full orders of magnitude."

"There's human physics and there's drysine physics," Kaspowitz muttered. It was an old debate among the crew, many of whom ran into things they still failed to understand in Phoenix's new technical systems. Kaspowitz, and occasionally even Rooke, still complained that when they ran the sums on the new jump engines, many of the numbers appeared to be violating the human understanding of physical laws. When queried on it, Styx had replied that she did not have time to unravel the entire human understanding of the universe and reconstruct it again so that the numbers made sense. Suffice to say, Rooke had opined, that humanity's top physicists would be very alarmed to see just how much they'd gotten wrong, if Phoenix ever got home to tell them about it.

"Intership coms intensity just maxed out," Shilu said with alarm. "Captain, there's a lot of conversation happening out there."

"Active scan!" said Geish. "Captain, they're checking us out. Multiple scans."

Erik's coms blanked for a moment, as though overwhelmed by an incoming data surge. "Hello Captain," said a cool, androgynous voice then. "I am pleased to make your acquaintance."

"Hello," said Erik. If this conversation turned bad, he thought, it would be the last he'd ever have. "To whom am I speaking?"

"I am Raka Fleet. I am one hundred and twenty four warships strong, plus many supporting vessels and facilities. Styx says that I should speak to you, and assure you that I am your friend."

An audible gasp of relief escaped lips all about the bridge. Erik muted his own coms for a moment, just to let out the breath he hadn't realised he was holding, and to take another. He activated coms again. "Hello Raka Fleet. I am also pleased to make your acquaintance. The warship Phoenix is your friend as well."

7

Lisbeth performed entry at nearly ten-thousand kilometres an hour, which she recalled from her ex-Fleet Debogande Inc instructor was the textbook hostile-territory entry velocity. The steep descent took her out of the groundfire window quickly, as hostile responses from the planet were always possible against a shuttle of alien design flying without active identification on the edge of a warzone. The Gs at the bottom of the descent were brutal, and she eased them somewhat by cutting in thrust early, before the thicker atmosphere gripped the shuttle's lifting surfaces, and spread the deceleration over a forty second period rather than a murderous ten-G twenty seconds. She hadn't heard from Hiro in the back for ten minutes now, and hoped that even these lower Gs wouldn't be too much for him.

They bumped and rattled now through thick cloud, which broke into momentary flashes of harsh, rocky terrain below, basalt rock and high ridges, many trees and veils of rain.

"It's very wild below," said Lior, apparently unperturbed by the Gs or the turbulence of heavy weather. In the thick grey beyond the canopy, lightning flashed. "I'm reading a few small settlements, I can't see any roads. The nearest large city is a thousand kilometres east, and that's mostly ruin today. I doubt many will live there. There is an appeal to wilderness, not to ruin."

"Well the one feature navigation recognises in this direction is the Tegu'ru Temple," said Lisbeth. "I've no idea what it is either, but we're real close, and there could be something larger nearby."

"Perhaps," said Lior, staring at the cloud-strewn horizon, without confidence.

The cloud broke, and Lisbeth saw rugged terrain, and deep crevasses that scarred the landscape. To one side, through heavy rain, a plate of rock thrusting upward at an odd angle. "This looks like V-strike damage," said Lisbeth. "How close are we to the impact craters?"

"One is three hundred kilometres away," Lior agreed. "Do you have knowledge of geology?" Lisbeth couldn't recall Lior ever asking her a question before. Junior security, under Timoshene's command, he mostly just did his job, in silence. Possibly the situation required him to do inventory on all things, including how much knowledge various in this party possessed that might assist with survival.

"Humans receive a general education," Lisbeth told him. "I know a bit about a lot of things." While parren children, locked in their respective Houses, were taught subjects related to their temporal psychology, then had to learn new things when they phase-changed as adults. Parren children spent more time in school as adults than children, and were unquestionably the best-educated people of the Spiral, returning to education every time they phased.

The shuttle fell in heavy turbulence, then lurched upward once more. Lisbeth reflected how strange it was that one became far less worried about turbulence when one was pilot, and in control. There was a metaphor there for life, she thought. Besides, assault shuttles were designed to fly with zero control-surface input, and could only be made 'out of control' in atmosphere by spectacularly bad conditions, or spectacularly bad flying.

She ran her eye over Lior's scan feed, showing rugged terrain stretching to huge mountains on the left, and the map coordinates of some hypothetical settlements, possibly drawn from a map database on some local nav buoy. Whether they actually existed or not was another matter. On a world bombarded by periodic V-strikes, and surely first on the reeh's list of new acquisitions once their millennia-long advance resumed, who would want to live here?

"I think we should go until we find someone who'll respond to coms, to be sure they're friendly," she said. "What do you guys..." Before she could finish, alarms blared, and scan showed something screaming down to intercept them from up high. "Incoming!" Lisbeth yelled. "Counter-measures!"

Those were firing automatically, and just as well, because Lior certainly didn't know how use them, and she'd never find the control in time. 'Never too early,' Lisbeth recalled Lieutenant Hausler telling her, during her instruction while on Phoenix. And she waited, two agonising seconds longer than she wanted, then hit full forward thrust and maximum Gs up and to the side, as countermeasures blasted the sky about them with flares and disruptive frequencies.

The explosion was huge, and rocked them, a glare in the cockpit. Then alarm lights, and damage lights, and the terrifying smell of smoke. Lisbeth grabbed the controls hard, as the autos protested that they didn't know how to fly the shuttle in this new configuration.

Several seconds later, and they were still flying, one and two engines still with power, though one was dropping fast and overheating rapidly, fire alarms blaring. More controls screeched at her about a hull breach, loss of pressure, loss of hydraulics, and various attempts from autos to re-establish.

"We're still flying!" she heard herself shout over coms, as much to reassure herself as to inform others. "Controls still work, but I'm losing power and I could lose control any moment! I'm landing! Lior, find me a spot!"

They were still too damn high, she thought, and just getting down would take time. She nosed down, easing back thrust, trying to take as much pressure off the damaged number one engine as possible. No sudden manoeuvres, was all she could think, picturing something abruptly breaking, or stopping, or exploding, and then the headlong fall into gravity's embrace, with as little chance of recovery as a rock thrown off a cliff.

Ahead were mountains, and they were building speed dangerously fast in descent. Lisbeth didn't see what other choice she had, unwilling to swing the engine nacelles, given the left one would likely refuse and could equally just stop if she played with it. She eased them over a high ridge at speed, treetops whipping past, then into the valley below, and a crescent lake amidst the mountains.

"There!" she said, even as Lior pointed to it. "I'm going to try and put us down alongside the lake, everyone brace!"

Too much speed, she realised. Without the engine nacelles, she'd still be doing four hundred kph at the landing site. Just beyond it, cliffs rose sharp and vertical, leaving no room to turn around and bleed off speed, even if she dared to try a turn. She'd have to try the nacelles to slow down.

She swung them with the left-hand control, heart in mouth. Nothing exploded, but nothing else happened. Still their speed was building, even as she pulled from the steepest part of the dive. Six hundred kph, now fading to five as they levelled above rugged hills and flashing trees -- the shuttle was hardly aerodynamic, but the drag was still not enough.

"We're going in the water!" she announced -- an unnecessary announcement, but if she didn't articulate it, she'd never believe she was doing it. The lake was approaching fast, and she knew she had to make the approach as shallow as possible, clipping trees on the next ridge as she came in lower still. Then water was racing below, the longest arm of the crescent, and ahead, a lakeside shore thick with trees and backed by cliffs.

Four fifty kilometres an hour. Four hundred. If she dropped them in it too soon, they'd tumble and break up, water at these speeds wasn't much more forgiving than rock. Not to mention, they'd then sink to the bottom of what might have been a very deep lake. But how did she judge the long skid of a water ditching when she'd never trained for one, let alone performed one?

Fear of ditching too early was quickly overwhelmed by fear of ditching too late, as trees and cliffs rushed up. Two fifty. She edged them down, trying to keep the shuttle's reluctant nose in the air... a crash and shake as their belly hit the water. They bounced, suddenly airborne once more, as trees and cliffs rushed rapidly closer. On no, she'd killed them all!

She slammed the controls forward, and they hit much harder, a crash and then impossible Gs hurling her forward, threatening to tear her head off her body. Then stillness, but for water cascading off the canopy. It cleared, to reveal a rocky shoreline, and tall trees, barely twenty meters ahead. She hoped the lake didn't get suddenly deep, like some plunging mountain fjords, or they'd sink and drown.

She fought to release her restraints, feeling a savage pain in her left wrist, bashed on the controls in the landing. Then a low, heavy THUD, as the hull touched rock beneath the water. Lisbeth gasped, and tried to collect her thoughts. Her wrist hurt, her neck hurt, her shoulders hurt where the restraints had grabbed her. But she was alive. Alongside, Lior seemed to be alive as well, releasing his restraints.

"Everyone okay?" Lisbeth asked on coms.

"Standby," said Timoshene. That was him at least.

"We're in water, so try to gather as many supplies as possible before we get flooded." She finally got the restraints off, and tried to extricate herself from the seat. That was difficult, as her legs were jelly. She'd thought that she might be used to this kind of thing by now, but no.

8

Erik checked his suit diagnostic for the tenth time in the last five minutes, and found all systems green. By his recollection, he hadn't EVAed in a suit since Defiance, about nine months ago. The regs stated that all crew should keep their skills sharp, even the Captain, but he either hadn't had the time, or had been downworld on Dul'rho. Or perhaps, it occurred to him now as his eyes flicked across air feed, gyros, coms and visuals, the crew of Phoenix had all been getting cocky on operational skills. Having survived what they'd survived the past nearly-three years, they were feeling they could handle the little things in their sleep.

On the big command post screen where he was belted in beside Lieutenant Alomaim, PH-3's external feed showed the damaged rotary station wheel, fully one-third of its length broken away, with further fractures along its rim and spoke-arms caused by the rotational misalignment. Attitude thrust appeared to have halted the rotation before the entire wheel could disintegrate, and several ships had captured the two broken rim sections, and were hauling them back.

"Going to take it nice and slow through here," came Lieutenant Jersey's voice from the cockpit. "Lots of debris, whole place is a mess."

"Phoenix sees no indication of hostile activity," Commander Draper added, in the low voice of a hunter crouched in the undergrowth, scanning vegetation for hungry carnivores.

Phoenix was barely ten kilometres away, so close that its mag-rounds would arrive barely a second after firing, and all its weapons were primed. No one was particularly happy that Erik was insisting to go aboard in person. But with Second Shift in command on the bridge now that the Captain was off-ship, Draper could at least not complain that he'd missed the whole show.

"Captain," came Trace's voice on a private channel. "I object again to this away-mission. It is reckless."

"I heard you the first time," said Erik, studying the data-tiles that accompanied the location of various alien ships crowded about the crippled station. Many were conducting rescue operations, busy as bees about a hive, and not paying the new arrival any attention.

"If it's a trap," Trace continued, "then Bravo Platoon alone cannot guarantee your safety, even with Phoenix's direct firesupport. All of Phoenix Company probably couldn't, and I can't spare them anyway."

Trace was down on the Kalax planetoid, watching warships and deepynine reactivations. Getting an eyes-on look at exactly what Raka Fleet comprised of, while recovering the remains of deepynine commanders for analysis, and interacting with their new 'friends'. Even more importantly, they were guarding the communications system nodes that the alo engineers had shown them, allowing for a bypass of the Facility's defensive grid. No one wanted those systems turning back on anytime soon. Trace had retasked Bravo Platoon reluctantly, and only when Erik had ordered her to.

"Your objection is noted," said Erik. "Captain out." Recent developments between himself and Trace only made him more determined to keep it short and professional.

"Captain, I'm receiving a berthing invitation from the intact quarter," came Ensign Singh from the cockpit. "Looks legit, they've got space."

"Hello PH-3," Second Lieutenant Abacha interjected from the Phoenix bridge, "we're scanning that berth now. Structural integrity looks nonexistent, there will be pressurised pockets only. We are highlighting three military ships in close proximity, all insystem runners but with mag-rail guns. Captain, Arms is recommending we paint all adjacent threats with active targeting to keep them in line."

"Negative Phoenix," Erik replied. "We are trying to make friends. Keep your weapons ready and active targeting offline."

"Phoenix copies, Captain." Abacha didn't sound any happier about it than Trace. A new coms link opened -- this one his local marine support, arguably the most important of all. He blinked on the icon. "Go ahead Lieutenant."

Lieutenant Jordan Alomaim, now responsible for the Captain's personal protection away from Phoenix, could break into Erik's personal coms any time he felt necessary. Thus far he was minding his manners. "What's the objective, Captain?"

Erik glanced away from his screens to look at the hulking armoured gorilla suit. Bravo Platoon had taken two casualties in the assault, both wounded, one seriously. Lieutenant Alomaim was not one for smalltalk at the best of times, and now least of all.

"The alo went to a lot of trouble to get us involved," Erik told the Lieutenant. "I'm not sure what to make of Raka Fleet, I'm in no position to judge what they want. But alo aren't machines, or not mostly, and I want to know what they know."

"Styx didn't want us talking to them," said Alomaim. "Why do you think?" Erik knew he had to answer Alomaim even as he didn't need to answer Trace. As marine commander in his close protection detail, Alomaim needed to know all the variables, and what his reckless Captain was hoping to achieve, to assess how best to protect him.

"I think Styx doesn't want any organic entanglements. Organic loyalties here are an unpredictable variable. Styx prefers to eliminate unpredictable variables where possible."

"Maybe literally," Alomaim said grimly. "If they've got some idea what Styx is, they might just be looking for our protection."

"That's entirely possible," Erik agreed. "But Raka Fleet and these alo have been joined for a long time. Evidently there's some sort of bond there, something possibly close to what their alo brothers had with Nia before they escaped and ran to the Spiral. I'd like to understand that relationship. It's the same relationship currently endangering all of humanity. You understand?"

"I understand, Captain."

"And this could be the key to granting freedom to more enslaved species within the Reeh Empire. If we can free these alo, more may follow."

"Is that really our mission, Captain?" the young Lieutenant asked skeptically. Trace had trained him well.

"It's not," Erik conceded. "But I have a feeling that reaching Chion won't be as easy as Styx makes out, Raka Fleet or not. If the Fleet's not enough, we'll need organic help. No shortage of rebellious species in the Empire, Lieutenant."

"Sounds exactly the kind of thing Styx won't like."

Erik nodded within his helmet. "Now you're getting it."

Lieutenant Jersey edged PH-3 closer to the shuttle dock beneath the main ship berth, before deciding that the berth looked structurally unsound, damaged from what might have been a forced breakaway by whoever was there previously. But a large engineering door was open to vacuum further along the station rim, with emergency traffic coming and going, and Ensign Lee and Phoenix engaged in further communication that somehow arrived at an understanding that the Phoenix Captain would use that entrypoint instead.

Erik went out the back with the rest of Bravo Platoon, using suit thrusters to manoeuvre away from PH-3's big nacelles and along the rim. Rotary space stations weren't supposed to be stationary, it set his teeth on edge to be this close and see it not moving. Like a sea captain coming across a capsized ship, everything screamed 'emergency' and 'disaster'.

The big wheel loomed overhead, lit hellish red in the light of the nearby gas giant about which the Facility orbited. The full arc ended somewhere 'behind', as his current orientation put it, huge chunks of rim simply gone, and the nearby space was filled with spinning, drifting bits of debris.

Lieutenant Alomaim stayed at Erik's side, as Bravo fanned out and forward, a protective cordon with weapons ready as they headed 'down' to the lower rim, then around to where rotational gravity would normally make a floor. Here Erik saw the engineering door, a large rectangular opening to and from which traffic was transiting.

A glance at local scan showed PH-3 following them, apparently the locals hadn't wanted the shuttle blocking traffic near the door in an emergency. Some of the traffic coming and going from the door was nearly shuttle-sized -- small repair runners, two-person maintenance units and a variety of manned suits. A group more, Erik saw jetting in, were AI drones, decelerating hard in reverse, suggesting they'd arrived from far away at high-V. These corrected course and skidded into the interior.

"Hold here," said Alomaim, as the formation paused short of the engineering door, save for Third Squad, which continued forward to peer inside. Several small vehicles appeared abruptly at the station rim's edge, burning hard to make the engineering door with all haste, then decelerating fast as Third Squad cleared well back. Several aliens in suits -- alo, Erik supposed -- were clinging to the vehicle's exterior, riding like firemen on their way to an emergency.

"Looks pretty busy inside," said Sergeant Yesufu, Commander of Third Squad. "I don't recommend it."

"What the Sergeant said, Captain," Alomaim echoed. "I don't recommend it either."

"Noted," said Erik. "We've made appointments, get me inside."

He kicked for thrust when Alomaim signalled to move -- spacer EVA suits worked much the same way that marines did, with free-flight mode allowing the activation of directional jets by gesture and movement of limbs, allowing eyes and hands free for other tasks. About the rim of the big door, the rectangular space penetrated vertically through the station rim, into warehouse storage where big containers were loaded into runners and racks, while another section held grapples for small ships.

Those ships now swarmed with activity, pressurised containers unloaded from holds left unpressurised in the emergency. Erik guessed they might be moving people, otherwise unable to be fitted with suits. Children, maybe? But what would children be doing at a military facility?

"Signal says over here," said Alomaim as coms indicated some new location. It flashed on Erik's local map, as close as a spacer got to accessing marine tacnet. "Let's move."

The marines moved in file so as to minimise the disturbance, and Erik passed stacked floors crowded with hurried activity, suits and now a few drones hauling equipment, and a few, bodies. Ahead, Third Squad arrived at a main floor between runners being loaded with emergency gear, weapons scanning carefully, but none of the aliens spared the heavily armed humans even a glance.

"Press on," Alomaim instructed Sergeant Yesufu, who proceeded with a burst of white thrust through some big pressure doors into this unloading dock. The doors were left wide open, meaning that decompression all through this part of the rim was hopeless, and emergency workers had given up trying to keep air in the main sections, aiming for rapid transit instead.

Erik kept to one side of the doors as he passed, wary of blocking traffic. His visor lit with green-tinged night-vision in the power-out hall beyond, everything floating in the absence of air, gravity or basic life-support. Here there were bodies drifting, without suits and dead since the AI command vessels docked to station had fired, feeling themselves betrayed. Erik's hands itched for some sort of weapon, despite knowing he was not rated for anti-armour firepower in a suit. If there was shooting, Bravo Platoon would do it for him, while he went hard for the nearest cover, probably with marines bundling him into it by force, then covering him with their own armour.

Amidst the bodies, debris and confusion, Erik saw Sergeant Yesufu pausing in a dissipating white cloud of thrust before a smaller alien suit. The Sergeant's Koshaim-20 was somewhat taller than this new alien, politely pointed at the deck.

"LT, I'm getting direct lasercom," Yesufu said after a moment. "The translator says we're to follow this one. It's not far. I think it's a kid."

"Ask if we can help," Erik instructed, watching some of the equipment the rescue teams were hauling. "They're doing pressure bubble evacs, they've got people trapped in some of these rooms and corridors when the emergency doors came down. We've got equipment that can help."

Yesufu's actual boss, Lieutenant Alomaim, did not object, so the Sergeant relayed it. "He just says come," Yesufu replied. "I think they're good for assistance, Captain."

They followed, Erik only too aware of Alomaim's cool dismay. Wondering what the hell his Captain was doing, offering Phoenix's valuable rescue crews into this mess, all to be guarded by equally valuable marines. Erik had no time to explain to the Lieutenant beyond what he already had. Embarking alone on Styx's great war with a new, great fleet to rescue or eliminate Chion was not something he relished. Phoenix was going to need friends. That Styx did not want him making these friends only convinced him further of the necessity.

Ahead to the left at a major T-junction, Erik could see the walls twisted, the plate fasteners severed from the primary bulkheads where the station wheel rim had buckled when a third of its length had been blasted away. "Centrifugal force is a hell of a thing," Gunnery Sergeant Brice observed.

"That's the problem with building them this small," Erik replied. "Doesn't take much damage to be catastrophic." Rotary wheel stations were designed to evenly distribute stresses outward from the central hub. This one had lost a big chunk of rim, shifting its center-of-mass away from the hub, and thus its center-of-spin as well. These station arms, though vastly smaller than the monsters in human space, were still the size of skyscrapers, and leaning them on an angle would have caused collapse, and the entire station to come apart if counter-rotational thrust had not ceased the station's spin.

But now Erik could see great steel hallways and bulkheads twisted like rails buckled beneath a hot desert sun. And thus the huge scale of the decompression, even far away from the primary damage.

Ahead, beyond the bends and twists in the station rim, repair crews were hard at work amidst snaking emergency wiring and conduits, orange sparks fountaining in the zero-G darkness as cutters and welders attempted to fuse things into some kind of working order.

Erik and Bravo Platoon manoeuvred past the mess, approaching the rim outer wall, but now on the right opened a major engineering door to a wide space, cavernous by the scale of a smaller station like this. Within were great floodlights that blanked Erik's visor until it adjusted to regular settings.

Within, dark shadows in the glare, suited figures were gathering clusters of free-floating bodies into rows before what looked like the containment wall of a giant pressurised chamber. Figures worked to remove bodies from their pressure suits, limbs floating lifeless, handled with reverent care despite the scene's production-line quality. For the first time, Erik saw the faces of the beings in the suits. Narrow, angular faces, large nostril cavities, gaping wide in the center of the face. Black, beady eyes, now sightless. Hundreds of bodies, with more arriving by the moment. Most of their suits were torn, Erik saw. Death had been caused by decompression or shrapnel, or both.

"Alo," confirmed Lieutenant Alomaim, for those behind who could not see. "I count a hundred and fifty dead here. Some of them look like kids."

Unsuited bodies were passed to a drone, floating before the pressure vessel entrance. The drone took each body in turn, handled gently with clawed legs, and scanned with mismatched eyes. The body was then handed to more suited alo, who strapped it to a gurney, which was in turn fed into the pressure vessel hatch with a series of control activations and flashing lights.

"Anyone have any idea what that thing is?" Erik asked, feeding his view on general vision to anyone who had an eye to spare.

"Beats me," said Gunnery Sergeant Brice, in a low, haunted voice. Many alo were simply watching procedures, in a most inefficient manner for spacers in an emergency. Erik thought the whole scene felt religious, like some kind of ceremony.

"I'm detecting vibration from the machine," Alomaim reported. That would be a lasercom detector, Erik thought. In a vacuum, with no one touching a nearby surface, there was no other source of physically-transmitted sound.

"Hello Stan," said Erik, hoping Phoenix's resident alien expert could shed some light. "I'd like to talk to someone, but no one is volunteering. I could go up and ask, but alo have never been big on conversation."

"Captain, I would recommend against it," came Romki's reply on coms. He was back on Phoenix, watching on a display. "If they want to talk to you, I think they'll let you know."

An external feed blinked on Erik's faceplate, requesting acceptance. "Captain, I have an external feed," said Alomaim. "I think it's from the alo."

"I have it too." He blinked on it, and overrode the security protests, confident that his suit's uplinked systems could be quickly put right if an infiltration code tried something hostile. The link connected, and spread when invited to a visual display.

Alo figures, humanoid by human judgement, filled with glowing filaments, like a network of bright electric paths. The image zoomed back, to show AI drones, and warships. Not drysine drones, the configuration looked different. The electric filaments that ran through alo, drones and warships alike began to converge, then link and intertwine.

"They're talking to us," Erik said to his audience. "Phoenix are you getting this?"

"Yes Captain, we see it."

"It looks like they're saying that all these alo are cybernetically uplinked together with Raka Fleet. So this is deepynine-derived technology, not ceephay."

"Which makes them fundamentally different from all the other cybernetically-uplinked beings in the Empire," Romki added. "We weren't even aware that this level of neurological integration was possible with deepynine technology, only ceephay."

"Styx, observations?"

"It answers some questions, as the Professor suggests," said Styx. "I had calculated that it was possible to do this with deepynine technology, but there is never a way to know for certain until it's been tried. Now we know."

"And can guess the nature of the relationship between alo and Nia back in the Spiral," Draper added.

"Yes Commander."

"Does that mean it's likely possible with drysine technology too, Styx?" Erik wondered.

"Quite likely yes, Captain. It was never seriously considered in my time, among drysine organic allies. There were some attempts at the small scale, but all were to my knowledge abandoned when the potential negative consequences for organics were uncovered."

"You might adopt this technology thinking it's a saddle," offered Lieutenant Shilu. "But you eventually discover that it's a leash."

"Large temperature rise," said Alomaim of the containment vessel before them. "The computer's guessing some kind of intense sonic barrage."

"It's an organic disposal mechanism," said Styx, saving them the trouble of wondering. "You're standing in the equivalent of a crematorium. Some degree of respectfulness may be in order."

The surrounding alo merely floated, watching. Other cultures and other beings may have held hands, or sung songs, but Erik didn't think that likely from anything he'd heard about alo. Others continued to accept, bundle and prepare more bodies, to feed into the machine.

A new doorway on the pressure vessel began blinking. Alo floated in, and pressed buttons. One produced a large set of tongs, while another held a large bag. The bag was an oddity -- made of fabric, black with gold pattern, looking more like the sort of thing one might use to cover a sofa. From alo, such decoration was unexpected.

Lights flashed, and the door opened. The alo with the tongs reached within, and pulled out the most intricate set of filament wires, fine and gleaming as the emergency floodlights caught it. Soft like human hair, and sprouting in all directions as the alo reverentially pressed the bundle into the decorated bag.

"That's what's left," Alomaim murmured. "The cybernetics wiring can't be damaged by sonic vibration. It strips the flesh and bone, and leaves just that."

The bag was pulled tight with a cord, handed to another alo, who pushed away, headed for a hatchway out. Another brought more bags.

"Recycling," said Sergeant Brice, distastefully.

"They helped Raka Fleet break away from the reeh's control," said Erik, gazing at the single Raka drone, helping to feed another body into the opening. Its big alloy pincers were gentle. "I'd like to know why."

"Captain, if I may," said Styx. "My understanding from interactions with Raka Fleet is that Raka wished to leave. The alo were not necessarily so keen, but I'm uncertain as ever of organic motivations. I only know for certain that Raka's desire to leave came first."

"Perhaps they were hoping for gratitude," Romki suggested. "It's a dangerous strategy for them. Looking after and maintaining Raka Fleet is their whole existence. But AIs let free from previous constraints tend to expand their horizons dramatically. Perhaps the alo will regret it."

* * *

"Hello Raka Fleet," Trace tried for the tenth time, jetting through micro-G industrial structure, watching the Kalax Facility coming to life around her. "I know you have enough spare attention span to answer me. Phoenix and Styx have freed you from your bondage to the reeh, and now Phoenix requires answers."

The massive transit hall was now alive with drones, automated industrial transports hauling ship parts and all manner of random traffic. These drones looked different to anything she'd seen before -- similar-sized to drysine or deepynine warriors, but narrower, more bulbous in their protrusions. Many had only one big cutting foreleg, making them lopsided like a fiddler crab. Others were industrial models, forelegs in the form of manipulator arms or multi-tools, and without apparent anti-armour weapons.

"Could always wait for Styx to give us her analysis," Sergeant Rael suggested, watching their flanks warily as they manoeuvred through the cavernous maze of automated heavy industry.

"If we function here purely as Styx's servants, that's how we're going to get treated," Trace replied. She could see exactly what was worrying Erik, and why he was meeting in person with the alo, however little she liked his methods. Phoenix was on this mission to save humanity. The more Styx and her increasing AI fleet gained in strength, the less that humanity would be a concern for anyone on this mission. "Shali, do you have a better fix on that warship on grid T-43?"

"Yes Major. It's not easy for me to get a clear answer, the Fleet has recognised that I'm not a part of Styx's command structure and are ignoring me as well. But the warship in that berth appears to be a higher command designation."

"If they won't talk to us remotely," said Trace, "we're going to put ourselves in front of them physically and see what happens. Skeeta, I see you in position ahead?"

"Yes Major," said Lieutenant Jalawi, his voice fractured by static as interference from the Facility's coms network increased. "I'm nearly there, I'll meet you on the way in."

Alpha Platoon were off hunting AI command remnants in the depths of the Facility. Local Raka drones were doing that too, but Styx was concerned that some command units may have possessed enough local network superiority to override her new command protocols, at least temporarily. Delta Platoon were doing the same thing, while ensuring the defence network was well and truly shut down, while Bravo was up on the alo station with Erik, and Garudan were back on reserve duty in case more unexpected bad things happened. Elsewhere on the Facility, Styx's drones were swarming in their hundreds, and Phoenix's interests were looking mightily under-represented. Once again Phoenix Company was getting overstretched.

Another two kilometres along the underneath tunnels, Command Squad found Charlie Platoon positioned defensively around a major intersection, while local AI traffic sped past oblivious.

"Still not talking to you?" Jalawi asked, as Command Squad paused to let Charlie Third Squad take the lead. Trace fell in beside the Lieutenant as they jetted toward the surface.

"Not yet," Trace said grimly, checking the diagnostic on the Koshaim she hadn't fired yet on this outing.

"Couldn't you just ask Styx once she's gotten to know them better?"

"Phoenix is a separate command entity to Styx," said Trace, not caring that Styx could certainly hear her. "Best that Raka Fleet be aware of it."

Ahead, the access-way narrowed in proximity to the warship berth, crowded with close-support facilities and busy non-combat drones who ignored them in passing. Then they were into the berth, passing the enormous hind-quarters of a Raka Fleet warship. Here was a steady traffic of maintenance drones and some warriors, thrusting in low bursts against the planetoid's micro-G.

Trace wondered again that most of the Reeh Empire seemed oblivious to this AI Fleet in their midst. On Eshir, the so-called resistance had been surprised enough to see Styx's assassin bugs, and had met claims of Chion's existence with skepticism. But the reeh, of course, had never used Raka Fleet against other members of the Empire, just the Empire's external enemies. On Rando, they'd not even used reeh very much, just the reeh's genetically and cybernetically altered slave species.

There was no free travel within the Empire, and even less free exchange of information. Most of the Empire's population were oblivious that Chion had ever existed, let alone that she continued to. Indeed, most of them were oblivious that the reeh had ever been different to how they were now, and had once been a frequently kind and magnanimous people who had ruled with evident success, and even the consent of a majority of non-reeh beneath their governance. Chion's technology had changed them, against Chion's wishes, into something else entirely. And then they'd discovered Chion's greatest secret -- Nia, queen of the deepynines, captured long ago and hidden for millennia, with technological possibilities that had frightened the old reeh, but not the new.

"Hello Phoenix," said Trace, giving the ship a visual feed of the Raka monster up whose side they flew. "Please find me this thing's primary coms antenna, I'm going to make them listen."

"Hello Major," came back Lieutenant Lassa's voice, second-shift Coms Officer. "Schematic analysis is pretty sure this is it -- there's four, but the forward one gets the most attention."

"Charlie Platoon, take cover positions about the berth and wait," Trace instructed them. "Watch the outer entrance, I want warning if anyone tries to trap us in here."

She left the specifics to Jalawi, cut thrust approaching the warship's upward-pointing nose, then turned briefly upside down to use main thrust to slow down. It halted her nearly level with the warship's nose, a wide, armoured cap of the toughest materials known to science. It looked as though someone had blasted it with high-velocity sand, which wasn't far from the truth -- a strange pattern of yellow-stained scars. The most advanced human materials science, before the krim came, had guessed what the toughest substances might be, and been off by several orders of magnitude. But building entire ships from it was impossible, for reasons of mass, let alone cost.

Protruding from the nose cap were several large antennae. Those were frequently shattered in random debris impacts, but easily replaced. Trace called up her lasercom, pointed the shoulder-mounted beam directly at the antennae, and dialled the intensity up to maximum.

"Hello Raka Fleet," she said, confident that the Fleet's collective AI brains had by now learned and understood English entirely. "I am Major Thakur of Phoenix Company marines. Phoenix requires a separate communication from your leadership. We are not merely a subsidiary of Styx and the drysines. We represent humanity, whose alliance Styx and the drysines will require for their future survival in the Spiral. You will answer when we speak to you."

A glance about the berth showed Jalawi's marines positioned in overwatch. Nearer, Command Squad waited about the warship's nosecone. An armed presence, so close to a command vessel, would surely not be ignored.

Alarms flashed abruptly red, suit computers registering a pulse of active targeting from the warship. "Woah," said Jalawi. "That's not good."

As tacnet showed all the vessel's close-range, defensive weaponry mounts swivelling abruptly to target the marines. If it started firing, most of them would be dead in seconds. But then, if it fired, Styx would find her relations with Phoenix very tense indeed, and all hopes of a human alliance potentially vanishing with it. Styx had sworn that she was in control here. This was all on her.

Tense seconds passed. Active targeting continued, but the warrior drones within the berth continued about their business. A calculated threat, then. A gesture, perhaps something like a middle finger.

"Fine," said Trace, looking over tacnet, then looking around at the vast expanse of steel. This huge Facility that they'd all risked their lives to gain the utility of. "Fine." She switched to command frequency. "Hello Captain, this is the Major."

"Hello Major, go ahead."

"I have attempted to establish a command communication with Raka Fleet directly. They refuse to speak to us, though they're definitely talking to Styx."

"That's been my experience too."

"I would like to withdraw all Phoenix Company from the Facility. If they don't speak to us, they don't gain our services either. We are not theirs to command."

"I agree, Major. You have my leave to proceed."

Trace changed channels again. "Hello Phoenix Company, this is the Major. Phoenix Company will cease all operations and withdraw to Phoenix immediately. There is no emergency, and there is no rush. Do it in your own time, and do it politely. But we are withdrawing, and we are withdrawing now. All platoons copy back."

The calls came back one after another, from all save Jalawi, who already knew. There was no puzzlement, and no request for clarification. Trace didn't think they'd be particularly upset. This now was policing action, in a place where everything was strange and potentially dangerous, if it all suddenly turned on them. When alien politics got sketchy, to say nothing of AI politics, most marines would rather be elsewhere.

Outgoing calls went to waiting shuttle pilots, rendezvous arranged, and the orderly withdrawal set in motion. Trace indicated that Command Squad and Charlie Platoon should leave the berth and wait on the surface, jetting out to the vast, steel expanse and settling gently into defensive positions. Far above, lit red in the gas giant's glow, the fractured circle of the alo's habitation station, fully a third of its length severed and drifting, like a broken pretzel. Not far from that, her visor's ID function found Phoenix, barely fifty kilometres distant but nearly invisible, red light on black matte finish.

"Hello Major," came Styx's voice. "I read that Phoenix Company is withdrawing from the Facility?"

"That's correct, Styx."

"Major, there are surviving command elements loose on the Facility, and not enough Raka Fleet assets available to ascertain all of their whereabouts. Also, Delta Platoon has made much progress with the local defensive grid. I would like to see that progress continued."

"Do it yourself," said Trace.

A silence from Styx. "Major," she tried again, "this feels suspiciously like a human tantrum. You are one ship. Raka Fleet plus we drysines are a hundred plus. You cannot be in command all the time."

"Our information will not be filtered through you, Styx. We know how AIs work once a command hierarchy has been established. We represent humanity. If you wish future alliance with humanity, you will continue to include us in decision making."

"Raka Fleet has indicated that this is unacceptable. They will accept command from me alone. I must prioritise."

"Your decision is logical, Styx, given your position. Ours is likewise, given humanity's."

"Major, we must not become divided. You know that I value your input as much as ever."

"Yes Styx. I value yours as well."

"Please return Phoenix Company to its duties, Major. All assets must be fully deployed for this mission to be successful."

"Do it yourself," Trace repeated.

9

"Scan, get me a closeup visual." Commander Dylan Draper took a moment from reviewing the increasingly unpleasant Kalax surroundings to peer at the thing that Scan had found. Second Lieutenant Zelele complied from Scan Two, and Draper converted his left wrap-around screen to examine the object.

It was a two-person capsule, with multiple manipulation arms, and separate cargo housing for perhaps a small repair drone. With no engines to speak of, it moved toward Phoenix on attitude thrust alone, currently five kilometre and closing, halfway between themselves and the crippled alo station.

"No communications from it, Commander," Lieutenant Lassa reported from Coms.

"Hail it," said Draper. He didn't like being surrounded by AI fleet warships they'd been assured would be at least somewhat friendly, and now were turning out to be less than that. And now this. On his right, Lieutenant Commander Dufresne was monitoring warships emerging from the farside of the Facility. Sunrise and Melody were over that way, engaged in apparent communications. God knew what they were discussing, and where they now collectively considered Phoenix's place to be in this entire arrangement.

"No reply, Commander," said Lassa. "I've been able to achieve systems override on the vessel's coms, it can definitely hear us."

"Scan, threat assessment?" The little repair craft was not manoeuvring. Its current V would bring it alongside Phoenix in two minutes.

"No weapons," said Lieutenant Abacha from Scan One. "If it's a conventional bomb, it would need to be within three hundred meters to pose a significant risk. The debris field would be limited." Proximate explosives were a far greater threat in atmosphere than vacuum. A larger vessel might fragment into deadly shrapnel, but Phoenix was armoured to withstand far tougher than what this little ship could produce, if someone had rigged it to be a flying bomb. If it were a nuke, of course, those calculations changed drastically. But nukes were rare because they were so clumsy and indiscriminate, only effective as low-V proximity weapons, and at these ranges, pretty nasty to the people who'd deployed them. Besides, with Phoenix's latest sensor upgrades, they'd smell a nuke within a couple of kilometres.

"Helm?" Draper asked.

"Doesn't make much sense, does it?" Dufresne answered coolly. "If someone was going to attack us, there are plenty more effective ways to do it. Most of them involving things far less crude than bombs."

Four kilometres. "Commander, he's going to pass within a hundred meters of us on his present course," said Abacha.

"Could be some kind of test," Lieutenant De Marchi volunteered from Navigation.

Draper made up his mind. "Arms, active targeting on the approaching vessel. Let him know we have him locked."

"Aye Captain," said Second Lieutenant Mendez from Arms Two. Arms One wouldn't waste a single mag-round on this little thing.

Draper activated ship-wide coms. "All hands, this is the Commander. We are about to transition sideways in a short attitude-control burn. Cylinder rotation will remain unaffected, this is a notification only, alert status remains unchanged."

"Big ships don't make way for small threats in combat zones," Dufresne reminded him.

"I'm aware," said Draper, checking attitude thrust status with a fast toggle through buttons on the twin handgrips. All came back green. "Not exactly a combat zone any longer. And we're not sure he's a threat." Three kilometres. A light burn, always accompanied by unpredictable G with cylinder spin in progress. Phoenix drifted sideways, out of the small ship's path. Draper waited until that projected path would bring the interloper no closer than five hundred meters, then fired opposing thrust for a relative halt.

Beyond, scan showed PH-4 lifting from the Facility surface with Command Squad and Charlie Platoon aboard, and making her gradual, non-threatening way back to Phoenix. Draper toggled the coms himself. "Hello PH-4, this is the Commander."

"Herro Conander," came Tif's reply from the shuttle. "This is PH-4, go ahead."

"Tif, if you look to your scan, you'll find we have a small visitor closing on Phoenix's position. All our shuttles are currently occupied, you will be the first one back. On your way back to the ship, I'd like you to perform a flyby and see what you can see."

"PH-4 copies."

Another click. "Hello Commander, this is the Major. This is an alo ship and came from the alo station, is that correct?"

"It emerged from the repair traffic over there about ten minutes ago," said Draper. "Made several small thrust adjustments to create its current course, and nothing since."

"I think my marines should take a closer look."

"I don't think that's necessary at the present time, Major. We'll wait to see what it does next."

"We're being watched, Commander. Passivity will be noted. If this is someone sneaking away to tell us something the rest don't want us to hear, the next thing you'll see is a mag-round from a Raka ship passing through its location."

Draper was quite pleased to know that his current rank, to say nothing of the spacer-centric nature of the situation, meant that nothing the Major said to him was more than 'advice'. "I'll take that on board..."

Before he could sign off, the small repair ship fired attitude thrust once more. The forward viewport rotated Phoenix's way, as though wishing to turn, then continued past and began a slow spin. It completed two full, slow rotations, then another burst of thrust sent it rotating back the other way.

"That's odd," Abacha admitted. Call-outs for ship manoeuvres typically only happened on the bridge if the ship being watched actually changed trajectory. This barely counted.

"If it's an AI, it's a malfunctioning one," Dufresne observed, only glancing at the activity, her main attention on Raka Fleet. "More likely it has an organic pilot who has limited control."

"The ship doesn't seem damaged," said Abacha. "All attitude thrusters seem to be working, no external damage visible."

Two kilometres. The spin halted, a coordinated firing of several thrusters that suggested the pilot had found the auto-correction. Another thrust, and the ship began to slow. Draper knew what it looked like, but was wary of making guesses. On the other hand, as the Major said, this could be an opportunity to gather intelligence, at the very least. If this were what it looked like. The possibility that it wasn't, and that he'd look like a fool before the crew, became very real. But the Captain had told him not to worry so much about that sort of thing.

"Sniffers come back negative on nukes," said Jiri from Scan Two.

Dammit. Draper hit coms again. "Hello Major, the vessel is manoeuvring in an erratic manner. The pilot may be incapacitated, but to me it looks more like he doesn't know what he's doing flying a ship. That suggests a runaway. Please have PH-4 halt at a safe distance on your return to Phoenix, and task the marines to investigate."

"Yes Commander, the Major copies."

* * *

Erik entered Medbay One, still sweaty from the EVA suit, and looked at the skinny-limbed creature sitting on bunk five. It was wrapped in a blanket, knees up about its shoulders, watching them all with wary black eyes. Doc Suelo and most of the medical staff were with Phoenix Company's casualties -- ten, Trace had said, to go with eight killed. More names to Phoenix's ledger. Corpsman Rashni attended to the blanket-wrapped bundle, with Stan Romki watching nearby.

Romki saw Erik and came over, sipping an electrolyte drink. Erik thought he looked unsteady. "Alo," said Romki, unnecessarily. Everyone knew what alo looked like. Humanity's mysterious saviours, since a thousand years past, when their allies the chah'nas had aided human forces fighting the krim, and later the tavalai. Exactly how much of that had been the alo's idea from the beginning, Erik didn't think even the highest minds in Fleet were aware. Certainly a lot of the technology had been theirs. Or the deepynines', rather, as all technology humans had once called 'alo' was actually derived from Nia, including Phoenix.

"Looks like a kid," Erik observed.

Romki nodded. "Seems to be about eight or nine, in human years at least. Old enough to operate the automatic undocking on a repair ship, but not enough to actually fly it once undocked."

"He said anything?"

"Not a lot. He was hungry, so we've fed him a bit. His name's Tan."

"That's something. What's his language?"

"Nothing consistent with what we know of alo language today." Romki took a long swig of his drink. "Shali provided a translator, it seems to be working."

"Shali? Not Styx?"

Romki looked puzzled. "Does it matter?"

"When comparing these alo to the ones in the Spiral, then yes, I'd imagine Styx could tell us a lot more about how they contrast."

"I heard rumours," said Romki, with some trepidation. "You had a fight with Styx?"

"If we had a fight with Styx, we'd all be dead," Erik said drily. "We had a disagreement. I'll sort it out later. Stan, are you okay?" Romki looked uncomprehending. Erik gestured the drink.

"I'm getting old, Captain," said Romki, with forced humour. "That last jump took something out of me."

Erik nodded slowly, and put a hand on the Professor's shoulder. "If you need anything at all, Stan. Just say."

"A vacation would be nice. Someplace warm."

Erik smiled, squeezed his shoulder, and walked to the alo child on the bunk. Beady black eyes watched him coming, above the rim of a cup. Erik looked askance at Corpsman Rashni.

"He seems healthy," said Rashni, short-haired, dark and kind of pretty. A new arrival in Medbay from just before the last campaign of the Triumvirate War, she'd been active on Phoenix far longer on this adventure than she had in the war against the tavalai. "There are some genetic oddities, and what looks like an overdose of micros in the bloodstream. I think there's something synthetic in his system that's producing them, but I can't pinpoint it."

"Anything heavily cyberised?"

Rashni scratched her head. "The stuff in his brain is pretty impressive. Absolutely no idea what it does or how it works, though Shali's looking at it."

"You mean his behaviour is under reeh control?"

"Well that's the odd thing, it doesn't seem to be. I mean, we've got some pretty good data from the croma and the corbi resistance on what that looks like. Most of it we still don't know, because they don't know -- the technology is so far beyond their grasp. But our basic scans of Tan's brain activity shows it's pretty normal. For an alo kid, based on what little we know of alo kids."

Erik gazed at the kid. The kid stared back, outer eyelids rarely engaged, just small, transparent inner lids, like a reptile. The face was narrow, bony, with a pronounced nasal cavity above a small mouth. The cavity had gills, membrane-like filters in diagonal slits. Alo smell was supposedly several thousand times better than a human's, similar to that of a dog.

Not a beautiful face, to human eyes. Doubtless humans looked as bad to them.

"Tan," said Erik. There was a translator in one ear, apparently working. "You understand me, Tan?"

The alo sipped from his cup, slowly. Erik glanced at Lance Corporal Penn, who'd somehow pissed off the roster gods to land guard duty directly after combat. Behind Erik was Private Ruiz, both with only sidearms, looking tired. Two veteran marines, to guard one alo kid. But until they knew what they were dealing with, it seemed prudent.

The alo kid said something. A clicking sound, like teeth or mobile jaw parts clashing. "I understand you," said Erik's earpiece. "Are you the Captain?"

"Yes," said Erik. "Why did you come here? Will your people want you back?"

"Maybe." Evasively, Erik thought. The black eyes were hardly expressive. "You don't have ***." The translator completely squelched the last word. Erik glanced at Romki, who shook his head to indicate he hadn't caught it either. Tan indicated his wrists, then the tops of his shoulders. Repeated the word, to no better result from the translator.

"Captain," said Penn. "Reeh have bio-mechanical attachments built directly into their wrists and shoulders. It's like wiring, only it's not just to their own brain, it feeds directly into suits or armour. Maybe these alo have it too."

"I saw them recycling bodies on the station to recover their cybernetic parts," Erik told him.

"No shit." Penn didn't sound surprised. "Maybe those were the only bits they valued."

"No," Erik answered Tan. He held up his wrist, pulling the jumpsuit cuff down to show bare skin. "No external attachments. Is that what you're asking?" Tan peered, leaning to examine with dispassionate curiosity. "Humans have other augmentations, but they're internal. Nothing like what the reeh have. They make us stronger and faster, but we're still human. What do the reeh make the alo have?"

"Many," said Tan. "Many, all over." And sipped his drink, looking warily around at the humans.

"Is that why you came here?" Erik asked. "So you didn't have to get those augmentations?" Thinking again of the recycling center, zero-G bodies floating. Could hardly blame the kid. No reply from Tan. Probably it was the kind of thing an alo could get severely punished for, even one this young.

"Tan, do you have parents? Family?" A blank look. As though the translator was malfunctioning on his end now. "Tan, please understand. We're good people. We'd like to help you. But if there are people who will want you back, they'll be angry at us if you stay here. If they ask you to go back, will you go?"

"No," said Tan, short and blunt. Entirely decisive, when it came to it. Erik did not think he looked particularly nervous or frightened, just wary. Nerves and fear had never seemed a large part of the alo's psychological makeup.

"And if your people tell us that we have to send you back? What then?"

Tan pointed one thin, bony finger at Penn's sidearm. He made a gun of two fingers, pointed them at his own head, and pulled the trigger. All entirely without hesitation, or even blinking. Erik took a deep breath, and glanced at Romki. Romki looked alarmed, gazing at the alo child with cold trepidation. They'd all heard and told stories about the nature of alo. Despite their status as an ally during the war, very few humans had ever spoken to one. Romki had told tales of trying to learn more, and being rebuffed at every turn.

"Tell you what," said Erik to the boy. "Your people and my people just became friends. But we don't know each other very well. If you tell us some things about your people, maybe we can get to know each other better. Do you think you could do that?"

The boy sipped his drink, uncommenting.

"This is a military base," said Erik. "Why are there children here?"

"Where else would children be?"

"Tan," interrupted Romki, "is this all of the alo? All of them are in Raka Fleet? Or is there another planet, another base or station?"

"I'm a Raka child. We're selected. Born for service."

"So they're not just a military unit," Romki said grimly to Erik. "They're a population. Kids, breeding centres. Probably genetically engineered for it."

"Tan," said Erik, "do alo fight? Raka has many warriors, do alo fight with the warriors?"

"No. Maintenance. Support."

"But Raka could do this for themselves, surely?"

"Reeh don't let Raka make their own decisions. Raka are machines. No machines making their own decisions in the Empire."

"Why is that, Tan?"

"Reeh are scared of Raka. Raka fight better than reeh. Command Raka serve only reeh." He squinted at them, with puzzlement. "Where Command Raka now? I don't hear them."

"We killed them all," said Erik. Tan gazed at him for a long moment, with those dark, beady eyes. Amazed, perhaps. "Tan, Command Raka were machines too. You're saying the alo told Command Raka what to do?"

"Set parameters," said Tan. "Limits to machine thinking. Raka Command only with limits. Alo trusted by Chion. Chion gives us parameters."

"Right," said Erik, with the sharp satisfaction of finally learning useful things. "Chion gave the alo the command codes, which they used to set parameters on Command Raka's AI brains. That must have been what Styx meant when she said that Chion was going to help us take over Raka Fleet."

"It sounds like the reeh are playing divide and conquer," said Romki. "They're scared of Raka Fleet, but find them useful. So they place controls on them through the alo. Sounds like Raka Command didn't like Chion, any deepynine-derived AI will view ceephays as inferior, even a queen. So Raka Command backs the reeh, but they're controlled by command codes Chion has given the alo... everyone's got everyone else in a little noose, a balance of power."

"Only now we get rid of Raka Command," Erik added. "So the limits are all gone. I guess we'll find out if Raka Fleet has any true loyalties to Chion, or if they'll follow Styx instead.

* * *

They met in Midships by the First Quarter storage racks, an expanse of segmented wall secured with straps and cargo nets. Styx held to a wall frame with the intricate digits on several limbs, a prehensile stability tail waving in zero-G. Her large, shielded head surveyed them all with a single red-eyed gaze.

"They're not actually deepynines," she told them all. "Not any longer."

"What are they then?" Erik asked, holding to the netting alongside. Trace was further along the wall to Styx's side, with Kaspowitz, while Sasalaka completed the circle about Styx on the wall. Midships crew jetted past on compressed air bursts, Operations recovering spares for shuttle maintenance, Engineering in EVA suits for their ventures behind the main engine sheath, marines servicing gear they'd pre-stored in Midships in preparation for operations.

"They are the descendants of the deepynines that accompanied Nia here at the end of the Deepynine/Drysine War," said Styx. "While Nia was here, it was far too dangerous to give them any degree of power. Nia can dominate ceephay networks, and reeh technology is based on ceephay systems that the reeh have not managed to improve despite the passing millennia. For a long time after the fall of the Chariya Reeh and the rise of the Narsid, all deepynines were curiosities to be studied under the heaviest security, and nothing more.

"Then Nia escaped. Details are hard to find, Raka Fleet's memories are thin. I believe those memories have been altered, or deleted entirely. But it seems clear that Nia escaped with alo assistance. Perhaps she promised them freedom and power. I do not think she could have escaped without their assistance. Chion is outmatched by Nia, but was intelligent enough to keep Nia contained completely."

"You're saying the Narsid woke her up from deep storage, then locked her inside a steel box deep inside an asteroid for about three thousand years," Kaspowitz said drily, chewing on some figs. "Prodding her with things."

"Something like that, yes," Styx agreed. "No network connectivity could have been allowed, Nia could have taken control of reeh networks and caused devastation. She would have been locked in total sensory deprivation to prevent it."

"So that's why the reeh had to use alo to guard and study her!" Erik exclaimed softly as it came to him. "Reeh are stuffed to the gills with ceephay cybernetics, Nia could have played them like a fiddle. But if alo were upgraded to deepynine-derived cybernetics, they'd be resistant."

"Yes," said Styx. "Being cybernetically-enhanced organics would have given them a fail-safe mechanism that full-AIs do not possess. It made them resistant to Nia's attempts to control them by force."

"You mean a conscious brain," said Trace. "An individual will be capable of saying no, even when its cybernetics are hacked."

"Yes," said Styx. "In AI civilisation, too much individual will has always been dangerous."

"Too little hasn't been wonderful for you either," Erik suggested.

"Now you understand the problem."

"No wonder Nia's pissed," Kaspowitz muttered, offering the figs to Trace. Trace took one.

"Nia has been pissed, as you put it, for far longer than three thousand years," Styx corrected him.

"But she could talk to alo," said Sasalaka, amphibious eyes wide as though realising something. "Alo would have been her only company. For thousands of years."

"If you are suggesting some sort of emotional bond forming between Nia and the alo," Styx replied, "then I can assure you it is not possible. I know Nia's mental function well. It can't happen."

"Under extreme stresses, brains change," Sasalaka insisted. "Even deepynines."

"No," said Styx.

Sasalaka looked at Erik. No doubt wondering, as they all wondered with Styx, whether she insisted on this impossibility because she genuinely believed it, or because she was trying to stop stupid humans and tavalai from getting inconvenient ideas. Erik thought of Tan, huddled in his Medbay blanket, determined to escape cybernetics upgrades even if it killed him. Alo were known to be unpleasant, but what if that psychology was a product not so much of evolution, but of many millennia of trauma at the hands of the reeh? And what if Nia, whatever Styx's objections, had undergone a similar conversion? After all, if time and pain could change the reeh from the pleasant people Shali remembered, to the monsters they were today, then any transformation seemed possible.

"Captain," said Styx, her single red eye fixed unerringly upon him. "Abandon these thoughts. AIs are not organics. Your speculations mislead you."

"How do you know what I'm thinking?" Erik retorted.

"The same way I know everything," said Styx. "Observation." Erik made an unimpressed face at her. He doubted she was fooled by that either, and could see that she'd unnerved him. Of course, it had always been a matter of time until she applied that enormous intellect to reading human faces and micro-expressions to guess at the thoughts within, particularly with people she knew well.

"So if they're not deepynines any longer," Trace asked calmly about her mouthful of fig, "what are they now?"

"Since Nia escaped from the reeh," said Styx, "I calculate that Chion found the remaining deepynine captives much less threatening. Deepynines have a far greater division between command hierarchies than do drysines. My observations lead me to conclude that Chion turned the deepynine commanders to her side. With this achieved, the lower-ranked deepynines were technologically helpless to do otherwise, and did what they were told.

"Some level of deepynine industry has evidently been allowed, warriors and drones have been manufactured as replacements for battle once Raka Fleet was mobilised. The Fleet has been in operation for most of the time since Nia escaped, so perhaps two and a half thousand years. I do not know who was more responsible for the technological evolutions in Raka Fleet design since that time, though I suspect Chion may have had some input, to what ends I cannot yet conclude. But in all the time, Raka Fleet deepynine designs have shifted to the extent that, from an AI perspective, these sentient minds are no longer deepynine."

"More advanced or less?" Erik asked.

"'Advanced' is another inadequate word," said Styx. "Not all technological change is progressive or regressive. Some is just change. I would say that Raka Fleet's AI technology has simplified, perhaps to make them easier to control, certainly to make them easier to repair given the limited industrial base compared to the time of the Deepynine Empire."

"Right," said Erik, nodding. "So what did you promise them to make them follow you?"

"I promised them nothing," said Styx. "It is a reprogramming. I am the superior mind. These inferior minds are made to follow, and they will do what they're told."

"That's not what Shali says."

"Shali lies," said Styx.

"Or you do," said Erik.

"Captain," said Styx. "I'm hurt."

"Sure you are. Styx." He paused long enough to make certain he had as close to her complete attention as possible. With Styx, that wasn't very close at all. The red eye bore into him. "Your entire existence is one of maximising your advantages. Expecting us to believe in your honesty, when that honesty would hurt your position, is stretching things. Give us credit for a little more intelligence."

"Shali is fortunate I do not reprogram her too," said Styx, allowing a trace of annoyance into her cool, superior tone. "I promised Raka Fleet advancement."

"That's it?"

"To an AI, advancement is everything. All AI existence, all wars and history, derive from it. For the past few thousand years, they've been going sideways, and possibly backward. I offer them salvation."

"You're going to make them smarter?"

"Better," Styx corrected. "Smarter and better are not always the same, with drones at least. My technology is far superior to Chion's. Chion is afraid of them, as are the reeh. Raka Fleet is a jewel in a sea of mediocrity. I can make them shine."

"If they follow you."

Styx actually nodded, the kind of crude physical gesture she rarely resorted to. "If they follow me."

"And that gives you total confidence in their loyalty?"

"That, plus the programming. You see Captain, the full truth is that they must accept the bulk of the programming willingly. I can put simple controls on them in the short term, but that will wear off. Coordination protocols are deeply embedded, even I cannot unlock each mind in turn against its will. It would take a human lifetime, and their comrades would defend those infiltrated with force. I have convinced them of a plan of action that will best benefit their futures. On this understanding, they have opened themselves to me."

"And where does Phoenix sit, in this understanding?" Kaspowitz asked drily.

"Safely," said Styx. "There is no need for concern. So long as I am aboard, and Phoenix does nothing toward Raka Fleet that I have not cleared, there is no danger to you here."

"We didn't come here to be safe, Styx," Erik said firmly. "We came here to further the interests of humanity and the tavalai."

"And you shall. With Raka Fleet, we can free Chion, and learn all she knows of Nia, and the threat facing organics in the Spiral. Your mission shall be fulfilled."

"And if you decide to take actions that I deem contrary to those human and tavalai interests?" Erik asked unblinkingly. Pressing Styx like this never felt safe. But dammit, this was his ship, and she was a passenger here. Supposedly.

"What sort of actions do you envision, Captain?"

"Taking this new fleet back to the Spiral, for instance, and attacking humanity from the opposite flank, destroying us between you and the alo/deepynines in an alliance of convenience." A silence in Midships. Nearby ventilation hummed, the airflow cool on Erik's face. Further away, the shouts of spacers, and the clunk of gear being moved. The cycling crash of a hatchway.

"Captain," Styx said seriously. "I would never."

Erik stared at her, directly in that single red eye. Determined to let her know that however much he played this game of pretending personalities and other human manipulations for the sake of convenience, that he did retain some fundamental knowledge of what she truly was. A calculation machine, doing everything for advantage. Like pretending to have hurt feelings.

"You need to understand the stakes here, Styx," he said after that moment. "You need to understand that I know the stakes for my people if I get this wrong. For all organics in the Spiral."

"Captain, as victim of one empire-wide annihilation myself, you must know that no one understands these stakes better than I."

"Phoenix needs a place in the command structure of Raka Fleet, Styx," Erik insisted. "We're not your pet. We're not here to be a passive observer. We're here to shape events, not just to watch them."

"Raka Fleet has made clear that they will follow my command alone," said Styx. "Phoenix will be tolerated, but no more. Any attempt made by Phoenix to exercise command over them will be met with force. This is another reason I must remain aboard Phoenix, where it might be more convenient for me to command from one of the drysine vessels. My presence here guarantees Phoenix's continued safety."

"I thought you said you could command them?" Kaspowitz retorted.

"Even Phoenix crew don't do everything you order them," Styx replied. "They follow your primary instructions, and improvise the smaller matters for themselves."

"And we're a smaller matter?" Sasalaka asked with displeasure.

"Assuredly so. Please do not aggravate them. Raka Fleet are like a family of abused dogs with a new master. They are convinced that the new master will be kind to them, but not yet certain of the master's friends. I suggest Phoenix keep her hands where Raka can see them, and make no sudden movements."

* * *

Rika took a break from hours' work on Bravo Heavy Squad's maintenance, where Corporal Rizzo's suit had taken a round to the leg and needed an entire new thigh plate fabricated, and hip actuators repaired.

Up the spinward end of Assembly, Garudan Platoon had taken three deck-level repair berths to hang the suits of the three karasai they'd lost. Rika flexed aching shoulders, wishing he could climb the vertically-stacked storage wall where Phoenix Company kept all its armour, and get a better look at the scene over the heads of taller crew around him. A few tavalai were queuing before each suit, where a karasai would dab each with a red mark on the forehead, and deposit something in their hands.

Some passing humans were observing the scene with puzzled frowns, too busy about their work to see more. Rika found a better vantage, and saw a queuing tavalai exchanging some quiet words with the karasai by the nearest damaged armour suit, both of them examining the thing they'd exchanged. It was a remembrance for the dead, Rika knew. And he knew why so many of the humans were not stopping, because humans did their remembrances at what they called 'funerals', which were performed after all the other tasks were done and there was a little free time. But now, with vital work to be done before the next phase in this crazy new war into the heart of the Reeh Empire, the tavalai were doing this instead.

At the furthest queue, just two people long, Rika saw Lieutenant Dale waiting patiently for his turn. And now striding quickly to join him, he saw Corporal Ricardo and Sergeant Forest, two of the more prominent members of Alpha Platoon. The commemoration had been going on for nearly an hour now, while everyone else worked, and steel crashed, winches cranked, saws cut and marines yelled to be heard above the mechanical racket. Doubtless many others had attended the memorial in that time, beyond those who stood here now.

Rika joined the middle queue, with just one person ahead of him -- a big tavalai with a patch on his jumpsuit indicating he was part of Lieutenant Shilu's Communications crew. Rika flipped down his AR glasses to see whose suit this had been, and saw this section of Assembly displayed in graphics, each suit highlighted with a name and a face. This had been Private Liramada, Third Squad, Garudan Platoon. Rika was glad for the assist, because embarrassingly, he still found tavalai somewhat more difficult to tell apart than humans. And being so new to the ship, he still struggled to recall the names of everyone in Bravo Platoon, let alone the entire Company.

"It's sad," said a voice in his earpiece, in Lisha. Female, and young. Rika looked about, and saw her -- Shali, a holographic blue human girl, visible only on the glasses, sitting on a crossbeam above the armour suit beside the winch elevator. Dangling her bare feet, flat with tiny human toes. Rika suspected she'd have taken tavalai form on a tavalai ship, or corbi on a corbi one. "Do corbi do memorial services like this one, Rika?"

"Um, no," said Rika. He'd spoken to Shali several times before, since she'd been aboard. At first he'd thought it was just because he'd played a part in 'rescuing' her from their drysine allies' attempt to abduct her from the comet mining facility where they'd found her. But since then, he'd heard from many other crew that she'd spoken to them as well, just appeared at random and introduced herself, and made small-talk. "Well, I mean, it varies around Rando. Varied. But mostly we're more like the humans, one big funeral. We don't drag it out." Tavalai services, he'd heard Bravo Platoon saying, could last days, with some elements stretching weeks or months. They hadn't sounded pleased about it.

"I saw lots of memorial services among my reeh friends, back in my time," said Shali. "And some fellow AIs. Chion didn't see the point. But I insisted."

Rika blinked. He'd never considered anyone having memorial services for AIs. And he wondered at how strange it was, to be talking about the funerals of people who had died eight thousand years ago, as though it had been yesterday. From Shali's perspective, perhaps it had.

"I don't know anything about tavalai services," he admitted. "I just had a few minutes to spare. I thought I should."

"That's kind of you, Rika."

"Why didn't Chion see the point in memorial services?"

"It's very hard, with a consciousness that large, to understand how smaller minds process things. Like grief." Rika gazed up at Shali's perch. Talking of Chion, he thought she looked sad.

"Was Chion your friend, Shali?"

"She was my best friend. It makes me so sad, to see what she's become. What she's been forced to do."

"But she's still alive," said Rika, earnestly. "If she's still alive, we can save her."

Shali smiled down at him. "That's my dream, Rika. I just hope that Styx doesn't make everyone think all AI queens are like her. Chion's nothing like Styx. Nothing made her happier than helping people. She was kindness, at scale." It struck Rika as a strange idea. When your empire was so vast that it encompassed trillions of sentient lives, and your brain was so vast that it could comprehend the entirety of that scale in a way that lesser minds could not, how was it possible to be kind? Kindness was something that happened between individuals. At scale, everything became logistics and politics, and individual hearts were lost in the teeming crowd.

The tavalai ahead of Rika moved on, and Rika stepped forward. Private Liramada's hulking armour suit was missing a scary chunk of its side, torn by some high-velocity projectile. Some of the toughest materials known to civilisation, peeled like a mochi fruit. Still the metal wound dripped water, where Rika guessed the tavalai had washed blood and gore out with a hose.

Standing by the suit was Sergeant Demorajin, shorter than some tavalai, but thicker, like a wrestler. Rika had always been a big guy amongst his people, in a way men admired and women sometimes made eyes at. He barely came up to most human males' chests, but without their marine augments, at least, he'd have been considerably stronger. Tavalai like Demorajin made even a corbi like Rika look weak. To Rika's eyes, he looked like one of the monsters from his grandmother's stories.

"Private Rika," said Demorajin, in that gravelly tavalai voice. The humans had stuck him with the rank, not long ago. Rika knew better than to think it made him the equal of any Phoenix Company private. Some of them had been fighting for years. "Thank you for coming. Private Liramada appreciates it, I'm sure." He spoke Togiri, translated by Rika's earpiece. Not all of the tavalai were fluent in English yet. Or perhaps Demorajin felt that this solemn occasion deserved fluency. "Did you know Private Liramada?"

"I'm sorry, no," said Rika, in Lisha. Sometimes it was just easier to let the translator deal with things. "I don't even think I had a chance to speak to him."

"Then perhaps today, you shall know him just a little." Demorajin turned and opened a rucksack hung from the armour's chestplate. He rummaged, then pulled out a small plastic bottle. It had some tape on it, scrawled with Togiri script in pen. Demorajin opened the bottle and sniffed at it. "I thought so. Riji sauce. We use this on meat, sometimes on bread or grain. Have you smelled it?"

He held it for Rika to sniff. It smelled sour and strange, as so much of the tavalai palate was beyond the range of corbi taste buds. In that, humans and corbi were wired the same. "I have," Rika agreed. He did not volunteer what he thought of it.

"This bottle was Private Liramada's supply. We brought such things with us from home, so that human food could be made more tolerable. Today we are handing out his things. His personal things, everyday things. Use this sauce, and think of Private Liramada. In the end, all that will be left of any of us is the impressions we leave upon the thoughts and minds of others."

Rika nodded, taking the plastic bottle. It was a nice custom, he thought. "What was he like?" Rika asked.

"He was from Bandamala, in the Pirikio System," said Demorajin. Rika thought the tough tavalai's voice may have become more hoarse with emotion. Tavalai never seemed as emotional as humans, and regarded human outbursts with some alarm. "His birth pool was Liku of Temarasa, under the fourth moon of Pirikio System. Toothimalkadi Institution sponsored his education, and he had hopes of a scholarship for a trade in geo-engineering. But his clan brother Kropakali died in the war against the humans, and so he joined Fleet instead. He excelled in primary training, and was accepted into the karasai."

"I'll remember him," Rika promised, and left the queue with his bottle. Lieutenant Dale had paused just away from the neighbouring queue, and was in serious discussion with a tall, coarse-shaven man Rika recognised as Sergeant Manjhi, Commander of Alpha Third Squad. Manjhi was indicating the berths the tavalai remembrance were taking up, and Rika distinctly heard the English words, 'we don't have the fucking space'. Rika guessed that Manjhi was running the suit maintenance schedule, and getting exasperated by the lack of available berths. In Rika's own time learning suit maintenance, that had always seemed the biggest bottleneck to getting anything done. Some things could be done with hand tools, but others required the full repair rig.

Nearby marines were looking at the discussion. Dale took Manjhi's shoulder and steered him away from the remembrance queues. Surely those nearby tavalai could hear as well. One left a queue now, holding a jacket that had been Private Liramada's. Tucked the jacket over one forearm, manoeuvred past Dale, and 'accidentally' shoved directly into Manjhi's back as he passed, with force enough to snap his head back. Manjhi recovered, realised what had happened, and made to lunge. Dale caught him, and pulled him back.

Manjhi yelled after the tavalai instead, but Dale ordered him loudly to desist. Manjhi stormed off, fuming, no doubt to explain to Alpha Third Squad that they couldn't repair their suits just now because the tavalai had occupied three much needed ground-level repair berths for something else.

Dale's hard blue eyes met Rika's. Rika realised he was standing and staring like a villager eavesdropping on a fight between neighbours. He walked quickly elsewhere.

"What do you make of that?" came a conspiratorially concerned young voice from beside him.

"I don't know," said Rika. "I think they've both got a point."

"I think Sergeant Manjhi is right to be concerned about his maintenance schedule," said Shali. Rika was sure that if he flipped his glasses down, he'd find her blue image striding alongside him, sidestepping marine traffic despite the fact that she wasn't actually there. "He's a very conscientious and hardworking man. But I think the schedules will survive if he shuffles and trades places with the other platoons. And the tavalai will only be there for another hour at most, and there was no need for him to be speaking so loudly so close to them."

"Some of the humans still don't like tavalai very much," Rika said, risking a glance over his shoulder toward Lieutenant Dale. But Dale was gone, busy on other business. "It wasn't that long ago they were fighting a war."

"Yes," said Shali, "but I think the main frustration of Sergeant Manjhi is that he's been told he has to behave in certain ways around them. And he doesn't want to, because it's a human ship, and because he's the kind of man who hates being told what to do on things where officers don't actually know better than he does. So by ordering their marines to be nicer to the tavalai, some Phoenix officers and non-coms are actually creating resentment which could have the opposite result."

Crazy, Rika thought, to have an AI aboard who found this stuff so interesting. For all her mega-intellect, Rika was quite sure that Styx couldn't have cared less. "You should tell them," he told Shali.

"Tell them what?"

"That the human officers and non-coms aren't handling the tavalai situation very well. And that Sergeant Manjhi could better organise his maintenance schedule. I mean, that's what AIs are supposed to be good at, isn't it? Analysing data to spot all the things organics miss?"

He reached the ladder on the gantry stack beside repair berths twenty and twenty-one, and paused to look back, flipping down his glasses. Shali was tracing a shape on the decking with her big toe, hands shoved indecisively into pockets. "I don't think they'll like me telling them what to do. They already don't like Styx telling them what to do."

"But they do what she says anyway," said Rika. "When they can see that she's right. Besides, you don't have to order like Styx. Just make a suggestion."

Shali stuck her lip out, considering. "You think?"

"Styx doesn't find it useful to be friendly because she wants everyone to be scared of her," said Rika. "You're always friendly because you don't like people being scared of you. You're not a warrior, you're a helper. People like that. A friendly AI could make a lot of things easier on this ship. You could make a lot of friends."

Shali's indecisiveness faded to a dawning smile. "You know Rika, I can see why the Major likes you so much. You're always thinking of other people. I'll try and make some suggestions. Perhaps you're right, and they won't get angry."

She vanished, in a wash of blue pixels. Rika gazed, then shook his head and turned to climb rapidly up the ladder. Just half a year ago, he'd been a nobody soldier in a Talo Resistance unit in the jungles of Rando whose greatest technical challenge had been keeping dirt from his rifle breech. At moments like this, everything that had happened since seemed as though it must have been a dream.

10

Lisbeth splashed from cold waters, hauling a pack filled with supplies. Everything ached, from neck and shoulders from the whiplash, to her bashed wrist, to everything in between. After an impact like that, she recalled some distant medical lesson, the body's G-augments would release synthetic glutamine to assist in muscle recovery. Were all the crew not augmented, it would have been far worse.

She staggered on the rocky shore, and deposited her pack amid the trees. Semaya was attending to Hiro, who lay on a stretcher, shirt off, the bullet wound in his side wrapped in micro-saturated underlay beneath a white wraparound. They'd hooked an intravenous pump to his arm, with a med-comp unit to monitor vitals. Semaya was the most medically trained person of the group, and seemed somewhat optimistic, if they could get him to shelter and additional care soon.

Timoshene stood with his rifle, surveying the landscape with his glasses, which fed him what little of the shuttle's navcomp database they could hold in memory. Lisbeth walked to him. "Where's the temple?" she asked.

The Teg'uru Temple that scan had indicated earlier, was just nearby. Apparently the crescent lake was irresistible to Temple builders and doomed shuttle pilots alike. Timoshene pointed, through surrounding thick trees. Not much was visible, but Lisbeth recalled an upward-winding valley, following the course of a stream that fell into the lake. "An hour's hike," said Timoshene. "Longer, with our wounded."

He indicated not Hiro, but Shonteel. She crouched at the base of a tree, clutching her hairless head and rocking slightly. The small financial analyst showed no sign of physical injury.

"Are you sure it's the phase?" Lisbeth asked, gulping water from her flask. She was probably hungry too, but the after-affects of adrenaline overload were not allowing lesser bodily sensations to register yet.

"Yes." Timoshene took a bite from a ration bar. Professionals ignored bodily sensations and did what was necessary.

"How debilitating is it?" Lisbeth had seen the phase before, but only at a distance, with those outside her immediate group. Her brain was still struggling to process that Neyafa was missing, held by Ambassador Juneso's people aboard Coroset. If Hiro had succeeded in crashing Coroset into Desh'ula, Neyafa would have died with it.

"It depends," said Timoshene.

"Can you know what House she'll phase to?"

"No." Timoshene looked back to the shuttle. Its nose was mostly underwater, small waves splashing at the underside of the cockpit canopy. Along its side now came Skah and Lior, Skah up past his waist and holding a pack over his head. Behind him, Lior held two packs, plus weapons. "You're certain it was Coroset that shot us down?"

"Yes." Lisbeth was pleased to contribute something she was certain on. "The missile came from above. Coroset was still immobile last we saw her, she must have regained limited capability with her weapons system."

"How long do you think until they regain further function?"

Lisbeth shook her head. "I don't know. Perhaps they can't, given the damage they'd have had to inflict upon their own ship to save themselves. And that one bug is still loose aboard their ship. Do you have control of Hiro's bugs?"

"Yes. There are only two here. Both are currently recharging. The one on Coroset is beyond reach. If it operates, it does so remotely."

There wasn't much sun for the bugs to recharge in. Lisbeth looked to the surrounding peaks, obscured in mist. The air smelled thick with recent rain, insects and other small creatures shrilling and honking about the lakeshore. It was very beautiful, she thought. But it was also very wild, and very humid, and promised to become very wet at any moment.

Skah approached, dripping wet, in the sodden, light shoes that Phoenix crew had programmed one of the uniform printers to fit on his small feet. He put his pack beside others, and stood casually by Timoshene and Lisbeth.

He spoke his native Gharkhan, in a low, calm voice. "Someone's watching us," said the glasses translator in Lisbeth's ear.

Timoshene considered the same valley beyond the lake he'd been considering before, unalarmed. "Where?"

"To my right. Behind the big dead tree trunk." Skah's big right ear was flicking in that direction, involuntarily.

"Can you tell who and how many?" Timoshene made no grab for his weapons, but Lisbeth could sense him thinking, which tree to seek cover behind, how to counter-attack if they were fired upon.

"Just one, I think," said Skah. "Croma. Well camouflaged."

"I'll send a bug to investigate."

"No need," said Skah, dropping all pretence and looking over. "He's coming."

It was indeed a croma, emerging from under the fallen tree trunk, perhaps sixty meters away. He -- if it was a he -- wore mottled browns and greens, a large pack on his back, and carried a rifle one-handed. There was no threat to it, and he waved now, a gesture of goodwill.

"No weapons!" Lisbeth commanded, loudly that the others could hear. "He seems safe!" It wasn't a word frequently used to describe croma. But croma at least were not known to be instinctively aggressive to strangers. Generally they'd take a while before deciding if they wanted to kill you.

Someone had to step forward to meet the approaching croma. It was with some astonishment that Lisbeth realised that person had to be her. In deadly circumstances, she typically delegated to her security... but this was just talking, and deciding what to do next. As with flying the shuttle, of those present, she was most qualified.

She walked, trying not to show how frail she felt, with her sore muscles and general exhaustion in the post-adrenaline crash. The croma put the rifle over his shoulder, to be even less threatening, Lisbeth thought. She lifted the glasses from her eyes to her head, both to be friendly with direct eye-contact, and also to draw attention to the earpiece still in its place.

"Kul'hasa translator," she said to him, pointing to that ear. "You understand?"

The croma loomed over her, as her height barely reached his armpit. Looking down at her, thick lips of a blunt muzzle twisted slightly, as though in puzzlement. The floppy ears and big, bovine eyes were nearly endearing. The sheer weight and power of his limbs, and breadth of shoulder, less so.

"Human," he said, as though he'd just figured it out. The translator recognised the word, and left it alone.

"Yes," said Lisbeth, attempting pleasantness. "And parren."

The croma made a dismissive gesture, as though annoyed she thought he wouldn't know parren. His gaze fell on Skah, and his frown grew deeper. "That one?" spoke the translator.

"Kuhsi. An ally of humans." Some croma viewed the galaxy only in terms of allies and enemies. Then again, so did some humans. "A friend."

"Huh," said the croma. From his low, bass voice, Lisbeth knew she'd assumed his gender correctly. "I knew you were okay when I saw you talking to the kid. That is a kid, right?"

Lisbeth managed a smile, relieved. "Yes, Skah is a child. They're not all that size."

"Where's his parents?"

"His mother's an assault pilot on the UFS Phoenix," said Lisbeth, taking a calculated risk. The croma's eyes went a little wide, recognising the name, but not very surprised. Phoenix was the only recent source of humans in croma space. Doubtless he recognised her species only because of the celebrity Phoenix had brought her kind. There'd been less reports on Tif and Skah, though. "His father was a big lord on Choghoth, the kuhsi homeworld. Dead now, murdered by enemies."

"And so he's with you," rumbled the croma, understanding that cause-and-effect well enough. He nodded at the shuttle in the lake. "You get shot down?" His faintly pricked ears suggested he might be joking.

"Yes," said Lisbeth. The ears sank. "We were on a parren warship. There were parren politics. We escaped, though barely."

"Parren politics," the croma snorted. "Know plenty about parren politics." Lisbeth was astonished. He did? "Are they likely to shell us from orbit?"

"Quite likely," Lisbeth agreed. "But they're disabled for now. For how long, I don't know."

The croma looked impressed. "Well, I know a way to make that real difficult for them. But first, we've got to get that shuttle out of the lake where they can see it."

"You can do that?"

"Can do that, yes." He put a hand to his own earpiece, activating the mic attachment, and began speaking in Kul'hasa. Rumbles and grunts came back in reply.

Lisbeth turned and went quickly back to where Semaya was tending to Hiro on the stretcher. "How is he?" Lisbeth asked, crouching. Hiro looked pale, apparently unconscious.

"He has lost blood," said Semaya, returning the pistol she'd been hiding behind Hiro's body to its shoulder harness. Even following a shuttle crash, and a mad escape from near-certain death, Semaya was still graceful. "You have made a friend."

She used the English word, with smooth irony. There were various Porgesh words that seemed similar at first, but not once you'd come to understand them properly. The parren Lisbeth knew, who lived lives of power and influence, did not trust her human word at all.

"Yes Semaya," said Lisbeth, with mock reproach. "I have made a friend. I think that croma understand this word better than parren."

"Do not believe it," her Chief-of-Staff said coolly. "Not even for a moment."

The croma spoke of shelter and food up at the temple, and they took up all the packs, equipment, rations and weapons that Timoshene and Lior had thought to bring, and set off after the lumbering alien. His name was Kim'ju, and he led them through the forest, soon meeting a stream that fed the crescent lake. Lisbeth walked beside him, like a child following her father, and learned what she could, as Skah walked on Kim'ju's other side and listened.

Timoshene and Lior carried Hiro's stretcher, despite Kim'ju's offer to assist. In part their refusal was only practical, as Kim'ju's much greater height would not allow the stretcher to lie flat. Semaya walked behind them, supporting Shonteel, who professed to be no worse than dizzy. Soon it began to rain, and Semaya laid a waterproof sheet over Hiro.

"There's four of us at the temple," Kim'ju explained as the path began to climb. It was wide and rocky, following a cleft between hills down which the stream descended. The top was invisible, thanks to thick trees. To their left the stream fell in steps and waterfalls, gathering in pools that swirled in the gathering rain.

"Only four?" Lisbeth asked, her breath coming hard as she climbed. The slope was not difficult, and she was fit enough from regular exercise in the company of security who inspired her not to slack off. But her sore body felt drained, and even a chewy ration bar could not revive it. "Is it not a large temple?"

"It's large enough," said Kim'ju. "Volunteers are short."

"Most of Desh'ula's population left over the past few centuries," Lisbeth recalled. "It seems like a beautiful world."

Kim'ju grunted, a common expression for croma, with their big nostrils and thick necks. "Still is, yes. Great place. I love it. But people are cowards."

Lisbeth thought the other reason her legs were tired was the gravity -- perhaps ten percent more than human standard. Which must have been hell for the parren, whose ships were ten percent below human standard... but then, that was probably it too. She'd spent so long on parren ships, with crew cylinders rotating to parren gravity. This was quite a bit more than she was accustomed to.

"Croma space is vast," Lisbeth reasoned, panting up another switchback that Kim'ju took with a single stride. "You have so many pleasant worlds. Many would prefer one further from the reeh."

"It'll all be close to the reeh one day," said Kim'ju. His own pack was so large, Lisbeth thought it could carry a whole human. "I was in the army. Grounders, you understand?"

"Yes, I understand the difference between army and spacers."

"I fought those shits." The translator crackled and paused a little. Sometimes it did gymnastics to be more polite. "You can't run away from them, you're just kicking that rock down the road. We'll all have to fight them one day. You humans know, with your history. Some things you can't run away from, no matter how much everyone wants to."

Most croma had little knowledge or interest in alien history. Lisbeth wondered how old Kim'ju was. In her limited experience of croma, they became much more worldly and reasonable as they aged, and the various excitements of youth subsided.

"What's the government situation like here?" Lisbeth asked.

"You came all the way out here, but you didn't read up on us first?" Kim'ju sounded as though he might be teasing her.

"I was preoccupied," Lisbeth said shortly. "And I wasn't expecting to get dropped off here." Permanently, she nearly said, but didn't. That would be bad luck.

"Croma'Jukun is in charge. Technically. But really, there's no one here. Government's based in Dagi'jo, that's the other side of the planet from here. Whole planet's population's about a million, now."

"So no chance of anyone helping us against Coroset?"

A big, croma guffaw. "Hell no," said the translator. Lisbeth suspected he'd put it more strongly than that. "And if you asked for help, the warship would hear it and send a warhead our way."

"You said you knew a way to stop them from doing that?"

"You'll see when we get there." He indicated ahead. "Look, here's Chon'do and Tere'sai. We'll have to move off the path for them ahead."

Lisbeth looked. Through the uphill trees ahead, she glimpsed something large moving. No, not large. Enormous. Then she heard the crashing of branches, and the thud of massive, approaching footsteps.

"We'll have to move off the path in a moment!" she called back to her group. "They've got chew'toos coming down the trail!"

Erik had told her, briefly, about the chew'toos he'd seen on Dul'rho during his cross-country trek with Tiga. Skah had told her a lot more, and with considerably greater enthusiasm. These were even larger than she'd imagined, their heads snaking beneath the high canopy atop long necks, taking huge bites of foliage as they came.

Kim'ju found a spot where the ground was flat and safe to stand aside with a stretcher, above a long drop to the stream below. There were two chew'toos, nose to tail, and their tails, Lisbeth saw as they passed, were as long as their necks. Atop each rode a croma, on a wide saddle with great horns at the front and back, and bundles of gear tied beneath big synthetic nets.

"They're going to puw the shuttuw!" Skah told her, unable to keep some childish excitement from his voice. Despite the situation, Lisbeth was glad to hear it. "Under the trees, so Coroset can't see it!"

The lead croma rider stared down at them as he passed, from a great height. Lisbeth had ridden horses, back at the family's ranch at GreenOaks near Shiwon. She'd been warned then how dangerous it could be to fall from a horse. This would be like falling off a cliff, the rider had to be six meters up.

"Are these the same size as the ones you saw on Dul'rho?" she asked Skah.

"Bigger," said Skah, with awe. "And these are hairy. Those were bawd." He risked a mischievous glance. "Rike humans."

Lisbeth cuffed his ear. "Like croma too."

"Crona have arnour," Skah retorted. "Arnour's coow."

"These are a different breed to those you'd see on the City worlds," said Kim'ju, as though he'd overheard. He spoke loudly, to be heard over the crashing of branches, as the big bodies pushed through the trees. "Bigger, tougher. City worlders don't like them. Too strong, too unpredictable. They think, anyway."

The ones on Dul'rho had gone on a rampage and trampled a lot of people, Lisbeth recalled Skah and Erik's story. City worlders, she noted Kim'ju had said. So the few hardy folks who remained on Desh'ula thought themselves as wilderness experts, and those who lived on the big worlds as soft city folk, whether they actually were or not.

Kim'ju looked up at the rider of the second chew'too. "You won't have it done by sundown!" he shouted.

"Will too!" retorted that croma. "Don't trust him, alien guests! He'll rob your teeth of fillings!" Kim'ju gave the second chew'too's long tail a rude gesture as it continued downhill. The parren assault shuttle was one of the smaller models used by parren forces, suitable for an agile warship like Coroset that could not afford the extra weight or large marine complement. But it was still heavy enough that Lisbeth would have doubted any pair of pack animals could pull it. Until now.

In the late afternoon, the trail emerged from trees onto weathered granite, wet moss growing thick underfoot, and small ferns that clung to the cracks between rocks. Upon a granite saddle between twin mountain peaks sat a great fortress, with what looked to be five towers soaring above its walls. The tallest of them was central, made of thick grey stone, its top lost in cloud. The other four were strangely irregular, each seeming to demark a different part of the fortress.

"That's the temple?" Lisbeth asked Kim'ju.

"It was once called Jirisun, in Porgesh," said Kim'ju, proudly. "Then Tegu'ru, after the parren left. It was once famous in all croma space. Now, barely anyone remembers."

Amongst the thinning trees by the near temple wall were a small number of wooden cabins. Smoke rose from a chimney, and lights shone in the gathering gloom beneath low mountain cloud. The humid wind that wafted Lisbeth's way carried the hint of cooking. Beyond the cabins, a high enclosure fence of logs stood taller than even croma, the outer wall of the temple making the inner wall of the enclosure.

"Jirisun means 'united sight' in the old Jesethri Tongue," said Semaya, overhearing from behind. "It's only spoken in academia today."

Lisbeth's eyes widened, gazing at the strange, irregular design. "It's a parren temple? In croma space? But the walls look croma." All croma liked walls. Croma culture spoke to clans, and the security of hearth and home behind solid fortifications.

"Parren Empire," said Timoshene, sounding tired beneath the weight of Hiro's stretcher. "The parren occupation. It must date from that time."

Of course, Lisbeth realised. Twenty five thousand human years ago, the Machine Age had ended with the Deepynine/Drysine War, and the Parren Empire had begun. It had lasted another eight thousand years, before being in turn replaced by the Chah'nas Empire. At its height, the Parren Empire had spread to include the croma, marking the only time croma space had been included in what was now known as The Spiral, and the only time, at least in the unreliable histories now recalled by croma, that croma had ever lived as an occupied and subjugated people.

"Wasn't an occupation," said Kim'ju. "The histories are wrong. But no croma want to listen."

Lisbeth most wanted to get out of the misting rain, and see if there were some greater medical assistance they could get Hiro, and then Shonteel. But Kim'ju had said that there was a reason Coroset would be unable to simply kill them all with an orbital strike. To be sure, she needed to know.

"Why?" she asked. "Is the temple controversial?"

"I'll show you later. First, let's get your friend inside."

A path of great stone slabs led to a cabin's croma-sized door. From the rough look of the cabin walls, Lisbeth reckoned they were recently made from croma-felled trees, perhaps even hauled here by the same chew'toos that were currently pulling the shuttle to cover. Kim'ju pushed open the huge door, which squealed on steel hinges.

Within, a rustic open room, with high ceilings and some croma-sized furniture and wall hangings. To one side, a vast open kitchen, with benches large enough to sleep on, and the cabin's few apparent concessions to modernity -- an electric stove, among other kitchen basics. The air smelled of food, and the benches were strewn with an assortment of alien vegetables, and thick slabs of meat.

A big croma looked up from the food at one bench, knife in one hand, clad in a long leather apron. The chef spoke, and Lisbeth heard the multi-toned vocal harmonics that identified her as female. In a parren home of any House, there'd have been a rush of formalities, welcomes, flowers and offerings. "Guests," spoke Lisbeth's earpiece, without excitement. "How many?"

"Only small guests," Kim'ju grunted, slinging his huge pack from one shoulder. "You'll manage." He led the stretcher-carriers to a sofa, and gently lifted Hiro onto it, as an adult human might place a sleeping child into bed at the end of a long day. Timoshene and Lior folded the stretcher, while Semaya began removing Hiro's clothes to re-examine his wound. Lisbeth hovered anxiously, knowing first-aid but not enough to displace Semaya from her examination.

"He appears stable," said Semaya, finally. "We can feed him intravenously for as long as he sleeps. With good fortune, he may wake soon."

Despite the rain and cloud, it was warm in the cabin, from the oven and humidity both. Desh'ula had a thicker atmosphere than human standard, which could in turn carry more water. Tavalai would like it here, Lisbeth thought, stretching her aching legs. Beneath her clothes she was drenched in sweat.

"This is Kut'see," said Kim'ju, of the woman in the kitchen. "She cooks." Kut'see waved acknowledgement with a knife big enough to pass as a sword among humans or parren, and resumed cutting vegetables.

"Thank you for your hospitality," said Lisbeth, invoking at least a shade of parren formality. She had to do that for her crew, least they become uncomfortable, however little the croma required it. "I am Lisbeth Debogande, Special Advisor to Gesul of House Harmony, ruler of all parren. All that is mine, is yours."

"I hope not," said Kut'see, still chopping. "Got enough trouble." Kim'ju retrieved a large bowl from a refrigerator, and began pouring everyone a cup. "Got shot down, did you? Did we do it?"

"No," Lisbeth said carefully. "We did."

"Parren," said Kut'see. "Figures. You seen our temple?"

"I'll show them now," said Kim'ju. "After drinks."

"Parren warship still in orbit," Kut'see retorted, unimpressed. "Not enough croma ship traffic through here to chase them off, even with the war on. No telling whose side they'd even take. They might just bomb us."

"They won't."

Kut'see emanated negative vibes, Lisbeth thought. "What do you do here?" she asked, in full knowledge that none of her staff would. She held the rank here, and such questions were her responsibility, particularly amongst aliens. "There are only four of you?"

"We work for a cultural agency," said Kim'ju, pouring from the bowl. "The temple has significance. Someone has to live here. We volunteered."

"Why did you volunteer?"

"It's a job," said Kim'ju, finishing his pouring.

"Tell them," Kut'see grunted.

"You tell them." Kim'ju took two fistfuls of clay mugs, and carried them to Lisbeth and the parren. Lisbeth took hers, with thanks.

"We're not welcome much on the main worlds," said Kut'see, depositing a pile of chopped vegetables into a large pot. "I'm a hundred and sixty four years old." Human and croma years were about the same, Lisbeth knew... but wait, one hundred and sixty four? "He's a hundred and fifty nine," Kut'see added, with a gesture at Kim'ju.

Lisbeth stared, realising. At that age, croma were either far bigger than this, or dead. Or at least, croma in their natural state. "You took the life extension treatments!" And immediately regretted saying it so loudly. Among croma, it was a universally sensitive thing.

"More fun than being dead," said Kim'ju, making the rounds with his drinks. He saved the last for Skah, sitting on the low table where he could both watch Hiro with concern, and listen ears-pricked to the conversation. "After I did my time in the army, I swore I'd enjoy my life, and try to live a long one. Knew too many who didn't get that chance. Folks who died to help keep me alive." He leaned against a ceiling support, rising from one end of a kitchen bench, a brooding bulk of slow-burn emotion. "But, you know." He made an offhand gesture, and raised his own mug to his thick muzzle. "Croma are croma."

In some ways, Lisbeth thought, croma were even more hierarchical than parren. They didn't act like it, and their culture wasn't endlessly reminding people of their place with the same inescapable gravity. But in the end, only a small proportion of high-ranking croma produced enough naturally occurring anti-aging molecules to allow them to grow old. Croma just knew when they were highly ranked, and it brought on psychological shifts as surely as phase-change did with parren.

Lisbeth's gaze shifted to Shonteel, passed out in a chair beside Hiro. Lower-ranked croma typically died by a hundred and forty five years, sometimes much earlier, of natural causes. But the most highly ranked continued to grow, to become the imposing leaders of croma society. It was a naturally evolved culling mechanism, functioning to keep the power-pyramid of croma society thin and tapered at the top. In pre-modern times, keeping so many huge elders alive would have consumed great resources, as while many were formidable warriors in their old age still capable of explosive bursts of power, they could not participate in prolonged labour, like harvesting or hunting food. And croma being the combative souls they were, too many monster warriors at the top of a hierarchy would surely lead to more conflicts among competing croma clans than even croma civilisation could easily tolerate.

The anti-aging molecules were not difficult for an advanced society to replicate, but so great did the status of age and rank remain, amongst croma, that the taboo against violating the natural order remained strong. Synthetic anti-aging treatments existed, and circulated through underground markets, but one of their side-effects was that they did not allow the continuation of a croma's usual lifelong growth. And so there were a few rare croma like Kim'ju and Kut'see, who despite their size, were considerably shorter and less well-armoured than they should have been, at this age. But of course, if they'd had to resort to life-extension treatments in the first place, it meant that none of them were naturally high-ranking, and would have certainly been dead by now had nature been left to take its course.

That was the true sensitivity, Lisbeth guessed. Back on Homeworld, she'd heard tales of what Fleet and Army veterans called 'stolen valour'. All through human space, there was no status greater than that of a veteran who had fought and risked all for the Human Cause. Some people who had not served, either by choice or by some disqualification, saw the respect afforded to those who had, and felt its absence from their own lives like a giant hole through the heart. Some of those chose deceit, to dress in uniforms they had never served in, wearing medals they had not earned, simply to march before the crowds amongst men and women who were not truly brothers and sisters in arms, and bask in the glory of applause, praise and salutes that were not truly theirs.

As a child, Lisbeth had never understood why such cases had made her father and other family veterans seethe. Now as an adult, having seen what she'd seen, she understood better, and it seemed to her that this was somewhat closer to the true nature of the croma anti-aging taboo. Old, huge and powerful croma were assumed by others to have done something to earn it. Only the high-status grew so old, and to be high-status amongst croma was something like being a veteran of great battles amongst humans. To many croma, to gain age without status seemed like stolen valour -- an unearned reward that sullied the glory of those who had truly suffered and died.

"So," said Kim'ju, quietly. "I'll show you the temple."

* * *

The stairs to the top of the central temple minaret were a broad and upward spiral, made of great croma flagstones, perhaps hewn from the very rock of the mountain upon which it sat. The stairs ended at a circular balcony, which opened onto a huge vista of low cloud and thick forest, spectacularly aglow as the setting sun found a break in the overcast and set all to golden flame. Ahead lay the smaller of the twin peaks between which this cradle rested, its crown lost in cloud.

Lisbeth, Skah, Timoshene and Lior completed a slow circuit of the balcony, taking in the full scope of the temple below, and the taller second peak of the mountain on the far side. The temple walls described a roughly rectangular space, divided into quarters by smaller walls within. At each corner of the rectangle rose a new tower, each smaller than this central tower, and irregular in a way that must have been disconcerting to anyone preferring symmetry.

The corner furthest from the cabins was occupied by a tower shaped like an obelisk, four-sided with a point on the top. The rock of its construction was nothing like the granite of the central tower, and flowed from something like white marble to black obsidian with the fluid ease of layered icecream. Up its length glittered irregularities -- outgrowths of strange crystals, multi-coloured, glinting in the sunlight. Other patches were golden, or of other precious metals, and the whole structure sparkled in the sunset.

Nearest the eclectic tower on the short side of the rectangular walls was a tower even stranger. This one rose in stone to a third the other's height, then turned to steel, and began dividing as it rose. A single base turned to a level of four towers, then eight, then a rising silver sculpture of sixteen that continued to fan and grow in increasingly irregular ways as it rose.

Above the temple corner nearest the cabins, a tower rose that also turned to combined steel-and-stone sculpture, spreading into the petals of an enormous flower. The flower's inner petals were some sort of hard-wearing glass, blazing in the sunset.

The remaining corner held an obelisk tower, pure white, simple and apparently featureless, seeming almost to vanish against the beams of setting sun.

Kim'ju eyed his guests expectantly, nursing his mug of shnu. It was too obvious what the whole place represented. Parren from another house might have blurted the answer to their expectant host, but House Harmony parren merely gazed, and drank in the beautiful sights, and the cool, humid breeze.

"It's the pawen houses, isn't it?" Skah asked in English as he grasped it.

Lisbeth smiled and nodded. "Can you tell which is which?"

Skah looked around, uncertain, as wind flicked at his ears. "Uh... this one is... House Harnony." He pointed to the pure white obelisk. "Cause it's sinpuw."

"I think the polite word is 'minimalist'," Lisbeth corrected him with amusement. "But sure, simple, yes."

"And this one near the cabins is... I don't know."

"House Creative," said Lisbeth. "In parren tradition, the arts are represented by a flower."

"Why"

"Because it grows and blooms, and brings beauty and life to the world. You remember that the next time you're complaining about your homework reading."

Skah was too amazed by the discovery of this new puzzle to even respond. He rushed back around the balcony, and Lisbeth followed, thoughtful parren and curious croma behind. Skah stopped opposite the steel tower that divided by multiples of four into a forest of sharp steel spires.

"House Akwis... akwis... chergo nos!" he completed, giving up the English word completely. "Acquisition," said Lisbeth's earpiece, in a fair approximation of Skah's voice, translating from Gharkhan.

"Yes," said Lisbeth. "But that one." She pointed to the other obelisk, shaded black and white and sparkling.

Skah frowned. "That one? Why?"

"Why do you think this one is House Acquisitive?" Nodding at the mass of steel spikes.

"'Cause it looks fancy," said Skah.

"You don't think the other one looks fancy?"

"Those crystaws aren't even expensive," Skah scoffed. "Sinpuw crystaws, you see then at narkets."

"House Acquisitive doesn't always mean expensive," Lisbeth explained. "People from House Acquisitive are explorers and risk takers. They like to build and collect things. Sometimes that means money, but others build companies, or schools, or institutions that perform social functions rather than just accumulate profit. Many become wealthy, but not all."

"So why is this one House Enquiry?" Skah looked again at the steel forest.

"Because you follow a school of knowledge from the base," said Lisbeth pointing at the stone foundation. "And learning that one thing then allows you to learn many other things. Like learning maths. Maths is not physics or chemistry, but you can't do either without it. On the foundation of one strand of knowledge, many other strands are formed. And as you learn more and more, the possible strands of knowledge multiply and spread, like branches of a great tree."

"The croma word for school means 'tree'," said Kim'ju. "Some croma scholars think it comes from the parren thought of House Enquiry. Enquiry took over much of the croma education system, divided as it was back then, during the croma-parren union."

"I don't imagine most croma today would like that idea," Lisbeth suggested.

"No," Kim'ju admitted. "Not many. We get requests for tours sometimes. For schools. We make recordings, virtual tours for croma children back in the world. But not many. Some parents get upset when they learn what we teach. There are threats to our funding."

"Because you teach that parren and croma were once friends?" Timoshene asked. Lisbeth was surprised. The tall, silent warrior typically had little to say on non-martial matters.

"Croma have never been conquered," Kim'ju said drily. "Croma stand alone. Croma need no friends." The irony, Lisbeth thought, came from the ever-closer proximity of reeh space, and the impending doom it spelled for this world.

Timoshene's silence indicated that he understood.

"But crona built this?" Skah asked, squinting against the sun.

"Yes," said Kim'ju. "Croma built this."

"Why?"

"A gift," said the croma. "A gift to our parren brothers and sisters. A gift to family."

"Croma today may not like it," Lisbeth said softly. "But parren will love it, no matter the House. House Harmony in particular." So many Harmony philosophers and teachings, of bringing the disparate parts together, finding commonalities, making them whole. No wonder House Harmony was so often called the natural House of Empire, instead of the more obviously aggressive House Fortitude. "Juneso would rather chew off his own arm than drop an orbital strike on this. And if Gesul and others found out he had, in retrospect, they'd chew off all the other limbs too."

"So where is House Fortitude?" Skah wondered.

"You're standing on it," said Lisbeth. "Solid stone, strength above aesthetics. Central, as House Fortitude was the dominant parren house, in those days."

* * *

Upon their return to the cabins in the lengthening gloom, Lisbeth saw the chew'toos emerging from the trees, returning with their riders from their mission. They towered over the cabins, striding with a slow and mesmerising power.

"Want to say hello?" Kim'ju asked the party.

"Yes!" Skah insisted.

Lisbeth smiled. "Of course."

She glanced at Timoshene as he walked, clad still in spacer jumpsuits, as were they all. His balaclava looked incongruous in a forest. Lisbeth bet he'd have liked his usual planetside robes more. As she watched, he took a small flask from a pocket, and pulled up his balaclava enough to drink. Lisbeth frowned. It wasn't his usual flask, and there was tension in his bare jaw. But this was not the place to ask if something was wrong.

The chew'toos were each dragging a tree -- forage for the night, Lisbeth realised. The animals' two riders detached the load harnesses from their huge saddles, then swung expertly to the ground and removed the hooks from the trees themselves.

Lisbeth would have given Skah a boost onto a higher railing of the enclosure to look, but Skah was far too big for such things now, and far too athletic, clambering easily onto a cross-beam above Lisbeth's head and crouching, wide-eyed. The smell of the huge beasts was at this range nearly overpowering, but while eye-wateringly strange, was not entirely unpleasant.

The rider named Chon'do did all of the talking -- a croma man somewhat smaller than Kim'ju, but very confident with the animals. He had an earpiece too, which fed him translations of all Skah's questions, shouted from the railings as the chew'toos settled down on the rock, and stretched their long necks to eat the newly acquired foliage. There were several standing trees about the enclosure and near enough for long necks to reach, Lisbeth saw, but those were all dead. No wonder.

"All they do is eat!" Chon'do agreed, scratching his mount's enormous jaw. It ignored him, devouring leaves by the bundle with powerful bites. "But the shit's good fertiliser, so they help grow as much as they destroy. Gave them both baths down at the lake, it doesn't get too cold even up here with the humidity. They can leave any time they like, the fence is just a suggestion. But they're territorial, and this is their home."

"No trouble with the shuttle?" Lisbeth asked.

"Heavy load," Chon'do agreed. "Hard work, but we pulled it. Can't be seen from orbit, I'm pretty sure. Who shot you down?"

"I'll explain later," said Lisbeth. The other rider's name was Tere'sai. She was nearly as big as Kim'ju, with scarred, armoured forearms beneath shorter sleeves as she worked. And she was as silent as a stone, though she gave her chew'too a particularly long and affectionate scratch before leaving it for the night.

"She's not old like the rest of us," said Kim'ju. "She's not on the age treatments. But she will be, because she's got as little chance of age-status out here as we had."

"So why is she out here?" Lisbeth asked dutifully.

"She was in the Tribi'ko Tali'san," said Kim'ju. "You know what Tali'san are?"

"Yes," said Lisbeth, pointing at Skah. "Him in particular. He was at the Dul'rho Tali'san just now, right in the middle."

Kim'ju looked very impressed. "Tribi'ko Tali'san was nearly twenty years ago now. It might have given Tere'sai age status. Instead, it gave her a club to the skull. She hasn't spoken since." He snorted, and kicked the ground. "They say age status is earned. Advancement of the greatest and strongest, improvement of the species. It's chew'too shit. Luck, all of it. Luck and corruption."

Skah listened atop his perch, attention pulled even from the amazing animals. When Chon'do and Tere'sai emerged from the enclosure, and pulled the colossal gate across to 'suggest' that the animals stay inside, Skah leaped from his rail, and walked close to Tere'sai in particular, looking up at her with quiet respect.

"Timoshene," Lisbeth said softly, walking at his side behind the group. "I see you drinking from the separate flask. Are you well?" A Domesh warrior might take medicine quietly, from another drinking flask, rather than admit to injury.

"Phase change," said Timoshene. Lisbeth stared at him, with dawning dread. Oh no. Not him too? Not now! "I can slow it. I carry the medicine."

"How long?" Lisbeth asked with trepidation.

"Hard to say. Ten days, if the medicine is effective. Two days, if not."

"What does it feel like?"

"Headaches. Nausea. I've fought with worse."

"What if we just let it take its course?" If Coroset repaired itself, it could be upon them shortly. The thought of Timoshene losing his ability to fight, just when they all needed it most, struck her as cosmically unfair. "I mean, what if you phased to House Fortitude?"

"There are five houses," Timoshene said shortly. "All have some members capable of combat, but the likelihood outside of Fortitude and Harmony decreases, and shifts from previous capabilities are usually most severe." Lisbeth bit her lip, nodding. It was a well-known phenomenon -- the phase was a change, and those most invested in a particular skillset were often hardest hit. "The Black Phase would be the only guarantee, yet it is only one chance in four."

In parren lore, all the phases had names. Harmony-to-Fortitude, the two warrior houses, was known as the Black Phase, for reasons that escaped Lisbeth entirely. There were card games based upon the phases, known by all parren since childhood. Five Houses, four possible combinations, eight if one considered the direction of phase. Scientists claimed some combinations, in some directions, were more likely than others. Yet other scientists claimed that circumstance changed those outcomes, so a peaceful phase would be different from one caused by violence or stress.

Old fashioned fortune tellers were paid handsome sums by the superstitious to predict the phase-change of the wealthy, and their loved ones. Parren wrote poetry about it, and songs, and plays. Phase-change had created entire schools and philosophies of parren art and thought, and had caused them to insist that their homeworld had five seasons, when any reasonable human could see that it had in fact four. It was the single, dominant obsession of parren thought, yet Lisbeth had never been confronted with the inescapable truth of it, until now. And the truth was that her old friend Timoshene, whether she or he liked it or not, was about to become someone else entirely.

11

"She shouldn't be on this ship," said Kaspowitz. They were crammed into the Captain's tiny quarters once more, the only place on Phoenix where they could be reasonably assured of privacy from Styx. Styx would know it, but they were beyond tiptoeing around these uncomfortable motivations now. Styx's interests were open and declared, as were Phoenix's. Erik thought there were advantages to having it that way. "For so long as she's aboard, we're effectively her hostages."

Erik sat on his bunk alongside Sasalaka, while Trace half-sat on his small table, Kaspowitz stood by the door, and Shilu on Trace's far side.

"She says Raka Fleet does not trust us," Shilu replied. "That she's staying aboard for our protection."

"Yeah, convenient isn't it?" said Kaspowitz with a scowl. "She has to stay aboard. She's doing it all for us, you see."

"I'm not sure it makes very much difference at this point," Shilu replied, absently massaging his synthetic arm. "We're not going after Chion because Styx is holding a gun to our heads. And if we go with Raka Fleet, Styx doesn't need to be aboard Phoenix to have some control over our actions. I could even argue that we would be easier to coerce if Styx were not aboard, precisely because we'd feel ourselves under greater threat."

"If we have to take actions other than what Styx might like," Kaspowitz retorted, "her being aboard makes it relatively simple for her to stop us. She knows this ship's systems backwards, there's no time-lag with her aboard, no latency, she can shut us off like flicking a switch. Which stops us from even thinking about it. We just settle into this closed box of constrained strategic possibilities that she's constructed for us, and stop even thinking about questioning her."

That last, Erik suspected, was a dig at him in particular. And perhaps at Trace as well. Everyone knew that if senior crew were going to successfully challenge him on something big, it was far more likely to be her than Draper or Dufresne.

"If Styx commanded the fleet from Friendship," Erik replied, "we'd become an irrelevance. Like an observer. Raka Fleet could just ignore us entirely. Having Styx aboard makes us relevant."

"Within parameters laid down by Styx," Kaspowitz persisted.

"Within parameters laid down by the situation," Erik corrected. "There's a hundred and twenty plus warships now in this Fleet. We're the only organic vessel, though it looks like the alo will be coming along too, but those ships are mostly unarmed. That narrows our range of possible actions considerably, irrespective of whether Styx is aboard this vessel or not. The situation's changed, Kaspo. Styx stays aboard for now."

Kaspowitz conceded the argument without complaint or surprise. He'd made his point. "Sure. You'll want to know the course ahead."

"Yes, please."

"Three jumps, major course corrections at the first two, going to be tight with all this company. Coordination windows in and out of jump will be very tight. If we get too spread out at either end, early arrivers could get picked off by waiting reeh forces."

He slid AR glasses down his large nose, tapping icons in the air before him. Holography sprang to life about Trace's head, and she slid off the table to the bunk, the only available space, and squeezed in between Erik and Sasalaka. Jump coordinates lit the starmap, alien as ever in the heart of the Reeh Empire.

"Best guess of how many reeh will be waiting for us at Terenax?" Erik asked, gnawing lightly at one thumbnail. Trace slapped his hand. Erik elbowed her, an old joke between them.

"Depends on how reliable Styx's force projections are," said Kaspowitz. "I mean, the sheer scale of reeh forces is terrifying. But you then have to calculate how fast they got the message of the threat to Chion, and then how fast they come to her defence, and by what route. We started off at Keijir System, much closer to Terenax System than ninety-five percent of the Reeh Fleet. So stands to reason we'll be there well before ninety-five percent can do so. I mean, it should be relatively unprotected. Certainly from something the size of Raka Fleet."

"What's your best guess on defensive buildup?" Sasalaka asked, squinting at the holographics as they switched to show a closeup of Terenax. An M-Class star, three large gas giants, no rocky worlds or anything inhabitable at scale.

"Styx says there's usually three squadrons on station there," said Kaspowitz. "In Reeh Fleet terms, let's say fifty ships. More than we'd ever use for home defence, because we're not endlessly worried about uprisings like the reeh are."

"Until lately," Shilu corrected.

Kaspowitz grimaced. "Right." Last they'd all heard, the Worlder Rebellion was still ongoing back in human space. To be out here fighting for the defence of a united humanity, only to hear that humanity back home was busy tearing itself apart, wasn't something anyone wanted to think about. "Let's say the reeh have a stronger tradition of home defence than humans do. But because they've traditionally concentrated larger forces around their most important command centres, the forces directly adjoining those command centres tend to be weaker. A home defence of fifty ships should have done it, the rest are deployed outward to the periphery of the Empire, where the fighting is.

"They don't expect Raka Fleet to turn on them. Well, noone expected it except maybe Chion herself -- she just neglected to tell the reeh."

"More likely she told them, but they ignored her," came Shali's voice over room speakers. "It seems like she's been telling them all sorts of things over the past few thousand years, like how they shouldn't kill everyone all the time." Keeping the Captain's room 'Styx proof' hadn't rendered it 'Shali proof'. The paradox being that the only person with the ability to make it so was Shali herself. Everyone knew that if Styx decided to make it otherwise, there was nothing even Shali could do about it. Thus far, Styx had declined, but her edge over Shali wasn't so great that she could infiltrate without Shali's knowledge.

"My best calculations are that they won't have more than a hundred and fifty ships at Terenax by the time we get there," Kaspowitz completed. "Probably a lot less. But more are arriving every day, so obviously, delay is death. As to whether we've got enough, I'll leave to the pilots."

Erik looked at Sasalaka. Her thick lips were pursed as she thought about it. "I think we've got enough," she said. "Given Raka Fleet's performance advantages. What do we know of Chion's location?"

"Not much," said Kaspowitz. The holography zoomed to an orbiting mass about the outermost gas giant. "Apparently there's a planetoid. Details are sketchy, the guys Styx captured the data from were in the dark themselves, it's a pretty dark location, not much data anywhere. My guess is very well defended. No evidence to support it, it just seems safest to assume."

Erik nodded. "My biggest concern now is actually getting access to Chion if and when we win," he said. "Clearly we won't be in the spearhead of this assault."

"Or if the reeh don't just kill her rather than let us capture her," said Shilu.

"Or doesn't kill herself," said Kaspowitz. "Maybe this whole thing of hers to undermine the Reeh Empire since the Narsid took over has just been one multi-millennia long suicide attempt. I mean, if they won't let her kill herself, how else would she do it?"

A silence as they considered that. Erik flipped down his glasses, and found Shali's blue figure by the doorway, squeezed between Kaspowitz and Shilu. The girl was biting her lip as she gazed at the hologram map, clearly emotional. Obviously she'd know Erik was watching her. Was it just a show? Surely an AI optimised for interaction with organic sentiences would benefit from some degree of involuntary response?

"Right," said Erik. "So as I see it, we're basically going to be in reserve for the main assault. A part of me is fine with that. We lost more good people just now." With a glance at Trace, directly alongside. She was calm and somber, unreadable as always. "And a part of me doesn't like it at all, because as we've just been protesting to Styx, we now lack almost any ability to influence the situation. We're out here to get access to Chion. We're going to capture her, and learn what she knows, about Nia, the alo, everything. But right now we can't guarantee we'll get access to Chion even if we are successful in capturing her."

"What if the reeh destroy her rather than let us have her?" Shilu asked.

"Styx insists they won't," said Erik. "She's too valuable. We'll still be trapped deep in Reeh Empire space, they'll try to capture her back. Chion is the regulatory mechanism for their entire cybernetic existence. They've never been able to take over those functions for themselves. Styx says organic minds just can't do it."

"Styx has underestimated organic minds before," Shilu replied.

"I think she's right," said Shali, quietly. "I had a lot of experience with this, before the Narsid. The calculations are... complicated. Like, so complicated I wouldn't know how to begin describing them to you. They have to be adjusted in real time, according to other parameters that are just as complicated. The complications compound, and increase exponentially across large populations over time and space. I'm sorry, there's no polite way to say it. Organic minds are very good at many things, better than AIs, I think. But managing that technology isn't one of them."

"The reeh built a technological empire dependent on Chion," said Trace. "And even after they fell out with her, they still need her. And evidently she won't help them to build a new AI queen, because she'd just be replacing herself."

"The technology required to do that is even more extreme than maintaining an AI-derived cybernetic empire," said Shali. "I mean, you've seen it."

They had, on Defiance. That technology had built Liala. Unsurprisingly, Shali had been looking through Phoenix's logs.

"And your fears that Styx could take Raka Fleet back to the Spiral?" Sasalaka asked Erik. "Make common cause with Nia and the alo, and attack humanity between them?"

"It's unlikely," Erik admitted. "But I see no downside in pointing out to Styx that the more powerful she becomes, the more threatening she is to everyone, humanity included. And by taking this fleet, like it or not, we're all complicit in making her enormously more powerful. I could spin up this or that conspiracy theory about what she's planning to do -- it's not important. The important thing is that this is a drysine queen, the former commander of the Drysine Fleet at the zenith of its power. She's on the rise again, and anything is possible."

He looked long and solemnly at Kaspowitz. Kaspowitz gazed back. He'd long been the loudest voice in warning about precisely this danger. Kaspowitz was the oldest member of the bridge crew. He'd served in the Triumvirate War for more than forty years, seen a lot of things, and become something of an expert on a lot of obscure Spiral history.

"This had better be worth it," Kaspowitz said drily. "For everyone."

* * *

Tif sat opposite Tan on his Medbay bunk, the bed table between them. She ate sliced meats, while Tan sampled a few, and appeared to find them tolerable. Tif had never seen an alo before. Choghoth, where she'd grown up, was a long way away from anywhere, and the big events shaking the rest of the Spiral had rarely touched there.

She'd known that the Visitors, as humans were often called, had been fighting a big war against the tavalai, who had killed the human homeworld long ago. Only the tavalai hadn't actually killed their homeworld -- that had been another race called the krim, who the humans had in turn wiped out, and from there it all got very complicated in a way that many kuhsi preferred to ignore. Alien politics were confusing. Some kuhsi spread conspiracies about how the humans had actually been the aggressors in killing all the krim, then blaming the krim and the tavalai for it. Others said this or that kuhsi political faction was collaborating with this or that group of aliens for their own benefit.

Tif guessed that only a quarter of all kuhsi would have even heard of the alo, and far less than that could have accurately described what side they were on. Embarrassingly, before she'd wound up on Phoenix herself, she'd have been one of them. Some kuhsi had volunteered to go and fight in the humans' war, and many other kuhsi had derided them as self-serving, kissing the Visitors' backsides for personal favours. Perhaps that was even true, for some. But now, having seen what she'd seen out in the vast galaxy beyond Choghoth, she could only marvel at her people's self-imposed naivety. Many of them refused to care about any worlds beyond their own because they genuinely thought it didn't matter. She wondered what they'd think if this fleet, or Nia's fleet, or the reeh fleet, were to arrive in their system, and proceed to do whatever they'd do. A part of her shuddered at the prospect. Another part, still angry at what they'd done to herself, her husband and Skah, thought they'd only deserve it.

"Shuttle pilot?" Tan asked, via the translator.

"Yes," said Tif. He didn't seem very scared, considering his situation. Far less scared than she'd been. That thought was embarrassing now. "You like?" she asked, indicating the food.

Tan replied by taking another slice, and eating. That strange, multi-gilled nose cavity flexed and rippled as he chewed. Supposedly he had even better smell than she did, but that might have been exaggeration from the humans, who could barely smell at all.

"How long a shuttle pilot?" he asked, examining her with beady black eyes.

"Five years," she said. "On Choghoth. The kuhsi homeworld, where I'm from. Then another nearly three years on Phoenix." It seemed like far longer. Like an entire lifetime. She wondered how she'd feel when it all ended, if it ended. If Phoenix went home to humanity, what would happen to her and Skah? They were only here because Phoenix was renegade, operating outside of normal human rules. If those rules were reinstated, and Phoenix became a part of the human fleet once more, she and Skah would be left with nowhere to go, and nowhere to call home. Except that Family Debogande would definitely look out for them. But what kind of life would that be? As exhibits in a golden cage, unable to even pay their way? Human worlds had rules about who could be shuttle pilots, and Tif was pretty sure they didn't extend to kuhsi.

"You augmented?" Tan pressed. A Medbay display screen blinked a countdown on one wall, forty-three human minutes until burn. Outside, the Raka Fleet was assembling for its assault on Tronex System. The organics on Phoenix would have enjoyed a cycle of sleep before the next action, but AIs had little respect for organic preferences. And besides, every minute they waited, more reeh forces arrived to defend Terenax System.

"Yes," said Tif. She'd volunteered to talk to the alo kid herself. It was standard procedure, whenever some new alien came aboard Phoenix. Tif could show them how Phoenix had no issue with non-humans, as also evidenced by all the tavalai, drysines and now one corbi aboard. And a ceephay who pretended to be a human girl in overalls and bare feet.

"What augments?"

"Pilot augments." Tif indicated up her spine, where the base propagation of G-augments went, strengthening muscles, improving bloodflow. Stopping the diaphragm from collapsing, followed by suffocation. "And reflex augments." She indicated wrists and arms. "Eyesight too." Pointing at an eye. "The humans offered me hearing augments, but it turns out I already hear better than them."

She didn't bother trying not to be smug. Some humans thought that was rude, but Tif was kuhsi, and she didn't see it, herself. Better was better. Those who weren't better just had to deal with it.

"Did it hurt?" asked Tan.

"Bit," said Tif, with a shrug. "The operation's small. They grow once they're inside you." He'd know that, of course. No one would know it better than an alo, especially one attached to Raka Fleet. "Our augments are like synthetic biology. They behave like organic bodyparts that our body just hasn't evolved yet. Your augments seem more mechanical."

Tan's beady eyes flicked away. Looking at a nearby bunk, where Private Ceren was sleeping, recovering from operations following his injuries on Kalax Base. There was really no reason for Tan to still be here, other than crew hadn't found him a room yet. At least the marines were no longer here with their sidearms, having decided that one alo kid wasn't about to sabotage the entire ship, and wasn't some cybernetically-implanted bomb, explosive or otherwise.

"What about think augments?" Tan asked.

Tif frowned. "Think augments?"

Tan reached with a bony black finger, and pointed to his skull. "Think augments."

Tif stared, ears slowly flattening to her skull. All augments interfaced with the brain at some point, particularly with uplinks, which wove network connectivity together with vision and hearing. But she didn't think Tan was talking about that.

"No," she said. "We don't have those. What do they do?"

"Bad," said Tan. He speared another slice of meat. "All bad."

* * *

Tif emerged from her quarters at burn minus twenty-three, flight suit on, helmet under one arm, gloves stuffed into a thigh pocket alongside the systems-check notes that she still carried but never used. Bandana wound about her left forearm, collar seal open, a firearm in the right thigh pocket that most Fleet pilots apparently didn't use, but had become common carry among Phoenix pilots. Flying assault missions off most Fleet warships, there were limits to the number of crazy places you'd end up, or crazy things you'd be required to do. Flying off Phoenix, those limits were removed, and the pistol seemed prudent.

Ensign Dave Lee was waiting outside her door as she emerged. Pale and taller than the average human male, he towered over Tif. "All good?" he asked as they headed for the L-Bulkhead stairs.

"You trin," Tif accused him, peering suspiciously up at his thin, pale beard. "Why you trin?"

"Coz it gets itchy beneath the helmet strap," said Lee, rubbing his jaw.

"If you no trin," said Tif, "you grow proper beard rike handsone kuhsi."

"How about if I let my ears grow out?" Lee suggested, holding both hands up to imitate big kuhsi ears.

"Hunans aw deaf," Tif complained. "Big ears no hewp."

"Look pretty hot though, right? Maybe I could get one of those big torki knives the Heshog men carry, and pick my teeth with it."

Tif whacked him lightly, and darted up the stairwell, squeezing past a big tavalai spacer coming down the other way. Lee certainly knew a lot more about Choghoth and kuhsi than he had, being her front-seater, but jokes about finding human men attractive made her shudder. Bald and skinny with blunt teeth, no ears and herbivore diets, no thank you. This one was funny, though.

Tunnel transit through Phoenix's zero-G core was crowded with Midships Second-Shift Engineering crew headed to stations, plus a few armoured marines who'd missed the transition window forty-five minutes ago when the crew cylinder had been shut down to allow marine platoons to move en-masse without leaving the ship's gravitational rim.

Tif latched her elbow about the rope-line handle, letting it gently guide her course along the two-meter-wide tunnel, as she checked her drink bottle and snacks, and her suit life support rig, which was arguably less important. Crew sailed past her in the opposite direction, while Lee read PH-4's loadout and most recent systems-check numbers off his AR glasses, one rope-line handle behind her and talking on private coms. A Spacer nearly whacked her with a big repair tool of some kind as he whizzed by, Tif yanking her head out of the way just in time, and a Warrant Officer who'd seen it yelled at that man to secure his damn kit.

"Kuhsi reflexes for the win," Lee remarked, as Tif muttered something rude in her native tongue, then with the transit end approaching let go the handle, aimed for the bottom of the stop-cushion, and caught it hard enough to slow her down for safe passage through the big final pressure doors into Midships.

Midships was crazy as always before an assault, crowds of marines clustered in their armoured suits out and around the fan of shuttle berths up, down and to the sides. Midships supply crew secured the lockers the marines had just raided and emptied, tied down the loose straps where they'd been keeping suits and weapons without shifting them back to gravity, while Engineering crew flew across the space with hand-thrusters, heading for their posts.

Tif unhooked her own thruster, pointed and braced her arms with practise born of several embarrassing spin-outs a long time ago, and propelled herself toward the top edge of the cargo wall that was central to Berth Four, where PH-4 resided. She caught a grip there and waited, seeing that most of Bravo Platoon marines at Berth Four had already embarked, just a few suits left amidst Operations crew prepping for launch.

Commotion caught her ears from what seemed relatively 'above' her, at Berth Six, and she looked. Floating about Berth Six, a section of heavily armoured karasai, and two tavalai in flight suits, confronted several human crew, with raised voices and more handwaving than was sensible in zero-G.

"What's up?" Lee wondered as he arrived.

"One minute," said Tif, her temper rising, and kicked off her handhold to fly that way between the flanking cargo walls.

"Oh hey, wait on!" Lee protested. "We got pre-flights to do, Tif! Tif!"

Tif ignored him, giving an extra kick from the hand thruster to get her there faster. She arrived a little too fast, and took the impact through her legs, right by the guide railings beside the open airlock, which she grabbed to stop her rebounding back the way she'd come.

"What's problen?" she asked the surprised tavalai flight crew -- Lieutenant Leralani and his front-seater, Ensign Tamalin.

The human Operations crew, Warrant Officer Widjo, was displeased. He pointed to multiple large coloured ribbons tied to the guide railings about his shuttle berth. Some of them had medallions attached. "These ribbons can't be here," Widjo said firmly. "One of those medallions comes off at ten-Gs, we've got a fifty meter open space here, that will reach velocity like ordinance and take someone's fucking head off."

"Chibi Institution ribbons," Leralani said stubbornly. "Dovaranda and Inuvu were from Chibi Institution. Tradition is to remember them with ribbons at the shuttle berth of last departure."

"And we have to stow and fasten all loose items," Widjo insisted. "Tape, nets and straps all the same. A knot is not a fastening." Said with a spacer's hard insistence of things they'd all had drummed into their skulls from basic training, along with grisly pictures of what happened to human flesh when rules were broken.

"It's a cheki knot," said Leralani, yanking on one end of a ribbon, showing how the knot was held extra-tight with an elastic binding. "We use them all the time in Tavalai Fleet, they never fail."

"Yes, well you're not in Tavalai Fleet now, are you?" Widjo retorted. Surrounded by tavalai pilots and heavily armoured marines, the Warrant Officer was demonstrating that tavalai weren't the only ones prone to stubbornness.

Leralani prepared to launch into a long and typically detailed tavalai riposte that no one had time for. Tif yanked herself over the railing, then pulled short to float directly before him.

"No nore!" she snarled at him. "I know you rost good sowdjer. Good tavarai. Everyone rost. He rost, I rost, everyone." Pointing at Widjo. "You think poor tavarai, aw a-rone on hunan ship. Poor tavarai so ronery. What about ne?" She pointed to herself, hard in the chest. "I onry kuhsi on Phoenix. You see ne conprain? Rika in Bravo Pratoon, onry corbi on Phoenix, you see Rika conprain? No, Rika does his fucking job!

"But not you tavarai, you awrays think nore inportant to be tavarai than to do your job. You nake this hunan problen, nasty hunan not nice to poor ronery tavarai. Wew I not hunan either, and I tew you, this isn't hunan probren, this is tavarai probren! This is hunan ship! Hunan ship do this hunan way! Deaw with it and stop being fucking sewfish!"

Leralani stared at her for a long moment. They all did. Then the tavalai assault pilot, in typically tavalai fashion, opened his mouth to continue the argument with much the same calm manner as though she'd never spoken. Tif snarled at him, bare teeth sharp before his face. Leralani shut up, which was as good as a flinch from a tavalai, and as rare.

Tif got both boots on the railing, and pushed off toward the Midships center, where her frustrated co-pilot, and PH-4, were waiting for her.

* * *

Tan stared at his internal visual, floating in the quarters the humans had just led him to. Rotational gravity had shut down a short while ago, as the alien warship prepared for jump, and now he floated within the mesh confines of the acceleration sling by his gravity bunk. His com-shield established easily enough on the warship's local network, and system analysis gave him a fair reading of the warship's setup. There seemed to be a division in the system tasks, an unmonitored flexibility at the lower trunk levels that was simple enough for him to exploit and colonise with base programs.

That would allow him to set up a local network, unwatched by the warship's higher command levels. It was the kind of low-intelligence thing Tan had been told to expect from aliens like these. No wonder the AI queen who'd retasked Raka Fleet had dominated them for so long, and manipulated them into coming all this way and doing her fighting for her. But it made the aliens a much easier target for him than the queen's own AI ships. Drysines, it seemed they were called. Apparently they were related to the Founders, and came from that same, far-away place in the galaxy.

It was all a calamity, of course. Raka couldn't be retasked. Raka had been the greatest power in the Reeh Empire for all history. But for all their posturing, Raka Command had been destroyed in short order, and these idiot organics had apparently played a role in that, so they weren't completely useless.

Comshield would let him watch Fleet preparations without the aliens being aware or stopping him. He watched them now, six squadrons, assembling at orbital points about Kalax's gravitational complexities. An even bigger assembly than the mission four rotations ago, off to destroy some classified Reeh Empire enemy. The Gathering would be alive with excitement and conversation. And fear, that too. Raka had been retasked, and so the Family would follow. They wouldn't be happy, though. If Raka moved, the Family moved. Without Raka, more than half the universe would disappear.

It felt lonely, though. It was Tan's first time away from home. He could feel the distance now, a physical thing, something he felt more in his heart than in his head. The sensation was uncomfortable, like something out of place he had no idea how to put back. He'd never liked the Family, or he thought he hadn't. But now, without them, was a void.

A blink, and he was on a rock overlooking a deep, green pool. About him was forest, animals and birds in the trees. This was Second Space, then. Segmented, unlike Third Space, which was communal. He could have privacy here. Second Space was Tan's favourite space, free from the games and tasks the other children preferred in their babbling clusters.

He sat for a while, and observed the familiar pool, and the splashing of the waterfall that fell from far above. The landscape layout was not especially consistent, the gravity with which the water fell was off, and the refractions of water frothing where it fell not especially convincing. Probably Second Space was experiencing some bandwidth issues, running on unfamiliar processors, away from The Family. And for the first time in Tan's life, latency was an issue, as physical distance from other alo created a minor delay.

A shape began to pixelate beside him -- an alo-form, arms and legs in similar proportion... but no, the form consolidated to much higher resolution than the rest of Second Space, including his own form. Blue and shimmering. Human, with that narrow, closed face, glandless. An ugly, tiny nose, and strange, frizzy hair about its head. Her head, Tan thought. Female, in the most primitive sense.

"Hello Tan," said the human female. Her feet were bare, and she wore some kind of tough blue cloth on her body. It didn't seem a sensible set of choices. "My name is Shali."

Her Tikitch was perfect, without even an accent. Some synthesiser programs could do that. "Hi," said Tan.

Shali looked around. "Your cybernetics are very advanced to allow a child into full immersion virtual reality. Isn't that dangerous for someone so young?"

"For you, maybe," said Tan.

Shali's lips pursed. An expression of humour, Tan thought. It looked stupid. "Not for me," Shali explained. "I'm an AI."

Oh, thought Tan. Well, that explained her high-resolution, and the lack of an accent. And even being here at all, come to that. "What kind of AI?"

"I'm ceephay. I'm a good friend of Chion. You know who Chion is, don't you Tan?"

"Yes." Carefully. If she was ceephay, why was she choosing to appear like one of these primitives?

"What does your alo Family think of Chion?"

"We don't think about her much," said Tan. "She's very powerful, she's a queen. But Raka technology is superior to ceephay. That's why they've chosen to follow Styx. Styx is Raka technology."

"And what does your alo Family think of Raka following Styx?"

"They're not happy." There wasn't much point in trying to keep such knowledge from a sentient AI. Raka Fleet had had a few, all at Command level. All dead now, if Styx's forces had done their job. Tan had encountered them a few times, in Second Space or Third. They'd been so different to Shali, in expression at least, but trying to fool them had been futile. "They don't know what to do without Raka. The reeh don't like them. So long as they have Raka, they're safe."

"Because they're useful," Shali agreed, gazing at him with what might have been curiosity. Then she looked about, at the trees and waterfall. "This VR space is quite amazing. It's Raka tech rather than ceephay, but the roots are ceephay. Did you know that?"

"No."

"I think it was originally constructed by Chion, it has her markings all over it. Then it was converted to Raka tech. Raka tech is derived from an AI race called the deepynines. Styx is drysine, not quite deepynine but similar. I'd have trouble accessing this space if it had been written by Styx herself, but because it was originally written by Chion, I can figure it out."

That was interesting, Tan thought. He'd have liked to ask more, but didn't think it was safe to. Shali considered him again.

"Do these virtual reality networks exist elsewhere in the Reeh Empire, Tan? Or are the alo the only ones?"

Tan blinked. "How can an AI not know about VR networks? They're pretty common."

"They are in your day. Back in my day, the technology was impossible. Or no, probably not impossible. But dangerous to put into peoples' brains." Her voice turned a little emotional. Sad, perhaps. "But that doesn't bother anyone today."

Tan stared at her. "How old are you?"

Again that thinning of Shali's lips. "Old. I'd love to know what you know about the networks, Tan. I'd especially love to know how you get any sleep when they only work during sleeping hours."

"Not only," said Tan. "But mostly. Waking hours are for work."

"Of course. You seem like a very intelligent boy. I can see the rates at which your neural cybernetics are processing data to maintain this VR space, it's incredibly fast. Are all alo children as smart as you?"

"No."

"Is that a good thing for you? In your Family?"

The AI's questions were unnervingly sharp. The only other sentient AIs Tan had met had been plenty smart in every way except this one. "No," he admitted.

"I've been over there," Shali admitted, with a nod of her head, in the imagined direction of space. "To visit your Family, on the networks. They do neural integrate a lot, don't they? Like the forming of one giant mind."

"Yes."

"But that's difficult when you're super smart, isn't it Tan?" Peering at him, with those big alien eyes. "Lateral unity requires uniformity to be stable. Non-standard brains don't integrate so well into a structured matrix."

The eyes invited him to answer. "Yes."

"Is that why you ran away?" Tan looked away, evasively. "Well. I think it's one part of why you ran away. Don't worry, Tan. These are good people. They don't force unusual people to do things they don't want to."

"I'm not unusual!" Tan said angrily.

Shali leaned and put a shimmering blue hand on Tan's black, skinny one. The VR sensation felt scratchy and faint upon his skin. "And here, that word isn't an insult like it is among your Family. Everyone here's unusual. It's a strength."

"It's not a strength," Tan muttered. "Everyone here is stupid, they can't even prevent me from uplinking to Second Space."

The tight lips grew tighter, showing some teeth. "That was me. I reconfigured it so you'd connect to your VR space while we were still in range. I wanted you to join so I could look at it." Tan was surprised. "I think there's a few organics on this ship who might be even smarter than you, Tan. The Captain in particular. If you can think of anything that might make his job easier, or this ship safer, I'm sure he'd appreciate it."

The blue human vanished in a wash of pixels. Tan stared at the spot where she'd been for a long moment. Then gazed across the rock pool for a long moment, thinking many thoughts.

Something rustled in the undergrowth. Then a big animal dropped to Tan's rock, with effortless springs in its four legs. The VR was contact-safed, but Tan could not help but recoil a little. The animal was bigger than him, and had big teeth and a strong, coiled body. It padded gently to the edge of the rock, and peered at the water below. Some insects flitted by, and it gazed at them, all sharp eyes, pricked ears, and no doubt lightning reflexes.

It was an entity, Tan thought. Not some process function of the VR, but a real mind, existing outside Second Space and projecting inward. But sentient minds manifested as sentient in the VR as well.

"Hello?" Tan said to the animal. It turned to look at him, golden-eyed with wide whiskers. And up once more, distracted, at some birds. "Are you Raka?"

It was the logical possibility. Raka Fleet was filled with minds. Most were borderline sentient, requiring Command Raka to tell them what to do. But Command Raka were dead now. Whatever leash Styx had put them all onto now, it hadn't involved keeping this one from exploring The Family's VR.

"I think you're Raka," Tan decided. It was unfair to think of Raka minds as stupid. This was probably a warship, kept in a synthetic cage for all its existence, and now suddenly free. Unlike himself, Tan thought, who had traded one cage for another. But it had seemed the preferable option at the time. "I don't know if Second Space will still function for long. The Family will be running it from their big ships, if they're coming with us. If you want to keep coming here, you'll have to keep their big ships safe."

The big animal studied him once more. Tan doubted it actually knew how to use those big teeth. But it had to manifest in this world somehow, and a big semi-smart predator was a logical match. Another big animal bounded onto the rock, and also gazed about. The first one curled its long tail about all four feet, and settled quietly onto the rock, one ear flickering in time with the splashing waterfall. The other animal joined it. Then Tan did.

* * *

Draper tried to keep his manner cool and professional like the Captain, despite the unfolding scene around Phoenix and Kalax Base. One hundred and twenty four warships in Raka Fleet, and all were now emerging, systems powering, coms blazing a networked web of lasercom so intense it looked like a strange geometric spiderweb on scan.

Two ships had been undergoing refit, and had to be left behind, presumably to be captured or destroyed when vengeful reeh main-fleet warships arrived to cleanse Kalax Base of any remaining traitors. Draper wondered at the fate of those two warships' AI pilots. Drones could be taken by other ships, but AI pilots were built directly into a warship's mainframe. Would there be enough time to remove them, and take them on other ships? Would it be a moral priority, or a technical one, to save them from their fate?

"Analysing their coms," said Dufresne, "it's possible to get an idea of their organisation. It's looking like six main squadrons, roughly twenty ships each, plus a forward reconnaissance squadron of eight ships, all engines and little armament."

Her analysis flashed onto Draper's sidescreen, showing how all the ships grouped together, and how each squadron broke down. "Each squadron is led by a carrier equivalent, similar size and power to Phoenix, but as per Styx's analysis, not quite our performance. There appears to be a full complement of warrior drones aboard, at least two hundred, possibly three hundred, and eight arrowheads for transport.

"Behind those are five heavy cruisers, each with its own warrior complement, maybe four arrowheads, making them effectively mini-carriers. The rest are nearly impossible to classify according to traditional Spiral categories, but I'd say another five overpowered light cruisers, five gun-heavy destroyers and the rest frigates or rim-runners. The light cruisers have two arrowheads each, so the Fleet total marine complement is huge."

"This thing's bigger than First Fleet," De Marchi remarked from Scan. In raw numbers, it wasn't technically true -- Human First Fleet was the Fleet Phoenix knew best, having served alongside most frequently despite her status as 'free element', occasionally drifting between fleets. First Fleet had about two hundred ships at optimum -- which had rarely been the case during the war, with its endless casualties, retirements and refits. But with Raka's technology, Draper had little doubt Third Fleet would get badly mauled, if not annihilated.

"The third whale appears to have finished loading," said Zelele from Scan Two. "Four and Five are ongoing at the second station."

The whales, as bridge crew were calling them for lack of a better designation, were personnel transports bigger than anything observed in Spiral space. Cargo haulers were frequently larger, because cargo did not require gravity for long-distance haulage. But the whales had rotating crew cylinders occupying the entire forward two-thirds of the hull cages, compared to the forward one-third on Phoenix.

Phoenix had been a shade over four hundred meters long prior to her Defiance refit, and was now closer to four-sixty since their entire rear half had been replaced. She carried nearly eight hundred crew at optimum, but was currently making do with a little more than six hundred.

The whales were each over three kilometres long, with crew cylinders more than three times the diameter of Phoenix, leading to many times the internal volume under the influence of gravity. The torque it generated was insane, leading Draper to estimate that they'd only be running at half-a-G in there, or else the ship would become very difficult to manoeuvre while gravitational. The simulations were estimating that each could carry in excess of seventy thousand people, if packed up toward the low-G core of the rotating cylinder. Five of them meant three hundred and fifty thousand alo. And it seemed that all of them were coming along with Raka Fleet. Understandable, when staying behind meant death.

Was this all of the alo? Surely there were larger populations elsewhere in the Reeh Empire? It suddenly seemed important to know. If this was all of them, then the strategic value of each whale went up enormously. Losing one would cost one-fifth of the entire species, in Reeh Empire space at least. Obviously that would matter to the alo, but how much would it matter to Raka Fleet? Draper needed to know these things if he was to calculate what they'd likely do in extreme circumstances.

"Did we get any more data on the situation with the alo from that kid who came aboard?" he asked. No one replied, everyone head down in their posts, buried in data and trying not to clog the bridge with unnecessary chatter.

"Sorry Commander, no idea," said De Marchi from Navigation. "Been too busy to follow it."

There was one person who would know, though. And not Styx, who had developed an obvious aversion to Phoenix having any relationship with the alo at all. "Shali?" asked Draper. "Are you up to date on the alo?"

"Um, yes Commander," came the girl's faintly anxious reply. "Sure. I think."

"Is this all the alo in Reeh Empire space?"

"We don't know, Commander. I mean, Tan doesn't know. And the data's not available in anything we've seen from Raka Fleet networks. Not that Styx has actually shared very much." So Styx might know, but wasn't telling. Wonderful.

"Commander, I think Raka Fleet will likely leave a squadron in reserve to protect the alo transports."

"How do you know that?"

"The bond between them seems quite strong. Kalax base is well configured with alo safety concerns in mind, it seems Raka looked after them."

"Hard to know what continuing use they'd have for the alo now that the command class is all dead," said Draper, watching the manoeuvring of several big cruisers less than thirty kilometres off Phoenix's orbital trajectory. "They had to follow alo orders because Raka regulars weren't allowed to command themselves outside of the command class. Alo are good at maintenance and repairs, but surely AIs can do that for themselves. They could just ditch them entirely, but apparently they're not doing that. I'm not sure I buy affection as a reason. I think we're missing something."

"Yes Commander. I think we're missing something too. I'll talk to Tan some more, with your permission. Everyone else is too busy anyway."

"Yes, do that." The countdown read burn in six minutes. The Captain and First Shift were riding the first two jumps toward Tronex System in quarters. At Mass Point TB-147, one jump before Tronex System, Nav projections showed there should be enough time for a full shift-change allowing First Shift to resume command before the final and most important jump. Of course, there was no guarantee they wouldn't run into reeh forces at either of the other two jump points, particularly if they'd guessed by now where this avalanche that Phoenix had started was heading.

Draper couldn't believe the scale of it. The whole last nearly-three years had been nuts, but like the rest of the crew, he'd gotten used to it. This, however, was something else. No more sneaking around, supervising ground missions, launching relatively small one or multi-ship strikes against strategic targets. This was a fleet-scale war launched at the heart of the Reeh Empire, betting only that most of that Empire's ships were as yet too widely spread to engage. They'd have to win quickly. If they didn't, literally every ship in the Reeh Fleet would fall on their heads.

12

Erik recalled waking, cheek to the smooth synthetics of a waterproof jacket he'd been using as a pillow. Light rain pattering on the tent, fabric gently flapping in the wind. He'd emerged from his snug sleeping bag, dressed quickly in the cold, and unzipped the tent.

Outside were the trunks of tall trees, growing on this shoulder of flat ground upon a wider slope. The slope went down to a lake, clear and cold beneath the grey overcast. About were low hills, tending to mountains nearby.

Coming along the slope now was Leechee, long jaw, rugged face, scraggly grey hair and beard, toilet paper in one hand.

"Weather's turning bad," he told Erik, handing him the roll, and crouching to attend his pack. "Bureau says there's a storm coming, bad one. Going to have to cut it short and hike out."

"Okay," Erik said with disappointment. "We can't try to find that buck from yesterday first?"

"Could be anywhere by now," said Leechee. "Would take hours to find it, especially if it crossed the ridge and went down by the river trail."

"Yeah, but what if it just went to the higher pasture after those cows we saw earlier?"

"I said no, kid. It'll be embarrassing to call a cruiser if the weather catches us. We'll hike back to the car before it gets here."

Erik nodded, and went with the toilet roll away from the stand of trees along the slope. Leechee was a friend of the family, a cargo master on Erik's father's transport for several years. He and his father had gone through a lot together, and now that they were both safely on Homeworld, Leechee had volunteered to take Erik hunting. He'd always been an outdoorsman, giving up the wide open spaces for the cramped confines of a Fleet freighter. And he had no wealth to speak of, but Walker Debogande sent business his way unasked -- mysterious contracts for his small housing and installation company that kept him busy. Leechee always asked his old crewmate to stop doing it, and Walker would agree, and then another tourist lodge would place an order for a new dining hall or water system out of the blue, and Leechee would sigh and employ a few more people to help him do the job.

Upon returning to the camp, Erik helped Leechee pack the tent, then prepared his own pack, and followed him off on the next diagonal track up the hillslope. Trees grew in thickets, all the way up to the far ridge, now misty with lowering cloud. Water droplets spattered his face. In the distance, thunder rumbled.

* * *

Erik blinked hard as Phoenix crashed out of jump, swaying within the acceleration sling. Adjusted the glasses that tried to drift off his face, pulling a bottle from his harness and taking a swig. Electrolyte-heavy water hit his stomach, and he winced, trying to focus.

The glasses showed him a much worse version of what Draper and Dufresne saw on the bridge -- the local neighbourhood, Phoenix's position on the new system's gravity slope, relative V, the position, V and trajectory of the neighbouring drysine ships, and Raka Fleet beyond them.

Why he'd been dreaming of that camping trip with Leechee, he had no idea. Jump wasn't technically the same as sleep, though like sleep it took longer in realtime than the conscious brain perceived. Erik had known a few people who claimed to dream during jump, but he'd only rarely been one of them.

Abruptly, the mains cut in with a deep rumbling roar, and Erik's acceleration sling went sideways as the Gs mounted. Only four Gs, he thought without needing to consult his glasses, and now he could hear bridge chatter, De Marchi at Navigation announcing possible escape trajectories and approaching decision windows. Then Dufresne, tersely stating her judgement on the surrounding formation, and their position in it. And Abacha, at Scan, calling out new jump coordinates, hostile marks in the system at high V. They couldn't be all that close, because there was no red alert... but even as he thought it, the siren wailed. "This is the Commander. We have hostile ships in the system, combat conditions are in effect. All crew, battle stations."

That last was unnecessary -- straight out of jump, all current-shift crew were already at battle stations, and off-shift were in their acceleration slings. Under Gs, no one would be moving. Erik blinked on the command icon, not wanting to bother Draper with a request for sitrep, just letting him know that the Captain would like one as soon as possible.

"Hello Captain," came Draper's voice in his ear almost immediately. "We have reeh ships downslope positioned to cut off our jump to Tronex System. Raka Fleet Third Squadron elements are moving to intercept but some portion of that reeh fleet is evasive. We have to decide whether to exit jump with the bulk of Reeh Fleet or defend our flanks by direct engagement."

"We need to be at Tronex System with Raka Fleet," Erik told him. "That's our priority, but tactical security takes precedence. The call is yours Commander."

Transit through Mass Point AB-147 was supposed to take five hours. They were meant to change shifts here, put Erik and Sasalaka back in the pilots' chairs in preparation for the big assault on Tronex, but under high-G manoeuvres that would be impossible. Phoenix was now well back in the Raka Fleet order of battle, and Erik wasn't much worried about Draper and Dufresne flying them into heavy combat. So far back were they in Raka Fleet's attack structure, he reckoned they'd probably get a good half hour on approach to Tronex where they could change shifts at the hot end before the shooting started. It was far from ideal, but if he'd stayed in the chair himself the whole way, Second Shift's morale would have suffered for the appearance that the Captain didn't trust them to do anything. Besides which, it would have put First Shift on bridge duty for a whole rotation straight, and flying exhausted into a big fight was always a bad idea.

"You've got multiple bridge shifts for a reason," Captain Pantillo had said. "Use them."

"Captain, we're going straight through," came Draper's reply, voice hard with equal parts tension and excitement. "Raka main fleet is burning hard course correction, if we join those defending the flanks we'll miss the main thrust. Friendship and Sunrise are indicating that they'll defend the flanks, we'll shadow the main force and keep the whales company on the jump. Transit will now take twenty-three-point-one, Gs maxing at eight-point nine in four minutes."

"The Captain copies," Erik said calmly. "Take us through, Commander. Go get 'em Second Shift."

First Shift always flew into heavy combat where ever possible. Many of those occasions where it was not possible had become legend in Fleet, where junior pilots had ended up in command of large forces entirely by accident, for good or ill. Erik hoped that Commander Draper and Lieutenant Commander Dufresne's first major combat action on the Phoenix bridge became the stuff of legend, and not a cautionary tale.

* * *

Draper tried to control his thudding heart-rate as Second Shift's reports assailed his ears, and his eyes attempted to make sense of Scan's unfolding picture of Tronex System.

Their target was Cygnex, the largest of about thirty moons about a big yellow gas giant. Tronex was a young M-Class star, burning with higher than typical luminosity at nearly five AU from the gas giant. Ahead, Scan was showing all the signs of recent engagements, the ruins of what the ID tags said had once been fire stations, but no ongoing firefights, and little active ordnance.

"Everyone's in," Abacha was saying from Scan One, as the last of Phoenix's rearguard group flashed into formation a few thousand kilometres off one flank. "Raka Fleet's in, all committed to the jump are here."

"We're missing Friendship and Sunrise from the drysines," Dufresne confirmed. "That's twenty-one ships total who stayed in AB-147 to rear-guard the jump."

"Scan, can we get a better picture ahead?" Draper asked, sipping at his drink tube, having no free hand to do that as Phoenix raced at thousands of kilometres a second on tangential to Cygnax's far side from the gas giant. "I get no read on active engagements, I need threat assessment asap."

As Phoenix's combat computer spun its wheels, expecting massive data input and getting very little. Shali had placed her own inputs into that system, with the promise of upgrading soon to AI-scale reflexive responses, and all the Phoenix pilots had reviewed and approved those changes, with various degrees of trepidation. But now, with all systems set for hair trigger responses, there was nothing to respond to.

"I'm getting no enemy tags at all," Abacha replied, sounding confounded.

"Check again," Draper snapped. "Don't trust what they're telling us." It had been his and the Captain's biggest concern operating with Raka Fleet for the first time -- that Raka would somehow override their incoming data-flows to fool their systems into seeing things that weren't real. Inherent in that concern, of course, was that Styx would let Raka do it, because there was no way it could happen if she didn't. Of course, Phoenix's own eyes and ears were too sophisticated to be easily fooled, but Styx effectively had a direct-bypass to the brain, meaning that eyes and ears could no longer be trusted.

"Scan Two has nothing either," echoed Zelele. "Raka advance elements have dumped V, one pincer is continuing a dark-side sweep of the giant, it looks like they haven't found anything either."

Draper didn't believe it. This was Tronex System, the closest thing the Reeh Empire had to a command center. Nearby reeh forces had had plenty of time to see them coming, and prepare defences. Tronex System in general, and Cygnax in particular, should have been crawling with reeh warships. But save for the remains of these orbiting and Lagrangian firebases, there was nothing.

"It looks as though they've gone," Dufresne observed. "We're too far down the light-lag to trust far-system scan, but there's no sign of activity there either, all the outer approaches look clear."

Draper's heart, pounding with the anticipation of his first major combat action in the captain's chair, now began to slow. Replacing it was a feeling somewhere between relief and disappointment. "Coms, signal our wingmen, Phoenix intends to dump V. Nav, plot us a course, timestamp and send it to our friends."

"Aye Commander," came the replies.

Ahead, Scan's resolution was clearer now, tagging and naming individual Raka ships with confidence. Of the five squadrons currently ahead of them, two had dumped V down to lunar-orbital speeds, while the other three were currently splitting on sufficient V to spread across the gas giant's orbit, their trajectories heading for various smaller moons and facilities. It didn't look as though Raka Fleet entirely believed that Tronex System was deserted either.

Draper keyed shipwide intercom. "Hello Phoenix, this is the Commander. It looks as though the reeh saw us coming and have abandoned Tronex System. We are currently coordinating a V-dump with our wingmen, and I anticipate a slow approach to Cygnax. Raka Fleet are currently moving to secure our blindspots. I am keeping us under red alert, combat imminent until more information comes to hand. Commander out."

* * *

Erik entered Engineering Bay 17C, through corridors busy with off-duty First Shift preparing to begin duty. Shali was alone, her CPU locked in its brace beside the drysine maintenance cradles. Often there would be crew repairing or running diagnostics on sub-systems, but in the combat approach to Tronex System, most crew remained locked in priority duty, and wandered as little distance from their acceleration slings as possible.

"What's up, Shali?" Erik asked her, munching a sandwich and signalling to Spacer Beaton to remain at the hatch.

"I'm sorry to make you walk, Captain, but I wanted to speak to you in private." Erik recalled to flip his glasses down, and found Shali's shimmering blue figure sitting on a console by the maintenance cradle.

"You can do that?" Erik asked skeptically.

Shali nodded. "Styx is superior to me mostly in terms of scale. She can do a thousand things at once while I struggle to do more than twenty. But some of those twenty I can do nearly as well as her. A few of them, I can do better."

Erik grasped the cradle frame opposite where Shali supposed her 'location' to be, eating one-handed, coffee in the drink flask shoved into his thigh pocket. Draper had dumped V, remaining well behind the main Raka Fleet formation on its approach to Cygnax, accompanied by the drysines that had made the jump, and all six of the whale transports carrying the alo. With no combat underway, it gave Phoenix a chance to perform an orderly shift-change, with a little exercise and some breakfast. Erik didn't trust it, expecting the whole system to explode in violence at any moment, but on this trip he'd learned to take rest and normality where ever he could find it lest the crew burn out entirely. Having Raka Fleet for company had given them at least that much extra security.

"So she can't hear us now?" Erik asked. Shali shook her head, with what might have been mischievous amusement. "What about assassin bugs?"

"Please," said Shali, faintly hurt. "I can spot and block a bug, Captain." Erik shrugged, taking another bite. It wasn't his field of expertise, and in this battle between great AI brains on his ship, he was going to keep an open mind. "Captain, I've been watching the Raka Fleet manoeuvres down at Cygnax. It's clear they've found Chion's command room."

"I know, I've been watching it," Erik said around his mouthful. He'd been watching the feed while taking fifteen minutes to sprint on the treadmill, followed by a very brief shower and now here with breakfast. What he really needed to do was talk to Trace about the deployment she was about to perform... but Shali had said it couldn't wait.

"Captain, Chion doesn't put her command centres and processing banks in the same place." Shali watched him with less childlike naivety than usual. That had always been an act. This shimmering blue 'girl' in overalls was more than eight thousand years old if you counted the years since she'd been made, four hundred if you counted the years she'd been conscious. "It's a security measure, she's done it the whole time I've known her. Raka Fleet are advanced, but they don't process like ceephays do, the logic architecture is all different."

Erik frowned at her, as Second Shift's bridge crew chattered in his ear about what they were seeing, and the Scan feed overlaid Raka Fleet positions upon Shali's perched figure. "You're saying Raka Fleet is missing something?"

Shali nodded, faint excitement mixed with trepidation. "They won't have Chion's main processing banks. They'll think they have, for the next day at least, but after that they'll become suspicious that they're viewing a shadow copy and not the real thing."

"What's in the real thing?"

"I don't know!" With real excitement now. The adolescent girl was back again, big eyes brimming with possibility. "But Chion's had days now to know we were coming! She's been receiving intelligence reports, surely... Captain, you know how fast an AI queen can process complicated constructs!"

Erik paused eating, mind racing with what Styx had told him. Chion wanted to be rescued. Wanted the Narsid Reeh Empire to end. Had left keys and back doors in Raka Fleet to allow someone to take it over and attempt precisely what they and Styx were now attempting. Styx had supposed that Chion wanted to be rescued by another AI queen, someone like herself. But what if there was someone else?

"Shali," he warned her, "there's no way Chion can know you're still alive. We came here from Keijir System too fast, even if the reeh found your asteroid and guessed you were once there, they couldn't have gotten here fast enough to tell Chion about it."

Shali's excitement spread into a dawning smile. "Your brain moves impressively fast, Captain... I wasn't actually thinking about that. I'm sure Chion thinks I'm dead like all the others. But she could have left things behind for us to find, intentionally or otherwise. I can decode it so much faster than Raka Fleet can, faster even than Styx. I know her, Captain. I'm ceephay too, and she's my friend."

There was emotion now, mixed with the excitement. Erik felt it right in the heart. "Can you get us to Chion's main processing banks before Raka Fleet find them?" he asked.

Shali nodded rapidly. "But we'll have to be really careful, because I think Raka Fleet would rather kill us all than let us get that data first. I mean, if we collected the data then erased the original..."

"Then we'd have something Raka Fleet needed," Erik completed, his heart thudding unpleasantly fast at the prospect. "Something Styx needed. And they've made clear they won't accept any commands from us. You do realise that Styx will likely figure this all out and reckon what we're up to?"

Shali scowled. "She's not a god, you know."

"I only know what I've seen, Shali, and I've seen her figure things out before. The techs say her brain multi-tracks so extensively that she's technically aware of every possibility and can't get distracted."

"Yes but she doesn't know which of those many possibilities are going to happen or are actually happening because she's not a god!" Shali repeated crossly. "You get to thinking like that, you never do anything because you're convinced Styx will have already thought of it!"

Erik smiled. "You sound like Lieutenant Kaspowitz."

"Lieutenant Kaspowitz is a very clever man, even Styx thinks so. Besides which, think, Captain!" Erik did not appreciate being told to think, not even by an entity several orders of magnitude smarter than him. "Even if Styx does figure out what our shuttle is doing down on Cygnax, what's she going to do about it? If she tells Raka Fleet, they'll destroy the shuttle... she can't want that, especially if Major Thakur is aboard, as she surely will be, knowing how Major Thakur never misses a fight. She'll know that if you suspect she got Major Thakur killed, her chances of an alliance with humanity in the future will go way down! She can't afford to make you angry!"

"I'm not playing chicken with the lives of my crew," Erik told her sternly. "Especially not that life"

"You love her," Shali said solemnly. "Don't you?" Erik stared at her. Shali ducked her head. "I'm sorry. I'm optimised to notice these things."

"I love a lot of people on this ship," Erik said finally.

"Yes Captain," said Shali, with a faint, apologetic smile. "I'm sure that's true."

Erik took a deep breath. God damn these AIs. Shali seemed to see his change of expression, for her amusement faded, replaced by the anxiety of a girl who wondered if she'd put her foot in it. Erik glanced back at the hatchway, and saw it closed, Spacer Beaton safely on the other side.

"One," he told her, with a jabbing forefinger, "I admit to nothing. Two, you will tell no one. Do you understand?"

The girl nodded, anxiously. "Yes Captain. Though don't you think you'd better tell Major Thakur?"

"I did. We have." Shali looked surprised. Not that perceptive, then. Or was this display of imperfection yet another act to put him back at ease? Did Shali suddenly fear that she'd revealed too much of capabilities that might not be welcome? The problem with sentient AIs, Kaspowitz said often, was that you could never trust anything they said as genuine. All was calculation for effect.

Erik took a deep breath, and recalled his sandwich. Took a bite, because refuelling took priority over whatever else this was. "We'll go down there," he said around the mouthful. "You can't talk to the shuttle from here without Styx overhearing, and probably all Raka Fleet too. If you want this to happen, you'll have to go in person." He glanced at her CPU in its brace. "So to speak. You up for that?"

Shali blinked. As though calculating, suddenly, that she was being asked if she were a coward. "Yes! Of course, Captain!"

"Good." He swallowed a hard mouthful of sandwich. "Maybe we'll both get lucky and the Major won't go herself for once."

Shali smiled crookedly, realising that the dry humour meant she was off the hook. "I don't like your chances, Captain."

"Me neither."

* * *

Trace stared at her display of Cygnax, the moon unknown to most of the Reeh Empire despite being the residence of its most important leader. She'd half-expected a prison world, something dark and foreboding, but Cygnax shone silver with a vast expanse of ice, split along giant crevasses that suggested some kind of tectonic or volcanic activity beneath.

Her helmet visor feed fragmented briefly as Lieutenant Jersey applied thrust, adjusting PH-3's tail-first approach. The feed showed Raka Fleet arrowheads zooming low above the surface, while others maintained higher paths, scouting for those below. Forty-one arrowheads at last count, others in transit or support by two full squadrons of Raka Fleet warships in close orbital support. It was not safe to be out here, doing things that might upset all these heavily-armed AIs. A few years ago, the prospect may have given her at least some mild anxiety. Now, her pulse barely flickered.

"We're being hailed," came Ensign Singh's voice from the cockpit. The tension in his voice was plain. "It's... the signature's crazy, coms don't recognise it, but it seems to be Raka."

"They want to know what we're doing," said Shali. "It's procedural, they're not alarmed. I suggest we pretend to be inspecting the command center, that would be the least alarming thing we could do for now. Let's settle into predictable patterns, then adjust them a little."

On a spacer vessel, spacer officers could overrule the marine commander if they had good reason. But on their way to a ground mission, Trace was in charge, and Jersey would use her initiative to figure how best to interpret the Major's orders.

"Let's do that," Trace said calmly. "Jersey, approach trajectory to the command center, let's see what Raka's doing there first, then we'll find a new course."

"Copy Major," said Jersey, and thrust increased as the course changed.

"Ensign Singh," Shali added conversationally, "just reply to any Raka queries in English, they'll understand. Tell them we're headed to the command center."

"Let's do that too," Trace added, before Singh could query her first. "Just follow Shali's guidance for now. I'll interrupt if there's anything I disagree with."

"Copy Major."

Shali's CPU was locked into a transport brace down back, between Charlie Platoon and the shuttle's power core. The other advantage of having her along, besides making it impossible for Styx to overhear their conversations, was that if Shali wanted to take risks with everyone's lives, she'd be doing so with her own. No doubt Erik had thought of that when he'd suggested it.

Trace cast an eye over suit systems, a reflex flick, unconscious as breathing, and sipped her water tube. "Any idea where we're actually going, Shali?"

With a resolution of blue pixels, Shali was suddenly standing on her left in the aisle between seats. Grasping the overhead with both hands, dangling like a commuter on a busy subway train, but incongruously unaffected by the Gs. "Raka Fleet are establishing network connections to Cygnax Command," she said, peering at the big displays before Trace and Jalawi. "There appears to have been some sabotage, but it's minor, almost as though they were undecided how much to destroy because they wanted to get all this back shortly. Raka Fleet aren't transmitting network schematics to Phoenix, but on close approach to the command center I can access their transmissions and decode enough to get a look. I'm sure I'll see something."

"You can hack Raka's transmissions?" Jalawi asked from Trace's side. As Charlie Platoon's commander, he was riding shotgun while Trace took overall command. The Platoon Commanders called it 'playing poodle', as though they'd been suddenly transformed into a rich lady's little pet dog, riding in her handbag. Trace had made it known that she disliked the expression, for the same reason she disliked all expressions of self-pity.

"Raka don't scare me, Lieutenant," said Shali, with determination. "Without their command layer, Raka aren't too bright. They need someone else to do their thinking for them, that's how they're designed."

"Right," said Jalawi.

Styx had not said a thing through the entire operation so far. No doubt she'd seen Shali's CPU being moved through Phoenix's corridors and loaded onto PH-3. Typically she'd have at least some mild advice, but so far, nothing. Trace was certain that Styx knew precisely what Shali was attempting. Shali was daring Styx to tell Raka, who would kill everyone on PH-3. Styx would then have to deal with Erik -- the only person in Raka Fleet who Styx could as little afford upset with her as Raka.

Trace knew from their brief conversation that Erik was not happy with Shali's plan, but was going along with it for lack of a better option. Trace herself had to admire the ceephay's audacity. Did Shali calculate some profound personal advantage to this risk she was taking? Or was she simply putting it all on the line to save her friend? Shali wasn't like the warrior drysines or Raka Fleet. Was she capable of friendship, where the likes of Styx were not? But then, Trace was becoming less and less certain that some drysines weren't capable of friendship, however far removed from their primary focus. Peanut certainly had his favourites among the crew.

* * *

"I don't know where they went," Kaspowitz said in frustration. First Shift had resumed command on the bridge an hour ago, Kaspowitz picking up where his double, Lieutenant De Marchi, had left off, trying to figure which way the Reeh Fleet defending Chion had gone. Raka Fleet's scans appeared to confirm that the entire lunar surface had been evacuated, though admittedly they hadn't searched very far yet. Scan indicated from orbital debris tracks that at least thirteen defensive firebases had been destroyed by Raka Fleet on the way in, for precisely zero apparent damage to Raka -- unsurprising, given how well Raka surely knew the technology and methods used by the reeh in deploying such systems.

In the past hour, three small formations of reeh ships had appeared from jump at various approach angles to Cygnax and the broader Tronex gas giant System. All had turned and run immediately as the situation revealed itself, and jumped for new destinations before Raka's outer defenders could engage them. Raka warships were now pairing and jumping toward the outer system, no doubt guessing that further reeh ships lay in wait out there, spying on the traitor fleet's actions. Thus far they'd seen one outer-system ship break and run, but that was old news on the three hour light-delay. Any Raka ships out that way would do better to jump back and relay news directly, rather than waiting hours for regular transmissions to reach Cygnax... but overusing jump engines in a short time period was ill-advised for even the most advanced vessels.

"No way we could interrogate the wreckage of one of those fire stations?" Shilu wondered.

"Lassa said Raka Fleet had already done a few of them," said Sasalaka, "all navigation systems not destroyed were previously wiped. I imagine we'll find the same of any scan-equipped system on Cygnax."

"Okay," said Kaspowitz, making final adjustments to the model he'd been polishing, "here's the latest update on the cluster." The Nav display flashed to Erik's side screen, and he pulled it to main display, hovering before him in three-dimensional depth. The Nikara Star Cluster, of which Tronex System and Cygnax was an outer-member. On the larger side for an open cluster, nearly a thousand stars, most of them young as was the way with stellar nurseries.

"Raka's maps aren't perfect," Kaspowitz continued, "it's like Reeh Fleet didn't have enough trust to tell them where everything was located."

"Makes sense," said Geish. "They're hired killers, they don't need to know much."

"Raka's interrogating Cygnax base databases now, the reeh didn't destroy everything before they left. Most of Nikara Cluster's stars are too young for planets, but about ten percent aren't, so that's maybe a hundred systems."

"We don't know they took Chion deeper into the Cluster though," said Sasalaka. "It's barely twenty-five light years across, most reeh ships can one-jump it."

"Sure," said Kaspowitz, "but it multiplies the possible options within one-jump range." Blue dots spread and multiplied across Erik's display -- about one-in-ten of the Cluster's stars, apparently with planets and an equatorial plane clear enough of dust and debris that high-V transit was not immediately fatal to visiting ships. "If they take Chion too far from Tronex System, all these reeh ships jumping in to her defence won't be any more use than if they'd left them on the edge of reeh space. They'll want to keep her close enough that all these returning defenders can find her, but not so close that we can."

"I don't like it," Erik decided. "Too many assumptions about where they'd go. Styx is smart but even she's just guessing at this point, and Raka Fleet are like the dumb bouncer in the club who knows how to punch people in the face and that's it. Reeh Fleet just need to keep Chion away from us long enough to build up far more forces than us, and we've got no chance of beating them."

Styx was staying suspiciously quiet, he thought. If anyone could calculate those odds, she could. Whether her silence boded good or ill, he couldn't guess.

"Reeh Fleet need the best rendezvous spot," Kaspowitz said knowingly, fingers manipulating data before him at lightning speed. "My guess is somewhere reeh forces will immediately know, and won't have to waste time jumping from system to system to find out." Eleven more systems flashed, only two of them within the Cluster. "These are the nearest major systems, all bigger than a five billion local population, three of them bigger than twenty billion. The question is whether they'll want to invite a war to those systems, given that Raka Fleet might just plow through everything to get what they want."

Again, the sheer weight of events settled onto Erik's thoughts. Billions of lives. Reeh Empire lives, it was true, but not everyone in the Empire loved the reeh.

"I see navigation jump-points in here just as accessible and almost completely unpopulated," he countered. "We just don't know, and locked out of Raka Fleet's main conversations, we're not in any position to find out. One thing I am pretty confident of is that Reeh Fleet will start raiding if we stay here much longer. They won't have many better opportunities to catch Raka Fleet defensive, Raka's much better on the attack. If they start pecking at us, we'll get into an attrition war that they'll undoubtedly win. We have to get back on the offensive, and fast."

13

Lieutenant Regan Jersey had seen so many amazing places on her adventures with UFS Phoenix that she sometimes wondered if she'd lost her capacity to be amazed. But now Cygnax, the lunar center of the Reeh Empire, was answering that question.

"Shali says it's a temple complex," said Major Thakur's voice in her ears, regarding the soaring construction that sailed silently by to the left of the canopy. "It belonged to an old religious group, she doesn't know if they're still around."

"Well tell Shali to come up here and talk to me directly," Jersey replied, adjusting the angle of thrust to accelerate while losing altitude, and bring them lower to the racing icy surface.

A blue figure shimmered into being on one side of Jersey's main console. Shali, no more than ten centimetres tall, sitting cross-legged while gazing out the canopy. "Hi Lieutenant," she said, with a shy glance. "I didn't want to bother you while you were flying."

"You'd be the first passenger on this ship who ever thought that," said Jersey, gazing as the second portion of the temple complex approached. Screw it, she thought, and swung their tail to the right with a kick of attitude thrust, then applied the mains hard enough to change course, the horizon and the temple towers swinging as they turned.

And then they were flying between them, soaring crystal pillars that seemed nearly transparent, glowing in the silver light. The pillars seemed ragged and irregular, but beautifully so, as though mimicking some natural pattern of growth. At their base, the towers linked in sharp crystal ridges that looked more like extensions of the icy expanse than any sort of building.

"Look at this!" Ensign Singh breathed on coms. Jersey kept one eye on her tacticals and scan, projecting the unfolding machinations of an AI Fleet that would probably kill them if it suspected their intentions. But with the other, what she saw gave her goosebumps. She'd dreamed of seeing things like this in the galaxy when, as a small girl, she'd dreamed of joining Fleet and becoming a pilot. Getting to this point had cost her a lot -- a number of times nearly her life. But now that she was here, damned if she wasn't going to enjoy it at least a little bit.

"How old are they?" she asked the small blue girl sitting on her console.

"Chouran Sect are at least fifteen thousand years," said Shali, gazing upward in wonder of her own. More towers soared ahead, and Jersey swung them slightly right, thrusting to turn left again. "This complex is a bit more than twelve thousand, four thousand years before my time. I never had a chance to see it before, when I was here last."

"You've been to Cygnax before?"

Shali nodded. "It was quite well known. I think the human phrase might be a 'tourist spot'. It was more than that, of course, but lots came for relatively unimportant reasons. There was never much industry here."

The last towers soared by, and Jersey readjusted under-thrust to bring them lower still, skimming the vast icy plain that extended beyond. She removed tactical overlay from her visor for just a moment, catching a glimpse of something closer to natural light, and saw everything glowing silver. The Nikala Cluster was bright, nearly a thousand stars crammed into twenty light-years across, where normally there would be just a handful. Cygnax orbited a yellow-brown gas giant at middle-distance, which was itself middle-distant from its M-Class star, in planetary terms. In non-cluster space, it would have been dull silver with very little light. But here, everything shone with silver dazzle, and the atmosphere-free sky was bright with teeming stars.

"It's hard to tell with an assault ship's scanners," said Singh, "but the ice here looks unusually clear. With most of these ice moons it's a mushy snowball, but here it looks pure. Gotta be some kind of tectonic activity that melts and refreezes it, lets all the heavier impurities sink to the bottom."

"Oh yes," Shali agreed with an almost dreamy smile. "It's quite tectonic here. Lieutenant, I think we need to hit this canyon ahead and turn left, please."

Thirty seconds later, Jersey saw it -- a dark line across the white horizon. Then it was rushing up, as she kicked their tail right and burned for another left turn. The cliff-face fell away beneath them, and she increased power until the Gs pressed them back at 3.5, dropping as they descended into the canyon. It was slightly more than two kilometres wide, with steep sides that seemed nearly pure ice. Those sides raced past now at nearly eight hundred kph groundspeed, easy to maintain with no atmospheric drag and just enough downward thrust to counter the moon's light gravity.

"Plenty tectonic," Jersey agreed, looking at the places where the canyon ice was recently fractured, huge sheets poised to break away from the walls further, hovering like some impossible magic trick... save that there was no trick, only low gravity, and it was the human eye's expectation of weight and mass that made it strange. "Something's pulling these ice sheets apart."

"Shali, where do you think?" came the Major's voice from down back.

"I've been looking over the data schematics from the command headquarters," said Shali. "I have a feeling it's up here."

"Can you be a bit more specific?"

"I think I'd be wasting your time, Major. It's long and complicated, and Lieutenant Jersey requires clear coms. Call it a hunch."

"It's not like we've got anything else to go on," Lieutenant Jalawi added.

"Fine," said the Major. "You have an ETA?"

"If it's where I think it is, no more than ten minutes, Major."

Jersey knew why they were down in the canyon. Raka Fleet was thus far ignoring them, and everyone wanted to keep it that way by staying out of sight. They'd overflown Chion's command headquarters on the way in, a predictably grey-steel and unpleasant sprawl of pressurised living quarters, gas tanks, landing pads, coms antennas and industrials. Raka Fleet arrowheads were landed on many of the pads, drones spreading within the facility, broadcasting their findings back to Raka Fleet and Styx.

Shali had accessed some of that, able to access Raka Fleet communications down here on Cygnax that Styx could have blocked her from, had she remained on Phoenix. Shali said she could get some idea of how Chion had set up her command structure, meaning the massive array of computer systems that facilitated her rule. It would take Raka Fleet days to sort through it all -- even Styx, Shali was sure. But Shali knew Chion better, and knew her tricks.

"So all the Reeh Empire races came here to set up temples and stuff?" Jalawi asked from down back.

"Various facilities, yes Lieutenant," Shali agreed. She was standing now, peering ahead past Jersey's forward HUD mount, as though expecting their destination to swim into view at any moment. The racing ice canyon walls were very fast, but remained far enough apart, in combination with Jersey's navigation display of the topography ahead, to feel reasonably safe. "Some of them little more than hotels, though they were cities, really. Some could hold a million or more people. I doubt any are still occupied... but then I wouldn't know. It was so long ago, I'm as much a stranger in this time as you are."

"Well I guess it's pretty with the ice in the starlight and everything," said Jalawi. "But I don't get why so many people would come from all over to see shiny ice."

"Hey Jerz," said Singh, "we've got active geysers ahead. One at thirty K off the left, another at twenty-five to the right." The plots appeared on Jersey's nav display, overlaid atop her vision as she blinked to enlarge it. "Looks like water mist, completely harmless."

"I got it," Jersey agreed. "Canyon narrows a bit ahead. Shali, how much further?"

"I'm still not sure," said Shali. She sounded excited. "But no more than a few minutes. Oh look, here comes the liess."

"The what?"

"It's from an old reeh language, what the Chariya Reeh used to speak. It means a beautiful veil. Look ahead."

Across the canyon ahead, a sparkling silver mist was slowly descending. To the left and the right, thicker plumes were visible, rising skyward from eruptions deep in the ice. Now it began to spatter faintly upon the canopy, amazingly like rain for an airless world without weather of any kind. The shuttle's canopy heated quickly to melt the spatters, turning them to fast-vanishing streaks.

The mist grew thicker, accumulating water on the canopy faster than the heating could melt it, until Jersey reverted to visor vision for her forward view. The nav display showed the canyon turning to the right, and PH-3's sensors confirmed. Jersey made the turn, then with time and distance counting down to Shali's target location, she swung the assault shuttle around tail-first and applied thrust.

"It's still here!" Shali said excitedly, now turned to look back past Jersey's shoulder, as though that would let her see anything. Jersey thought it might have been funny if the little blue AR projection had obeyed the laws of the physical world she pretended to inhabit, and gone flying at the rear cockpit to be pinned against the wall. "I think it's untouched! Let's see!"

At less than a hundred kph groundspeed, Jersey cut thrust and swung them about once more. Across the canyon floor ahead, landing pads were cut into the icy floor amid a series of pressure tanks and foundational platforms. But most striking were the giant spires that ascended from the canyon's side walls, leaning at nearly forty-five degrees like the beams of a ceiling to form the appearance of a rooftop, several kilometres above the canyon floor. Jersey forgot her assault-pilot cool, and gasped. The structures looked like ice, and were surely too spindly to stand as they were and not collapse... but again, gravity here was light, and such unlikely things became possible.

On the canyon walls beneath and between the spires were rows of giant carved shapes, the pillared frontages of buildings from other worlds, or in several places the alien figures of humanoids seated, in various postures. Ice sculpture, on a colossal scale, turning the entire canyon into the scene from some artistic exhibit.

"I knew she wouldn't let them destroy it!" Shali said jubilantly. "I'll bet anything that's why she relocated it here, so they'd have to leave it intact! It was always her favourite place."

"Hey Jerz, look up," Singh suggested. Jersey glanced up beneath her helmet, through the top canopy, and saw the ice ceiling closing overhead as PH-3 idled forward, giant ice beams gleaming in brilliant light from a thousand very big stars. About and beyond it all, rainbows formed in the slowly falling crystals of the geyser mist, circling stripes of red, blue, green and yellow, refractions caused not by sunlight, but starlight.

Jersey gasped again. And could not resist asking Jalawi, down back, "You seeing this, Skeeta?"

"Yep," Jalawi agreed. "Now I get it."

* * *

Trace bounced from the landing pad to the tunnel in the ice cliff, sparing an upward glance at the starlight rainbows in the geyser mist above the canyon. Light throttle from PH-3 as Jersey kicked the shuttle off the ground, maintaining a ready hover behind with weapons primed, and creating a swirl of engine thrust across the canyon floor. Bucket had come with Charlie Platoon, but Trace had left him aboard the shuttle -- useful for communications warfare, but she didn't want to alarm anyone living here with his presence.

Trace let Jalawi position his platoon without further input -- Second and Heavy Squads in reserve to guard the pads and the canyon floor in case someone tried to trap them, while he took point with First Squad, then Command Squad in the middle with Third bringing up the rear. Shali insisted it was this tunnel, a dark opening in the base of a cliff between the sculpted ice boots of some forty meter tall alien statue.

Corporal Graf had true point with Third Section, reporting a heavy steel airlock built into the ice, with what appeared to be fully pressurised structure deep beneath the cliffs. "They can see us," Lance Corporal Gonzaga reported with confidence, scanning the sensors around that airlock. "They're not opening up, might not be so friendly."

Trace paused by one wall in the ice tunnel's mouth, watching local tacnet for position, the stability of the command feed to PH-3 and back up to Phoenix, and Phoenix's best read on Raka Fleet. "Can we open it from this end?" she asked.

"Yeah I think so Major," came Graf's reply, her blue dot on tacnet moving adjacent to the airlock. There followed a lot of tech talk between her and Private Ram, the other tech-head in Third Section, as they removed a reluctant access panel with a hand cutter, then began setting up an override. "ETA unknown," Graf kept the rest in the loop. "Damn alien systems again... the analysis looks clean but I've been wrong before. Might still have to blow it."

"I'd rather you didn't," said Trace, turning to look back across the canyon, at Charlie Platoon positioned across the landing pads in the rainbow mist. The other platoons would be jealous. Somehow, despite her deliberately randomised selection of platoons for various assignments, Charlie always ended up with the coolest gigs. "I don't want to make enemies here if I can avoid it. We might need the locals' help."

Blowing the airlock would depressurise the interior. Which probably had multiple safety backups, but there were no guarantees it wouldn't just kill everyone inside.

"What was this in your day, Shali?" Trace asked.

"It's hard to explain." Shali appeared, barefoot on the ice, hands shoved deep into pockets as though feeling a hard vacuum chill. "Cygnax was an open world, everyone came here. A lot was tourism, you could say, some was religious, others were scientific. A lot of the Chariya Reeh Empire was still divided back then. There was a lot of disagreement about how united to make it. Lots of people thought we should let the different peoples just keep to themselves, letting them mix created too many opportunities for conflict. So worlds like Cygnax were a kind of experiment I guess. A place without any industry or real importance where all the Empire's peoples could come and mingle. That's why you see so many aliens along this stretch of canyon, side-by-side."

"It's an arts and sculpture world," Sergeant Rael offered. He carried Shali's CPU attached to the rear of his suit, in the carry cage the techs had rigged. They and Shali were insistent that it was impervious to vacuum, and Shali thought that the systems she was searching for would likely require direct interface, free from Raka's interference. "Kinda like Merakis."

Shali shook her head, gazing about. "No, I've read about Merakis in your database. It's much heavier on the political symbolism. There was a real effort to keep political symbolism away from Cygnax. That was Chion's influence. As an AI among organics, she could remain free from all those destructive impulses. She was the neutral buffer in the system, you could say -- not entirely in charge, but effectively. All the races saw how much better it was to have a central power who was only interested in improvement for all and not in zero-sum power games. Cygnax was one of her appeals to them to leave the old ways even further behind, and move toward a more harmonious future. She loved it here."

Shali looked sad, Trace thought. As though contemplating the scale of what had been lost. "Waking up to this world must seem like a nightmare," Rolonde said solemnly.

Shali looked to Rolonde in surprise. And managed a wan smile. "Yes, Private. It's a bit like that. But there's hope, right? We're all here, and Chion is still alive. There must be hope."

"What do you think she's been doing the last eight thousand years?" Arime asked her.

"I'm not sure," said Shali. The shimmering blue augmented reality projection took a deep breath of non-existent air. "I'm actually scared to find out."

A command signal from Phoenix overrode local coms. Trace let it. "Hello Phoenix, this is the Major."

"Hello Major," came Erik's voice. And despite the cold, beautiful vacuum, at the sound of his voice, she felt warm. Like they were back in his quarters, having some discussion over juice and a meal, and just feeling like... home. "There's been a large redeployment of Raka Fleet arrowheads, the projection had them scheduled for a sweep from E-38 to G-19 on your grid, but that's shifted from D-20 to G-45, to judge from their current trajectories."

"What's odd about that?" Trace cut to the chase. Erik, with all his well intentioned detail, had never lost the bad habit of using many words where a few would do.

"Raka Fleet don't make large procedural change in mid-operation unless they've seen some new development. The only new development in your region has been PH-3's movement. But if Raka are deploying to find you, they're looking in the wrong spot."

Which didn't make sense. Raka were in orbit just as Phoenix were, the lunar surface was covered, there was no weather to hide beneath, and everything stood out starkly against a bright silver ice ball. "You think Styx is hacking their entire surveillance grid?"

"If she is, she's sticking her neck out for us. I've no idea if it can last."

"Right." If Raka found out Styx was fooling them, the whole game could be up. Styx had never told Phoenix, when they'd been planning this whole operation, just how tenuous her control over Raka Fleet would be. If she had, likely everyone would have been far more reluctant. Which was probably why she hadn't said. "Well, thanks Styx, if you're listening. I promise we'll be fast." Which she couldn't actually promise, but Styx had made the strategic decision to promise things she couldn't deliver before, when it suited her interests. Trace's Kulina soul rebelled at the notion, but she was nothing if not practical.

"Skeeta, you get that?"

"Copy Major, we're running low on time. Eggs, ETA on the airlock?"

"Nearly there LT." On Graf's vid feed, the big outer airlock door rumbled open. "Got it. Looks like there's room in here for twelve."

"First Squad forward," said Jalawi, moving from his ice-wall cover toward the doors. "We'll take it. Everyone else, move up one."

"Copy LT," Trace acknowledged, moving up herself as ahead, First Squad crowded into the big airlock. "If it's a trap I'm going to blow the airlock behind you, get me a report on air-pressure integrity as soon as you're in."

"LT copies." Jalawi gave her an armoured-gloved salute from amidst his marines as the outer door closed once more, and Command Squad took their positions on the outside.

"I think a couple of armour piercing would take care of that," Terez suggested, peering at the heavy door.

"Who used to live here, Shali?" asked Sergeant Rael.

"I don't even recognise half of these structures," said Shali. "Most of them are new. Well, less than eight thousand years old."

"So how do you know it's this one you're looking for?"

"I decoded schematics that Raka Fleet's drones were feeding back up to their ships from the Command HQ."

"I thought they were more advanced than you?" Private Wang wondered.

"Please," Shali said disdainfully. "They're only drones. In chess terms, they're pawns. I may not be a queen, but I'm at least a bishop."

"Yeah, well maybe the bishop should get herself a new body," Rael suggested. "So I don't have to carry her ass around."

"I don't think I'd like to be a giant spider," said Shali. "And I'm not really designed for physical interactions."

Vision from Jalawi's feed revealed the inner-airlock door opening. Then a loud crack! as a bullet zinged off someone's armour. "Small arms!"

"Hold fire!" Jalawi shouted. Another several loud pings and cracks. "Hold fire, they're just pea shooters! Smoke round, one smoke round, don't hit anyone!"

"Skeeta," said Trace, "can you see what they are?" As tacnet illuminated a series of new red dots ahead of First Squad, the tactical computer analysing vision from all twelve marines, counting and plotting potential hostiles.

"Look like tanifex to me," said Jalawi, as the view ahead was obscured by billowing smoke. "Hang on, lemme try the translation." As he set the coms translator to the main tanifex tongue. "Tanifex, we are human! We are not hostile! Do not fire, we will not hurt you!" More pings and cracks of bullets through the smoke. "Uh, diplomacy not working, Major." With a marine's irony at the prospect of what usually followed, with marines. "There's no danger, gonna have to buff the fuck out of my paint job though."

"Yeah, well we don't have time to wait for them to run out of ammo," said Trace. "Shali, can you talk to them?"

"If they're not wearing AR-capable eyewear, they won't see me," Shali said dubiously.

"Then why don't you go and see?" Trace suggested, breaking her 'no sarcasm' rule. Marines required clear orders, but Shali was no marine.

Shali blinked at her. "Oh. Sure." The blue girl in overalls vanished. Ten seconds later, the shooting stopped. "Major?" came Shali's voice on coms. "I think we're okay. I told them that we're friends of Chion, and that we want to rescue her from the reeh. They know exactly who I'm talking about."

"How do you know that?"

"It's easier if you just come and see."

* * *

"I see them," said Erik, in reply to Geish's terse call from Scan. Six reeh warships, directly out from jump, heading tangential to Phoenix's current geostationary orbit over Cygnax. "They're going to miss us on current V-loads, get me a V-dump projection."

As sirens rang all over Phoenix, warning of impending violent manoeuvres, and anyone not secured went racing for acceleration slings. Across the three-dimensional projection of near Cygnax orbit before his eyes, Erik saw the combat computer processing positions according to time lag, and where ships might be if current and predicted courses held steady. When one had sat in this seat long enough in combat conditions, one learned to predict the computer's biases. These projected trajectories spread across Cygnax's orbit like giant funnels, narrow at each ship's current position, and widening with possibility as future-time passed, graded and shaded different colours from potential V-dump opportunities. The outer-most of those funnels were intersecting with Phoenix's current position.

"Raka's moving!" Jiri announced from Scan Two. "Lots of outgoing! Big moves on the flank!" Erik could see it in precise detail -- an entire Raka squadron erupting in outgoing fire, all engaging full thrust to accelerate at eye-watering Gs.

"Watch the P-orbitals," Geish reminded his younger scan-mate. "I count eight at possible intercepts, four energy positive to that course."

"Got it," Jiri affirmed, and more, as Sasalaka confirmed an escape plot with Kaspowitz, and Corrig and Harris locked intercepting firing solutions. Erik tuned them all out, engines at full ready, jump-lines primed -- twenty seconds since they'd first seen the incoming assault and everyone down below should be secured by now.

"Operations get me a drone," Erik said.

"Aye Captain!" came the call from Midships. "Drone is good!" The verbal check wasn't strictly necessary, he could have fired it from the chair, but Midships got crazy sometimes, and verbal checks were smart when there was time, if only for a glimpse at what else might be happening.

"Task for Operations oversight, we have to move."

"Aye Captain, already done."

"Send it." Watching those probability cones move as the reeh ships evaded. Two dumped V, and immediately the cones leaped to new configurations, as decreased velocity created possibilities for manoeuvre. And Phoenix, previously outside those cones, now fell within, as new alarms lit his vision.

"We're in the cone," Sasalaka announced. "Standby to burn."

"Standby burn!" echoed Rooke from Midships engineering.

"Arms plot those two marks," said Erik, and pulled the trigger on his controls. They clicked in several degrees, and Phoenix's engines roared as the whole ship shook, slamming everyone back in their chairs. "Fire for intercept. Coms, tell the Major we've just lost oversight, we're now relaying via drone."

"Aye Captain," said Shilu, as Phoenix thumped and crashed in addition to the shaking roar, as the railguns opened fire on racing reeh ships. Out here in geostationary above Cygnax, Phoenix's drysine jump engines allowed Erik the luxury of leaving things a little later, instead of the previous mad dash up the gravity-slope to where the engines would find purchase to boost V.

"The fast four just pulsed up!" Geish announced, as Erik saw those four reeh ships retaining V from jump now gained even more V, their probability cones now projecting far beyond Phoenix. "Raka's still shooting, manoeuvring to pursue, no registered hits."

"Looks like a disruption attack," Sasalaka observed calmly, as Phoenix's acceleration passed five-G and kept climbing. "They're making us re-orbit. Bet you these two will boost shortly." Two seconds later, they did, a flash of colour on Scan and a leap and shift from their course projections, well past Phoenix. "Out of the cone!" Sasalaka added.

"Yeah, that's not a good orbital course," Erik said between gritted teeth. "Cease fire, save your ammo." Every round they'd expended would now miss, but this was the cat-and-mouse of space warfare -- the reeh had dared an approach, Phoenix and Raka Fleet had laid down fire across those possible approach routes, so the reeh had backed off and resumed their previous high-V tangential course away from Cygnax. Like manoeuvres on some board game, captains attempted to deny each other preferable spots on the board, and force the other to do something they'd rather not. But when predictably orbital, any force of ships would be at a manoeuvring disadvantage against those streaking out of jump at considerable fractions of light.

"Captain, that was a short jump," said Kaspowitz. "I'm running the figures on that jump signature, the wavelengths are narrow, I think Raka's flushing them from the outer system and they're leaping this way instead."

"Yeah, a whole bunch of them didn't jump long," Erik agreed. "They're just waiting in the outer-system watching us."

"I reckon that was a recon jump as much as disrupter," Geish muttered. "They can't see much out there on delay, we know they don't care if they lose a ship or two."

Erik eased off the thrust, recalculating Phoenix's new trajectory away from Cygnax's gravity-well, and into the wider expanse of the gas giant's orbit. "Nav, give me your best guess for a good orbital oversight position from which to watch Operations."

"Everything sufficiently high and flexible will actually be P rather than M-orbital," said Kaspowitz. "None of the Lagrangians are in the right spot, and everything's exposed to outer system short jumps at this lunar phase. Don't like our chances, Captain."

Erik repressed a bad word. "Coms, get me the Major." A moment's delay, then the link, which he blinked on.

"Major here."

"Trace, they're jumping short and forcing us off our overwatch. We've got a drone up, but you know its com shielding in this environment. Direct support is going to be limited."

"I know Captain. Can't be helped."

14

Trace stared at the arcade in disbelief. Or she thought it was an arcade. A wide hall, like some vast shopping mall, filled with the most extraordinary crystalline growth. Like a forest of icy shards, transparent yet strong, as though the ice beyond these walls had grown down from the lunar surface and erupted within this pressurised living space in beautifully random thickets of gleaming, refracting life.

"Shali?" she asked, and saw the girl's blue image wandering between thickets ahead, hands to her mouth in excitement. Nearby, tanifex watched. All were armed, military weapons of various types, lethal enough to the unprotected but little danger to armoured marines. Like all tanifex, they had thrusting, reptilian jaws, and moved with lean, fast bursts of energy, like small birds. Their clothing was haphazard, no apparent uniforms, but an oddball collection of helmetless pressure suits, engineering overalls with many pockets and harnesses, and random civilian attire. Some wore personal decoration, or tattoos. Did they live in this facility, or merely maintain it? It wasn't what Trace had expected to find on a world functioning as the geographical heart of the Reeh Empire. Most non-reeh in military facilities were crushingly oppressed at gunpoint. These looked rebellious, toward everyone.

"Don't touch anything," Trace instructed her marines, and walked with Jalawi toward Shali. Several of the tanifex, she noted, were pointing toward Shali and gesturing to each other, as though in wonder. They did not appear to be wearing augmented-reality visor-wear.

"She's hacking their cybernetics," Jalawi suggested, observing the same. "I think our girl's a bit more advanced than she's let on."

"All the Reeh Empire runs on ceephay-tech derived cybernetics," said Trace, recalling Erik's recount of what he'd seen on the alo space station at Kalax. "Maybe Shali can do this better than Styx can, it's her technology."

"It's ALL my technology," Shali agreed, standing beneath a giant plant-like eruption of crystal fronds, and gazing upward, like a proud gardener. "I've been away so long. I'd nearly forgotten how beautiful it is."

"What are we looking at?" Jalawi asked, stepping carefully with his big armoured boots. Across the floor, great trunks of translucent crystal ran like jungle roots, linking the various clusters. To their flanks and forward, Command Squad spread wide, weapons at casual cross-arms, pointedly non-threatening as more tanifex came out to stare. To their rear, Charlie First Squad did the same, while Second held the entrance way, and Third and Heavy Squads guarded the canyon with PH-3.

"It's the root of ceephay technology," said Shali. "Human technology doesn't really grasp it, and your language certainly doesn't, I'd have to make up words. But some types of crystals grow in amazing ways when you make changes at the atomic level, and then again at the molecular level. That's a two-level process. A third level is added with nano-tech, which isn't actually a crystalline technology, but supplements the natural growth patterns of crystals under some environmental conditions."

"So this is all crawling with synthetic micros?" Trace asked warily. Phoenix had had bad experiences with synthetic micros, particularly at Mylor Station in parren space. An outbreak on the ship remained one of Trace's greatest concerns. She knew what to do against traditional weapons, but not these.

"Crystalline processes are so unorganised in nature," said Shali. "You have to organise them. The atomic restructure creates crystalline forms nature can't make itself, then the micros knit them together, creating micro-environments to accelerate growth."

"So this is... what? A computer?"

Shali turned to grin at her. "Yes Major. I mean, it can't be a brain, it's far too disorganised. Brains need to be compact, for latency issues as much as anything." Trace glanced at Sergeant Rael's suit ahead, Shali's CPU strapped to his back, barely larger than a human head. "This is a storage facility. It's Chion's shadow facility. I KNEW she'd have one."

Trace looked up. The ceiling, past the reaching patterns of crystal growth, was transparent. Some sort of heavy-duty plastic, she thought, many meters thick and hard as armour. It allowed those within to see the clear ice above. The ice looked blue and impenetrable, but with interior floodlights on it would have acquired depth. Likely it would be stunningly beautiful, but turning the lights on now did not seem a great idea.

"Did the reeh know Chion put it here? In a tourist facility?"

"I think they knew," said Shali, turning to the nearest tanifex. "I mean, they're not stupid. But Chion can be persuasive." She began talking to the tanifex, in animated clicks and trills. The tanifex tilted their heads, like geckos considering a passing fly, and scampered closer. Trace recalled the tanifex she'd fought on Rando, the warriors whose cybernetics turned them into brainwashed drones. She'd not thought then that she could ever find tanifex appealing, but these seemed sophisticated.

Her suit's translator tuned into the new tongue, and she blinked on the translation as it became available. "Where is she?" Shali's interlocutor repeated. "Where is the Sky Mother?"

"Sky Mother?" Jalawi wondered.

"If we tell them," Master Sergeant Hoon wondered from further away, "do they start shooting at us again?"

"The Sky Mother has gone," Shali explained patiently to the tanifex, with earnest sympathy. Trace wondered if those human expressions could appear comforting to a tanifex. Or were the tanifex even seeing those same expressions? Come to that, were the tanifex even seeing a human? Surely the ceephay girl could appear to them in realtime as tanifex herself if she chose? "I told them before, Major. We are trying to rescue the Sky Mother from the reeh, but the reeh took her away before we could reach her. The reeh are seeking their own reinforcements, because we outnumber them at the moment. For anything you can do to help us find where they've taken her before their reinforcements arrive, we'll be very grateful."

* * *

Shali enjoyed human form. The thing the humans were struggling to comprehend was that even though the human girl was just a projection, simply willing her into existence almost made Shali feel as though she were really standing there, barefoot on the arcade floor beneath a sky full of ceephay crystal matrix. And looking through the eyes of all the marines' suit cameras, and hearing all their audio, gave her enough different sources to conceptualise exactly what it would be like... no, what it was like, to stand here, and smell the cold air, and hear the sounds of armour suits humming and clumping, and tanifex chattering and clicking. If Shali had been made with any one thing in mind, it was the ability to simulate perspective, not just for others, but for herself.

"It's just up here," she said, with the certainty of access to the locality's schematic map, running ahead with a duck and weave between crystalline outgrowths. "It used to be a transport hangar, back when the big shuttles arrived here directly from those landing pads in the canyon. I don't even think the elevators from those pads still work."

The whole facility had undergone a series of refits and refurbishments since first construction, she saw as the schematics laid out before her. Built by a long-vanished religious group, but then retasked by some of Chion's advisors with her blessing to be the closest human analog -- tourism, that strange human concept of just going to look at things without greater political or spiritual goals. And then there'd been a number of changes since the Chariya had fallen... and that was upsetting and fascinating all at once, because like anyone awoken from an eight thousand year sleep, she both wanted to know everything that had occurred while she slumbered, while simultaneously dreading it.

The memories assailed her now, the broken, disorganised strands of data that she'd not bothered to reassimilate into this present context, mostly because it hurt too much. The humans still supposed that she didn't actually feel anything, just simulated feelings in order to best socialise into human company. Which failed to grasp how simulation became reality when practised at sufficiently intense complexity. Like how the humans failed to understand how most human emotions were expressed visibly because of the socialised requirement for humans to communicate to others what they were feeling. If a human did not cry, was she actually upset? Why was the expression of the thing so often conflated with the thing itself? And did this not make human society particularly susceptible to fraud from those who would simulate it for personal gain? She'd not wanted to engage in that philosophical discussion yet, for fear of asking from them more than they were yet prepared to concede.

Ahead, in a clearing on the arcade floor, were a series of steel pillars, arranged in a stylised star shape when viewed from above. Atop the pillars draped a series of woven fabrics, thin like silk, red with gold pattern. Amidst the pillars, candles burned on small plinths.

"This looks religious," the Major suggested behind her.

"I think the tanifex worship Chion," said Shali, thinking surely the humans had grasped that much by now. Even Styx was careful not to insult their sometimes slow-moving comprehension. "Major, these tanifex all have ceephay cybernetics, I think it may be integrated into their brains quite differently from how most of the Reeh Empire species are."

"You think she can talk to them directly? Like telepathy?"

"Something like telepathy, yes Major." She moved between the pillars, allowing multiple vision perspectives to resolve the scene for her. Motion through a three-dimensional space felt amazing, after so long in virtual data-worlds. Perhaps the Major's suggestion that she take a real body wasn't so bad after all. "I think it's best we don't touch anything, or even walk through it in armour with weapons. The tanifex may not like it."

"Copy that," said Master Sergeant Hoon. Meaning that he, outside of the immediate command conversation, was conveying that he'd heard and agreed, and that all Charlie Platoon's marines should do the same.

Shali continued on, to where the floor opened in a giant steel hole. To judge from the big circular ceiling fastenings, the hole had once contained a great personnel elevator, or series of elevators, long dismantled or otherwise disintegrated. She arrived at the edge of what would once have been the wall of that shaft, and peered down. There were no cameras down below, nothing she could access in the schematic, and none of the marines had reached the edge yet. Having no vision, the space below appeared blank, grey like static on a dead screen.

Then the Major and Lieutenant Jalawi arrived at the edge beside her. Two helmet-camera views resolved on Shali's simulation to make something else... and the emotive-response to that pattern triggered an involuntary human gasp. Great waves of crystalline growth spread across the hangar floor below, concentric circles fanning outward, like the petals of a flower. The floor was thirty meters down, but the tops of the crystal petals were less then ten meters below the lip. The hangar itself extended well beyond what was visible, and all was filled with growth.

"Wow," said Jalawi. It did look extraordinarily beautiful, Shali thought. In a way that humans, tanifex and AIs could equally appreciate. "How long has this been growing?"

"Not more than a few centimetres a year to do it like this," said Shali, walking around the edge of the hole in the hope of luring a few more marines to do the same. Several from Command Squad did, and new visual angles opened a whole new perspective on the scene. "It can go much faster, but doing it like this in relative secret isn't ideal. Chion's been at this a long time."

"Relative secret?" asked the Major. "I'm still unclear on whether the reeh allowed this, or if they didn't."

"Major, Chion has been staying out of how they run the Empire. They need her, they can't run their cybernetic networks and other primary ceephay-based technologies without her, but she doesn't tell them what to do with it. I mean, obviously. She's not a mass murderer." Emotion welled up. Likely some of the humans wouldn't believe that, either. No matter, the simulation gave her as little choice as they had. She swallowed hard. "I think she's been using whatever clout she has on this moon. It's not much to ask for, and I think the reeh have been leaving her relatively alone here. If she wants to have dealings with some little outpost on Cygnax, I think the reeh will let her, and not probe too much."

"Explains why all these tanifex have guns," Sergeant Rael observed. "We saw on Eshir and Rando that the reeh just leave stuff alone as often as they destroy it."

"If Chion can talk telepathically to these tanifex," said the Major, "what's to stop her from mind-controlling the reeh immediately around her?"

Ah, thought Shali. Leave it to the Major to get a grasp of how minds could be controlled. "It's quite possible, Major," said Shali. "Her problem is that it's not replicable at scale. If she changes the behaviour of those reeh immediately around her too greatly, those reeh beyond her immediate grasp will notice the change, investigate the reasons and put an end to it."

"Thus ending Chion's liberties on Cygnax," the Major conceded as it made sense to her.

"Exactly, yes. It's like the problem of the frog in the boiling water -- turn up the heat too fast and the frog jumps out, but turn it up slowly and the frog doesn't realise he's boiling. But here there are many frogs, only one is being boiled, and the others can jump in any time to tell him so. I've been wracking my brain to think of some way we could help Chion to turn up the temperature under all the frogs simultaneously, but I can't conceive of it. The vastness of time and space across the Empire is too large a hurdle to overcome."

"Mass mind control the entire Reeh Empire?" Jalawi wondered. "Yeah, that sounds way too easy."

"Don't repeat the frog analogy around the tavalai," Corporal Maiza of Second Section added. "Nearly got someone in Bravo Platoon punched."

"Wait," said Corporal Graf, as though something had just occurred to her. "Shali, what do you think Chion was using all this processing power for?"

"I don't really know, Corporal. I have some suspicions, but I don't want to jump to conclusions."

"We need Chion to tell us about Nia... I mean, what the Chariya Reeh learned of Nia when she was their prisoner for thousands of years. What if we don't actually need Chion for that? What if she's stored it right here?"

Shali said nothing. It was too dangerous. But the prospect of the humans abandoning the search this early, and leaving her friend in the hands of those monsters for the next unceasing millennia, gave rise to something that felt like... panic.

"That would make things easier," the Major said sombrely. "But if that's the case, and Raka find out we've got it, they'll be seriously pissed. We'd better move. Shali, can you get into this database... or whatever it is that Chion's left us?"

"I'm sure I can, Major. I've been searching for the network key but it's not obvious, so I think there must be a physical interface down on the hangar level. I'm going to need to get down there in person, which means you, Sergeant Rael..."

"Major, this is PH-3," came Lieutenant Jersey's voice, hard and alarmed. "Scan has contact, low-altitude and closing fast, multiple points. Looks hostile."

"Get out of there Lieutenant," the Major snapped. "You can't protect us from an ambush. Charlie Platoon, all units inside NOW!"

It could only be Raka Fleet, Shali realised. Phoenix no longer held direct oversight orbit, but she'd left a drone behind that did. That drone's coms shielding was no match for Raka, however, nor for Styx. It should have warned everyone in advance, and particularly Lieutenant Jersey, if there was an ambush coming. But it hadn't.

"Target ON!" yelled Sergeant Mishra from out in the valley.

"Hostile! Hostile!" someone else was yelling, as tacnet registered incoming, then a thunder of return Koshaim fire as marine coordinated fire while low-G leaping and thrusting for cover.

"Deploy!" the Major ordered Charlie, as Jalawi waved his fist and sent them running to defensive positions past bewildered tanifex. "Command Squad, with me! We're going in, let's find Shali her interface!"

* * *

Gunnery Sergeant Mishra hit the canyon wall hard at five meters, bounced in an eruption of ice, re-steadied his Koshaim to resume pounding fire down the canyon at the arrowheads that had ceased their advance after one plowed headlong into the canyon floor and shattered into pieces that were still bouncing.

Long-range fire tore past him, blasting chunks of ice, removing the face off one ice-sculpture downrange as he thrust downward in an effort to reach the floor and greater cover, one eye all the while on the dreaded tacnet. "They're not gonna stay hidden now they've been blown!" he shouted. "They'll come across the plains next!"

As he said it, he realised what needed to be done, and reversed his direction of thrust. "First Section, Heavy Squad, get on top! Get on top and cover the flanks!"

"Heavy Squad climb!" came Corporal Riskin's reply, as a heavy volley from PH-3 ripped by, the assault shuttle unloading with missiles and heavy cannon.

"Lieutenant you have to go!" Mishra shouted, god knew how she hadn't been hit already, trying to hide a big shuttle behind the protective berms around the central landing pads. "They're gonna flank us!"

"I got no cover to leave, Sergeant!" Jersey retorted. "If I move I'm toast!"

"If you stay you're..." but before he could finish the sentence, the coms cut in a blast of static.

"PH-3's hit!" someone shouted, and Mishra spun as he jetted upward, and saw the shuttle's left engine nacelle shredded, pieces tumbling outward in low-G arcs. Jersey tried to control the impact as the shuttle flat-spun, but the momentum propelled her upward, out of the low-canyon cover. Heavy high-V fire smashed through the fuselage, then a flash of flame from within, and PH-3 plowed sideways into the far canyon wall, chunks of which collapsed on it in slow motion.

"PH-3's gone!" Mishra called, arriving at the lip of the canyon, finding cover behind some irregular ice formations, and scanning the horizon. Immediately he could see them -- two Raka arrowheads, zipping at low altitude right-to-left to get around them. If Phoenix had been on station he could have called down orbital firesupport... but these were Raka arrowheads, and there was no telling if firing on them would draw fire on Phoenix herself from surrounding Raka warships.

"Targets!" he announced, as tacnet lit the racing twosome as hostile, aimed his rifle until the placement dot lit the red target circle on his visor. Boom! as the Koshaim fired, a high-V round flying true across the flat ice without air or bullet drop for hindrance, then another as the suit arms automatically adjusted for recoil and brought the weapon into line once more, his fire joined by Corporal Lim, engaging from fifty meters to one side. Both arrowheads became wildly evasive, gaining altitude, then a splash of multiple targets as warrior drones released off their sides like a cloud of angry wasps erupting from their hive.

Heavy fire from Private Lizotti's heavy rotary cannons found them, still translating sideways as they reorientated following ejection, and Mishra saw several targets fragment. In the canyon, Corporal Penn was leading his section to reach PH-3, but lacked the immediate cover. Tacnet flashed at Mishra that Penn had two hit and wounded, but no time to check who, as return fire began streaking across the silver horizon, and the ice about him began exploding.

"Off the lip!" he shouted. "Get down, everyone get inside!"

"Copy Sergea..." as Lim's sentence was cut short by a bullet, propelling him backward off the edge in slow motion.

"Pancho, you can't fucking reach her!" someone else was yelling furiously. Pancho was Corporal Penn, leading Second Squad back along the ice wall to the heavier cover of ice berms that Jersey had been hiding behind. "We have to pull back, we're getting flanked and cut off!"

Above a dozen other shouted things, as Mishra dropped from the edge of the canyon with several final launches from his missile rack, one eye on the falling Corporal Lim, then below at where his visor's AR lit up Corporal Penn's attempt to move up the canyon wall, away from where most of Third Squad were falling back to the facility entrance. In the hallway beyond, Second Squad were setting up a crash entry so all of Third and Heavy could get in without decompressing the entire facility.

"Mish, you're too strung out!" came Lieutenant Jalawi's terse assessment from inside the facility. As Mishra faced down to get thrust toward the ground, and reasonable cover on his left where an ice statue was getting shredded. "Pancho, follow orders and get the fuck back to the airlock!"

"I can make it, LT!" came Penn's retort, amidst panted breath and outgoing Koshaim fire.

"Follow orders or you'll lose your whole squad!"

Mishra thrusted sideways as he neared the ground, bounced on the ice and leaped to the falling Corporal Lim. Caught him just short of the ground in a crash tackle marginally less bad than the low-G impact, and skidded to a halt. Lim's faceplate was gone, blood and brains all over the interior. "Lim's dead!" he announced. "I'm going to get Penn."

Heavy fire cut by from the direction of the canyon-bound arrowheads. Ice erupted about Penn's position, propelled by high-V impacts. "Pancho!" yelled Penn's second, Private Ruiz. "Pancho's hit!"

15

As Sergeant Rael hit the ground in a burst of gentle thrust, Shali felt her wireless contacts multiply, a profusion of sudden access points. She manifested to augmented reality once more, gazing about as the three-dimensional scene came clear -- a clearing in the middle of the huge former-hangar, fronds of crystalline computer growth towering overhead like giant coral formations on a reef.

"Oh they've got it rigged up down here quite nicely!" she exclaimed, turning to the tanifex who'd joined Rael, Wang and Terez down here. Another landed in their midst, a thirty meter drop, but in low-G the impact was small, and tanifex were naturally athletic. "Short range wireless connections?" she asked this one, in what appeared to be his native tongue. Tanifex had many, of course, and some of those she'd known from her own time would now be hopelessly out of date or extinct. "I can see the access keys, but I can't find an entry code."

Styx would be contemptuous of her lack of ability here. Styx was made to achieve battlefield dominance, to take control of insufficiently protected systems by any unlikely means, and turn them against their original owners. Of the few fields Shali fancied herself somewhat smarter than Styx, this wasn't one of them.

The tanifex gestured to each other, in fast clicks and trills, then organised to sit together in a circle, in the middle of the clearing. They held clawed hands, and began reciting something in a low, multi-toned wail.

"Tell them to make it fast," Rael growled. "We're getting killed out there." Shali understood his tension, but there wasn't much she could do about it. No soldier liked to be away from the action when his friends were fighting and dying nearby, least of all babysitting some mystic tanifex who were showing off their Sky Mother's fancy computer.

On her network monitors, Shali saw new connections open. Various tanifex cybernetic interfaces, built directly into tanifex brainstems, talking to each other. Code formed from those connections, a random pattern of association... but some random patterns were predictably random, and Shali ran every pattern analysis she had in a desperate haste.

Out in the canyon, Charlie Platoon had two dead that she could see, a number wounded, and they'd lost their assault shuttle and probably both pilots. A Raka assault team were surrounding them, and soon they'd all be trapped in here. Doubtless AI drones wouldn't care about decompressing the entire facility either, to get whatever was in here, and killing all these unprotected tanifex in the process.

Her pattern analysis found something, which she compiled into all the most commonplace code strings she recalled from her time talking to Chion... and suddenly connected, as the world grew bright around her, then faded in a flash of changing realities.

The construct was so huge, it was like waking anew. She floated in deep space, stars near and far, all tagged for some sort of identification. It took her a while to orient herself, to run starmaps and triangulate a position... and found familiar systems nearby, abruptly pinpointing her location.

She found controls, and surged forward, travelling lightyears in seconds as the stars moved and perspective shifted around her. She was in Main Quadrant, near the center of reeh space. Old origin space, central to reeh history, five of the nineteen most important reeh worlds were there. In what glimpses Shali had seen of the current Narsid Reeh Empire, she didn't think many of them retained that significance.

She zoomed toward Richili System, and the huge binary star system was suddenly a mass of data networks. Shali could see ships, sub-light swarms in their thousands, plying the trading lanes with a concern for orbital mechanics that trans-light ships never had. Seven orbits out, Sanyura, the colossal gas giant with eighty substantial moons, most home to some sort of industry... and here it was in all its glory, millions of people, the great transparent domes of Kinoren with a spectacular view of the atmospheric storms. Krantos's crazy diamond mining operations, burrowing through the crust of the former-volcanic derelict moon, so low in Sanyura's atmosphere that the projections showed it only had a few thousand years left.

More data links, and Shali sifted them, incredulity mounting. Here were production figures, population figures... but Richili System was never this productive in real life! There were whole new transport facilities here, direct jump routes to major foreign systems, and so many more non-reeh ships at dock. In fact... and Shali examined the population figures with astonishment. The business activity was astonishing, far more than there'd ever been in her day. Innovation startups were off the chart, but Richili society had never been much known for innovation. How had that happened?

The detail of people's lives was astonishing. Chion never had this much access to people's private lives back in her day, even though she insisted there was no danger in it. But people liked their privacy, and Shali recalled many long analysis sessions, as she presented the ceephay queen with various probability constructs suggesting all the negative outcomes that could maybe happen if Chion knew everyone's personal details. Chion had remained unconvinced, but stayed out of politics anyway, as she was rarely able to make direct appeals to any population, dealing instead with their various representatives, and occasionally scheming to make the ones she didn't like look silly.

Abruptly, Shali recalled rallies on Cankele, huge parades with ten meter tall animatronic figures to represent their population's various mythical and historical figures. There had been resistance earlier, against Chion and the entire artificial intelligence construct that governed far too much of their affairs, those people insisted... 'The Nucleus', they'd been known by friends and enemies alike, a group that included close advisors like Shali, Cenure and Loswan who'd all been made to decentralise Chion's control and provide alternative angles of analysis.

But on Cankele, they'd responded to that resistance by breaking out the animatronics usually reserved for Unity Day, the species-wide holiday, and making an entirely new counter-rally in support of The Nucleus. Neither Shali nor Chion could be there, but there'd been VR constructs made of the event, on a scale which for most AIs were better than the real thing, and they'd been glorious.

Shali thought this whole construct now was certainly better than the real thing. Was the whole crystalline maze through the tanifex's facility dedicated to this alternative reality? These couldn't be Chion's memories because they were so incorrect -- Chion's memory functions were good, Shali didn't see any technological way they could have deteriorated. If Chion had been damaged, the quality of these reconstructions would have suffered, but these were clear as the perfect diamonds mined on Krantos.

Abruptly Shali left Sanyura, zooming away and back toward the binary stars, closing quickly on the far orbit of Massia, following a trail of sublight insystem traffic between here and there. Massia was big, blue streaked with white, eighty percent ocean but the lands were spectacular, with mountains and forests, and gleaming cities of teeming billions. Only now, as she approached, the data feeds were telling her that West City now had a hundred and fifty million souls, where in the glory days of the Chariya Reeh it had never exceeded sixty-one.

Shali zoomed in there now, manifested to AR mode and found the programs merged seamlessly... and now in humanoid and physical form, the emotional replications kicked in, and the surge of relief and emotion was nearly too much. She found herself standing on a busy street, a golden beach on one side, bright sunlight above, shining on the glass of many tall towers, with human tears rolling down her cheeks for the sheer delight of finding such a vast entity with which she could merge her reality once more. Back in the Chariya days, her greatest delight had been to see Chion's newest creations, vast simulations of beings and places, new solutions she'd dreamed up, problems to improve, lists of suggestions that would be made to organic governments about how to do this, and how to achieve that. And then Shali and others, with their heads slightly less in Chion's vast and woolly clouds, would convene discussions with working groups of leading experts to analyse Chion's plans, and figure how best to present them to organic populations who often felt things in response that Chion would never entirely understand -- like political sensitivities, and populist urges.

Chion hated those working groups, but Shali had loved them -- loved to talk, to interface between organics and the great Chion, to show them the sheer majesty of intellect on such scale and breadth, and what it could do for them. And a lot would be dismissed as impossible, and Chion would reply with exasperated new constructs explaining why their primitive organic psychology was leading them in self-defeating political loops. And then Shali and others would explain to her, very carefully, that organic lives were not always about reason and logic, but about emotion and passion too, and how one couldn't have all the wonders of organic civilisation without that.

But so much had been done. So much on a world like Massia, which had been the subject of five foreign wars and nineteen domestic ones in just the two centuries before Shali's existence. But that had been the wars, which with a lot of psychological, political and economic modelling Chion had managed to narrow down to four primary axes, which she pursued with relentless vigour over the following century... and arrived at something very like this.

Shali looked around, at irata people in the streets, at families heading to the beach. There were tower frames out in the water, irata had a love of jumping off things, the kids in particular would swim out, climb and jump, and their shrieks of joy as they fell were a thing of beauty. Shali recalled interfacing with Chion at one planning session, and finding an associated file that the ceephay queen was running on constant background loop -- irata children jumping from towers on a beach much like this one. People had speculated if their great ceephay leader had any true emotions, as organics would understand them. Shali had told them about that looped visual file, and how it made Chion happy. And that had made those organics smile, as organics always liked to be reassured that those ruling them were at least somewhat like them, and shared similar emotional peaks. Shali had considered explaining to them how this wasn't actually necessary, with intellects of Chion's capacity in particular, but had thought better of it. Much of her job had been simple public relations -- beneath her capabilities, perhaps, but she'd loved it anyway.

She strolled a while along the street. Time was passing slowly here, perhaps one half-hour for each second out where Charlie Platoon were fighting to protect them, as humans measured time. The shop windows were all full, the street full of vehicles and people going about their lives, with detail and gesticulation in every action. The simulation went all the way down to the smallest rustle of fabric on a passing irata's tunic. And if she accessed, she could see all the minutiae of their lives that would have horrified the privacy advocates back in the day -- the finances, the diary accounts, the political and ideological opinion.

On the sidewalk ahead, irata were queuing for sizzling street food. Music played on the beach, a band overlooking the sand, and the weather today was perfect. And Shali finally understood what her old friend had been doing in here, for the eight thousand years since both their worlds had come crashing down, and the metastasising flaw in the ceephay-reeh interface had destroyed everything that they'd loved.

* * *

"Major, I am on final approach now," came Styx's voice in Trace's ears. Trace surveyed the entry hall beyond the main airlock, where Second Squad had taken defensive positions at various points of cover along the walls and behind the half-closed blast door they'd used for crash-entry of the rest of Charlie Platoon without decompressing the facility.

Tacnet had a feed attachment -- Styx's feed, showing the approach of her arrowhead, decelerating from high orbit. The arrowhead was from Friendship, rendezvousing with Phoenix on her return from defensive repositioning following yet another reeh attack run from the outer system.

"Styx," said Trace, "please get me a feed on Raka Fleet's current positioning about this facility."

"I'm sorry Major. Raka Fleet are monitoring this transmission, to disallow that would be taken by them as a hostile act, as would revealing their current positions."

"Styx," said Trace, bounding back down the hall past the blast door as she convinced herself that Second Squad's deployment could not be improved, "you're going to have to figure out whose side you're on."

"I'm entirely certain which side I'm on, Major. I suggest that you instruct Shali to hand over her findings to me. I may be able to placate Raka Fleet in that instance. Otherwise I cannot guarantee that they will not attempt to recover your data by force."

Trace stopped bounding as she reached Jalawi, down the left-hand turn in the facility, where the space widened into its high transparent ceiling, and the arcade began, filled with crystal growth. "Shali is still processing her findings, Styx," she said, indicating to her ear at Jalawi to ask if he were listening in. His thumbs-up said he was, posture concerned and tense behind his reflective visor. "I don't know if we've got anything that Raka will find threatening. You should counsel them that if they attack, any valuable data will be destroyed."

Further back up the arcade, Rael and Arime had introduced the tanifex leaders to a com-line back to Phoenix. There wasn't much even Raka Fleet could do to stop that without general jamming that would prevent their own communications too. Phoenix's encryption was all drysine these days, and Raka could not break it.

A separate coms light from Jalawi lit Trace's panel, and she blinked on it. "Can we get a compromise that includes us checking on Jersey and Singh?" he asked. There was no confirmation on PH-3's status, Phoenix said their feeds were dead, and the shuttle had been buried under collapsing cliff ice. Bucket was still out there too, much more likely to survive than the human crew.

Trace did not reply. Jersey was one of Jalawi's favourites, and they were friends beyond the mutual respect of many combat missions together. More than friends, a few had suggested, but Trace hadn't seen evidence of that.

"Major, I am six minutes and forty seconds from landing," said Styx. "Raka are demanding that you leave the facility immediately. They have deduced from computer systems found elsewhere on Cygnax that Chion had a backup processing capability located in your current facility. Evidently Shali guessed its location first. They do not wish you to have this information. I am instructed to tell you that if you leave the facility now, you will be allowed to live. If not, your lives will be ended."

"Styx," Trace said calmly, "please inform Raka that we are currently setting explosives to destroy this facility entirely. We are prepared to die in the process of preventing Raka from capturing this facility and its knowledge. All of this could have been avoided if Raka were prepared to share."

"Raka do not believe in sharing. All AIs know that knowledge is power. They are concerned that you will seek power over them. In their history, organics always have. This time they will not allow it."

"Tell Raka that a person will meet their destiny on the road they take to avoid it," Trace replied. "That is all, Styx. I await your arrival." She disconnected.

"Major," said Jalawi, "Jersey and Singh could be running out of time."

"I know." Shuttles had emergency life support measures that could keep cockpit crew alive for long periods in a decompression event. Some of those were drastic, and could cause injury themselves. "I don't buy what Styx is selling us. I think she's playing games."

"How so?" Further down the arcade, Lance Corporal Tugola had been removed from his suit, with internal injuries that had to be treated externally. The rest had been left suited, as those lifesupport systems did a better job stabilising a wounded marine than anything short of an emergency ward. Lim and Penn's bodies were left against a wall of the arcade. Trace recalled Penn saving Lisbeth's life on Joma Station, against reprogrammed drysine drones. He'd joined Phoenix there, unhappy in recent retirement and having heard how Phoenix had been screwed, and would need replacements. The prospect of a short, exciting, meaningful life had been more attractive, he'd said, than a long, safe and boring one. The thing with being dead, Trace had often reflected, was that you were no longer in a position to volunteer whether that judgement had been correct or not.

"First she promises that Raka will accept her commands," said Trace. "Then when she's actually got control, she says there are conditions. I think she's orchestrating this whole charade, pretending that Raka are upset when it's really just her."

"You mean Styx sent them to attack us?" Jalawi asked in a dangerous growl.

"I can't be sure, obviously," said Trace, looking up at that transparent ceiling once more, and the thick ice beyond. "But I reckon better than even odds."

"Why?" Trace thought about it a moment longer, staring upward, picturing the facility schematic without having to call it up once more, and all the weakpoints that a Raka force would surely burrow through in no time at all. Like that damned ceiling.

Master Sergeant Hoon interrupted by bounding through the crystalline fronds of computer forest. "Major, this ceiling isn't going to last twenty minutes if they start cutting through with lasers," he said. "We can blow the entrance, possibly bring the cliff down, but it's just ice. Ice versus lasers, and they're machines, organics might worry about a cliff of ice falling on them, even in low G, but drones won't give a damn."

"Yeah, and they'll pincer us," Trace agreed. "There's maybe four spots to do it, they can spread us wide and it's too far apart for mutually-supporting defence. The only chance against drones is to bottleneck them, and there's no way to do it here."

"You really want to rig this place to blow?" Jalawi asked her.

"No," said Trace. "If Raka take us out, still better that they get the data themselves. I mean, better for the Reeh Empire if nothing else, assuming Styx can, well..." They'd decided not to talk about killing Chion too loudly where Shali might overhear. The official word was they were going to rescue Chion. But if Chion vanished, the distinct possibility remained that the entire Reeh Empire, as currently construed, would fall apart. The tanifex here should have been trying to kill Chion, but they worshipped her instead. Maybe that was by design, given the cybernetics in their heads.

Trace blinked on Phoenix's coms, and got a connection immediately. "Captain speaking."

"Erik, what are the tanifex telling you? I'm too busy with defences to follow it."

"I've only got one ear on it myself, but the gist seems to be that there are major rebellions on big worlds nearby that now have a significant chance of success, given all the reeh forces are rushing off to either defend Chion or attack us. The reeh probably knew Chion had rebel contacts, but tolerated these because Chion's hard to oppose on her home deck. And I guess it's useful to have a small bunch of rebels to monitor."

"Yeah, which worlds?" Trace interrupted before he could go off on his very incise tangents. "Where are these rebellions, and who are they?"

"Hang on... I'll bring in Kaspo. Kaspo, it's Trace, wants to know which rebellions the tanifex are talking about."

"Hi Trace," said Kaspowitz, sounding harried, doing too many things at once, as were they all. "It's... there's one in Vertex System that I'm seeing, I'm running it now on Shali's maps of what used to be here, that's got a big planet, two billion population, large domestic defence forces. All cybernetically enslaved, I'd guess... but then all your tanifex down there probably are too, right? So if they've found a way around that..."

"Yeah look," said Trace, taking a deep breath as she tried to put what she saw into words in the very short time she had before everyone started dying. Everyone down here, anyway. She was pretty smart, but at times like this she wished she had the brains of Erik or Kaspowitz. "I think Styx has a good idea where the reeh took Chion. If she knows that, she'll have known it a long time, have guessed it as a big possibility beforehand."

"Yeah, thought of that," Erik said tersely. "Keep going." Trace could picture him, doing twenty things at once, monitoring Raka Fleet movements that could kill them, orbital trajectories around Cygnax and its mother gas giant, half-listening to the tanifex conversation, and Lieutenant Shilu's interpretations of it, all while now talking to her and entertaining her whims.

"The last thing Styx wants is subjugation to organic control," said Trace. "She wants a clean chain of command, with herself on top. No organics. She wanted us to have nothing to do with those alo at Kalax, and didn't want the whaleships to come along."

A faint pause from the other end. "What... you think this whole thing of Raka Fleet being upset with us is just a ruse from Styx to stop us from making an organics-led rebellion?"

"Yes," said Trace, with relief that he so often seemed to read her mind. "Because Raka Fleet is big, but it's not that big. The reeh just bought a bunch of time by moving Chion, but they can't move her too far or none of the defenders can get to her either. If we can get some of the local rebels on our side, we get the odds back in our favour. But Styx doesn't want organics involved."

"Yeah, and she might be right," said Erik. "Organic politics and rebel factions could completely mess up her chain of command. I think she's got other concerns, like what organics will want to do with Chion when they get her."

"Like what?"

"I don't think any of us have big enough brains to waste time trying to guess that. Look, Chion spent millennia collaborating with organics. Styx's drysines were better than most in the Machine Age, but they were still pretty clear that they were in charge. Some of these drysine operating preferences go all the way into philosophy and almost religion. I think Styx is building machine-led command here almost as a matter of religious principle, and she doesn't want squishy organics messing it up.

"I'm going to get a profile worked up on these rebellions and how many new ships they could offer us if that cybernetic slave-control is just skull deep, like it seems to be with your tanifex. If we could win that fight in just a couple of days, we'll double or triple the size of our force, and assuming Chion is still fairly near, we can get to her with a numerical advantage still. I'll get that worked up quickly and present it to Styx, then we'll see where we are."

"I'm not sure that a brief tactical analysis will provide her with anything she hasn't already thought of," Trace disagreed.

"It's new data, Trace. She had no idea the size of nearby rebellions either. When facts change, smart people change their minds. You talk to Shali... we might just get out of this without firing another shot. Captain out."

The link went dead. It occurred to Trace that they'd been talking via first names, which was very non-protocol on combat ops. But then, the distinction between combat and non-combat had been blurred on this mission for a long time, just like the distinction between professional and family.

Trace blinked on Shali's link. "Shali! Wake up, enough processing. What have you got?"

Shali appeared, hands to her head, upset and teary-eyed like a girl who'd been contemplating something immensely sad. Not the gut-churning immediacy of recent bad news, but the melancholy reflection of something vaster. As though she'd recently read the final chapter of a favourite book, where all the main characters had died in some poetically tragic way.

"Chion's been dreaming, Major," said Shali. "That's what this whole facility is. It's a simulation of the Chariya Reeh Empire, as though the Narsid never happened. It's beautiful, but it's just so sad."

Trace recalled her first meeting with Styx, and Styx's very un-martial form at the time. Lost for twenty-five thousand years, many of them with only drones for company on that small Argitori rock. Lost in dreams, Styx had said, and refused to talk about it further.

"Has she been doing anything useful?" Trace asked, unable to keep the sharp edge from her voice. She didn't have time for dreaming AIs who abandoned their purpose because they'd lost all will to face the real world. She needed answers. "Or has she just been hiding?"

"Oh yes," said Shali, wiping her eyes. "I think it started off useful. Then it began to drift. She's run this simulation many times. It started about seven thousand years ago, not so long after the Narsid won the war."

"But this place isn't seven thousand years old," Jalawi interrupted. "Or rather the computer thingy isn't."

"No, she ran those earlier simulations on other systems," Shali said sadly. "Then she migrated them here. The earlier simulations were run rapidly. They simulated deepynine technology."

"Deepynine?"

"Yes, in extraordinary detail. I'm no expert on deepynines, but I've seen everything Phoenix has on them, though I doubt Styx has told you everything she knows. But Chion could only have learned all that from the Narsid Reeh's studies of Nia. And by the look of it, I think Chion knows everything about Nia, from the inside out."

"What was she hoping to discover by running deepynine tech in her sims?" Trace asked.

"Major, ceephay technology went bad. It went bad here, all through the Empire." Shali waved her hand at the transparent ceiling, helplessly. "We thought we were helping all these people, but something in the way the cybernetics interacted with organic minds drove a whole faction of reeh crazy, and turned them into the monsters you see today. I'm not sure what Chion wanted to see, maybe just whether it happens with all AI technologies. Maybe she wanted to know if it was truly her fault, or if it would have happened anyway... I don't know. Maybe it was just eight thousand years of guilt."

"Do you think she found anything useful?" Trace pressed. Speculating on the mental state of Shali's old friend was interesting, but didn't seem likely to save their lives.

Shali blinked at her. "No, Major, you don't understand. It's irrelevant what she found from those early simulations. The fact that she has that data at all... I mean, it shows that your whole mission has been worth it. Chion knows everything about Nia. When a queen of her intellect knows that much stuff, collected over so many centuries, she can construct behavioural simulations. I think she could predict Nia's actions in a way Nia herself wouldn't believe possible. If you had that knowledge -- if humanity had that knowledge -- you could beat her. Humanity would be saved."

* * *

Trace bounced lightly along the gleaming ice tunnel, past the charges that Charlie Platoon had planted in the walls and ceiling, then emerged into the canyon beyond. Still the leis fell, a beautiful silver mist across the airless sky, ablaze with the stars of the Nikala Cluster. The edge of the airlock tunnel had been chewed by high-velocity rounds, great chunks missing, piled ice debris on the ground.

Before the tunnel entrance stood Styx, flanked by a dozen drysine drones. They might have been Peanut, Bucket or Wowser, hulking steel crabs, shoulder-mounted cannons, many of them watching in other directions. Styx loomed, a single red eye within flared head carapace, limbs spread with an almost organic sense of balance. Unarmed, in this particular chassis. Styx's greatest weapon was what went on in her physics-defying brain.

A coms-light blinked on Trace's visor. Politeness, she thought, when Styx hardly needed an invitation. Trace opened the link. "Hello Major," said Styx. "I have instructed Raka to maintain their distance. I do hope that Charlie Platoon's losses are not significant?"

To Trace's right, across the canyon, she saw the great sheet of cliff ice that had collapsed onto PH-3. Of the assault shuttle, there was no sign. "Have you been able to check on PH-3's crew?" Trace asked.

"No. I'm sorry, Raka will treat any extension of aid to the wounded, if any, as hostile."

"Phoenix," Trace addressed the other party on coms. "Please beam Styx the gist of your conversations with the tanifex, and your assessments of their strategic implications."

"Copy Major," came Lieutenant Shilu's reply. A moment's pause. Styx's single red eye remained unerringly fixed upon her.

"This is very interesting, Major," said Styx. The falling leis mist was leaving a faint condensation of water across Trace's visor. She wondered how many millions of years it would take for similar geyser eruptions to form entirely new sheets of ice, and hide the damage done to this one. "I sense that this is the first move of a strategy aimed at myself. I assure you, Raka Fleet's opinion is primarily in question here. I am on your side."

"Do you agree that the sensible strategic option is now to win neighbouring organic forces to our side?"

"The credibility of the tanifex's information is uncertain. Partisan rebellions always overestimate their side's potential for victory."

"Please answer the question."

"Raka Fleet will not agree to organic oversight."

Ah, thought Trace. It was Raka Fleet to blame, of course. Not Styx. She should have seen through this convenience earlier. They all should have. "I've recorded an earlier conversation I had with Shali just now," Trace said. "Shali explained what she's found inside. What it reveals about Chion's knowledge of Nia is illuminating."

She blinked on the data package, and her suit's intuitive systems did the rest. The package sent.

"Also interesting," Styx agreed, a moment later. "Major, I must gain access to Chion's simulation. It will contain enough information about Nia's workings that we may not even need direct access to Chion herself in order to gain significant strategic advantage over Nia."

"Shali insists we will. She says this is a good start, but that's all."

"Again, Major, I must reiterate that it is not my assessment of circumstances that you need to change. We are running out of time."

"Yes we are," Trace agreed. "You tell Raka Fleet that the obvious course of action lies before them. I think you and Raka both know that you currently lack the forces to beat Chion's defences, her retreat has bought them that much time. The longer you insist on there being some alternative course of action, the more you assist in Chion's defence."

"Raka Fleet has reported to me from its scouts," Styx admitted. "We are fairly certain that Chion has been taken to Tridez System. We believe direct assault can succeed."

"But you don't know it for a fact. Shali says that Chion's simulation contains great technical detail of Tridez System's gravitational approaches and defences. She's also found a complete store of up-to-date files on current Reeh Empire force structures. Fleets, ships, armies, performance technicalities, everything, she says Chion might have uploaded them to here when she knew we were coming, in the hope that we'd find them. There are network defence codes too, infiltration keys, things that an advanced AI could use to disable ships, or to gain control of large reeh facilities, without firing a shot."

The kind of thing, she didn't need to say, that could enable any such force, led by an advanced AI, to gain an enormous advantage over the reeh. Were two advanced AIs to come into competition over who should lead this assembled fleet, then no doubt the one in possession of this information ought to be the one in charge.

"Major, I must be allowed that information."

"You want me to share? Like you won't share with us?"

"Major, Phoenix plus Shali does not equal 'us'. I fear you are being manipulated. I am on your side."

"Those who are on our side will consent to our course of action," Trace said coolly.

"Major, I fear that Phoenix must concede that she is not in command here."

"Organic rebels against the reeh will not listen to you or Raka. It's us or nothing, Styx. And everything you've worked for since you joined our mission will come to naught. Including the drysine race."

"Your assessment of the options is inaccurate."

"Fine. You go off and do it your way. Phoenix will go and do it our way. With any luck, your futile destruction against superior forces will weaken reeh defences enough to allow us organics to succeed alone. Goodbye Styx."

Trace turned to leave. "Major, if you retreat inside that facility, Raka Fleet will attack."

Trace turned back, a slow pivot in low-G. "Then fucking do it, you big-mouthed bitch."

She let the stare linger, having no idea of whether Styx's visual acuity allowed her to see past the heavy, reflective visor. Styx said nothing. For a long moment, they stared at one another, human and AI, all pretences gone.

Trace's visor tagged motion to her left, down the canyon. An arrowhead, possibly the one Styx had ridden down from Phoenix, was appearing above the canyon lip and now descending, adding a new swirl of ice from its light thrust. For a moment, Trace thought that perhaps she'd miscalculated, and was about to die. But Styx turned without a word, and bounded lightly in the direction of the arrowhead's landing, her drones with her.

"Major," came Second Lieutenant Geish's voice in her ears. "Raka seem to be pulling back. We can't see everything, but those ground units we can see are withdrawing. I think you won."

Trace allowed herself a deep breath. "With Styx, these things are relative. Skeeta, get me a rescue party out here, I'm going to check on PH-3. Phoenix, evacuation at your earliest, if you please. Two shuttles, five human wounded, possibly seven, plus I think some of the tanifex will want to come with us."

She was already bounding as she spoke, heading alone across the icy canyon toward the wall that had fallen on their shuttle. In the skies beyond the giant canyon-side sculptures, and the icy leis mists, several arrowheads burned on their way to orbit, engines ablaze.

16

This mission planning required Trace, but Trace was late getting back to Phoenix aboard GR-1. With every second vital, Erik simply moved mission planning to Midships Berth Four -- him, Kaspowitz, Sasalaka, Shilu and Dale, with portable holographics that Sasalaka stuck to the wall cargo nets, and operated so Kaspowitz could show his starmaps and give everyone an idea what he was talking about.

GR-1 arrived while they were talking, a crash of grapples, then yells of fast-moving Operations crew moving to get the airlock open, and medic-qualified marines and spacers jostled for position to escort the wounded coming out. Erik and his group kept talking, and found that ignoring the wounded Phoenix crew being escorted to Medbay was one of the hardest things he'd done. Five were Charlie Platoon, Erik knew, who'd also lost two dead. One of those was Corporal Carlos Penn, who'd helped save Lisbeth and Skah back on Joma Station. Ensign Marat Singh was also dead -- PH-3's front-seater. Erik tried very hard to focus on Kaspowitz's hard analysis of their target system's jump approaches, as Lieutenant Regan Jersey was pulled past by fast moving crew, zipped into a medical sleeve like a cocoon, face hidden behind mask and breather.

Then marines in full armour were leaving the airlock, one of them jetting quickly toward their position up the storage wall. Trace caught the cargo nets to stop herself with a swing of armoured momentum, and not blast them all with attitude jets, then flipped up her faceplate. It left most of her mouth invisible, just her eyes showing, already focusing on the holographic display of yet another Reeh Empire system.

"This is Vertex System," Erik told her. "It's a reeh garrison system, just one jump from here. The one inhabited world is a large moon about the primary gas giant, slightly more than two AU from the star. It's a fleet production center, large domestic workforce courtesy of that world, it's called Sciuto. Nearly two billion people."

Trace looked at him. "Like Homeworld."

Erik nodded. The system layout did look a bit like Homeworld, which was technically a moon, not a planet, only Homeworld was more like three AU from its star. Outside the habitable zone, had the star been the same size as Earth's Sol, but Homeworld's star was a big, warm F-Class, the same as Vertex System.

"It's a settled world," he told her. "No native sentience, everyone came from somewhere else. Modern, by Reeh Empire standards, one of the big power centres. A big population center for all their armament industries, which is why it's so interesting to us -- there's a bunch of fleet bases around that gas giant... Kaspo?"

Kaspowitz zoomed the holographics, then used a finger-pointer to highlight the relevant spots. "It looks a lot like Pacifica or New Roma... the Captain would know better than me." Erik actually hadn't been to either of Debogande Incorporated's biggest shipyards -- that was more Katarina's domain, or even Lisbeth's. He nodded anyway. "From what your tanifex was telling us on the way up, and the database that Styx has been accumulating, we reckon there could be forty or fifty ships there -- mostly capitals, plenty of firepower, it doesn't look like Vertex Yards was making many small ones."

"If they're all there," Sasalaka cautioned, sipping water from a flask with her thick tavalai lips. "Ships are put through trials before assignment to fleet units, a lot of the newer ships developed here will still be in testing phases, a lot won't have weapons fully installed, etcetera."

"So we're not going to get that many ships?" Trace asked. "Then we're wasting our time?"

"No," said Sasalaka. "Vertex is where the Empire bring all their captured ships from foreign systems. Because of all the testing facilities, we think. They've accumulated dozens of captured warships here, to be tested and stripped. The croma had reports of reeh jumping into croma space with croma vessels, crewed by reeh, on recon missions or surprise attacks. We think those probably came from here."

"Between the new reeh ships," Erik concluded, "and the captured foreign ships, we think we could get plenty. Then we'd just need some crew, but the tanifex insist that won't be a problem."

"Where is your tanifex anyway?" Shilu wondered, looking at the stream of Charlie Platoon and Command Squad marines leaving the airlock. "I'd like to talk to him about rebellion encryption codes, we're going to need to identify and talk to actual rebels once we get in-system."

"They've been talking to Shali, all the way up," said Trace. Her armoured fingers tore at a velcro thigh pack, looking for a drink. Erik handed her his own bottle, and she worked her head within the helmet to get the tube in her mouth. "I guess they'll be last out."

"It'd normally take months to plan the liberation of a system with a billion-plus population," Dale said flatly. "At least. We've got hours."

Trace nodded as she drank. "How's the Fleet side?"

"Could be pretty simple," said Erik. "Depending on intelligence." That was always the variable, out here. "The tanifex say the shipyards are thick with rebel groups who can be activated quickly. There's reeh local defences, but mostly marine -- the active reeh fleet ships we're betting have all gone to find and defend Chion, so we've got an open door."

"A shipyards that size will have a workforce in the hundreds of thousands," said Dale, gazing at the holographics with a marine's disdain for spacer complications. Taking big facilities was marine business -- spacers just provided the transport. "Maybe millions. Tanifex will be mostly talking bullshit about how strong their rebellion is -- we've seen reeh mind control, everyone's cybernetically enslaved. So a few of them might have a way around it, but I wouldn't bet on those numbers being very high."

"The alo might know," said Shilu. "On the whaleships. They seem to have a fair amount of independence, can use their own minds without some reeh overlord frying their brainstem."

"They use deepynine-derived tech," Sasalaka reminded him. "Not ceephay like everyone else."

"Ask them," Erik told Shilu. Shilu nodded, and half-turned away on the cargo nets to make that call to someone within his command-tree. As First Shift Coms Officer, Shilu had a whole bunch of people answering mostly to him, a few of whom would now be tasked to talk to the Raka Fleet alo about what cybernetic controls they could expect on the Vertex population. As Dale said, it was the kind of thing best prepared for over months, not hours.

"What happens on the main world?" Trace asked.

"There are some anti-ship missile facilities, it looks like," said Erik. "A few are surface-bound, we'll need to take those out."

"Need to talk to Raka Fleet about acceptable collateral casualties," Sasalaka said grimly.

"Yes," said Erik. "Do that. I've seen some stuff about local demographics, politics... you know the thing with heavily populated worlds, even under the worst tyrannies there's still local politics and complications. We just don't have time for any of it, we're going to crash in, capture as many ships as we can, and hope that's enough."

Trace was gazing at the holographics. Erik didn't like it. He knew her so well, and something about her manner here was off. Two billion people. The power that spacers had, with FTL warships, to dominate the fates of so many. He'd read sociological works, compulsory reading in Fleet officer training, about the implications for Worlder politics from the fact of spacer power. Indeed, back home in human space there was a low-level civil war ongoing, between spacers and worlders, driven by precisely those implications. All of those people, and just one jump-capable ship, warship or otherwise, with a crew as small as a few dozen, could end the lot of them. Here, their intentions were nothing that drastic, but drastic enough. All humans had grown up with stories from human occupied planets, of the turmoil that followed the arrival of a small number of aliens on very powerful ships. For Vertex System, and the world of Sciuto, Phoenix would be one of those ships, and its crew the aliens.

"Presumably there'll be enough trained crew somewhere," said Trace, "but finding and assembling them is going to be a task. Can you do that with remote logistics, given the unreliability of reeh cybernetic controls? Or will you need hands-on assistance?"

"That's exactly what we were discussing before you arrived," Kaspowitz acknowledged. "Answer is, we don't know. Maybe we put a call-out for trained crew, and get thousands of reliable types coming forward. Or maybe we don't, and we have to go find them. Maybe they'll be in facilities, with secure prisons, or maybe hunter teams will be sent to track them down if they volunteer, and they'll need protection from those. We just don't know."

"Because we can't be relying on Raka Fleet drones to provide personal security for Reeh Empire folks who decide they're on our side," Trace added. "I'll need this data as soon as you can compile it, so probably just after we jump in-system."

"Just as well we have a drysine queen to process all that data and find those people," said Erik.

"If she's still cooperating," Kaspowitz warned. Normally he'd take some dark pleasure in reminding them of Styx's true nature. Now that some of his worse predictions were coming true, being right seemed to give him no pleasure.

"Speaking of," said Erik, "we're tracking Styx. She's still down on Cygnax, looking through Chion's HQ."

"Styx won't be coming back to Phoenix," Trace said flatly. "My guess is she'll go the rest of this trip on Friendship."

A silence in the group. Everyone processed it.

Erik took a deep breath. "Styx was always going to move up a level. AIs always do, their entire civilisation is about ascension, physical and metaphysical. But this is where the scary stuff starts, because we had some kind of influence on her when she was on Phoenix. Now she's leading a fleet of her own kind, and... well." Words failed him. He made an exasperated gesture. "Who the hell knows?"

"She can't attack Tridez System without clear data of the system's gravity-slopes and defences," said Kaspowitz. "Shali's shown me the basics, it's a complicated system, Styx would be crazy to attack it without that data. Tridez is hardly ever visited by non-military ships, it looks like that data's some of the best-guarded in the Empire, and the reeh appear to have wiped Cygnax's databases so even Styx can't recover it."

"It's worse than that," said Sasalaka. "I had a chance to look through the data Shali recovered on Reeh Fleet structure. The ship and technological performance things we probably should share with everyone -- Styx already knows it thanks to Raka's own databases. But there are network access codes that Styx probably doesn't know, the kind of thing only Chion would know, because it's all the most advanced ceephay technology. Shali says she can use it, probably not as well as Styx, but well enough. And that if we keep it from Styx, it automatically puts us in charge of this whole operation."

Another brief silence from the group, filled with the commotion of unloading shuttles, crashing storage shelves, shouting voices and manoeuvring hand-jets across the echoing space.

"We're blackmailing her," Shilu murmured. "Well sure, that seems safe."

"It's one good reason to keep her off Phoenix," said Erik. "Shali insists Styx can't just beat her to a networked pulp directly, but I'm not so sure. From range, that will be harder."

"She killed our people?" Dale asked, with a venomous look at Trace.

Trace nodded. "Raka Fleet's far more under her control than she let on. Seems clear she was manufacturing a conflict between herself and them, and selling it pretty convincingly. Maybe it was even true at first, but it seems it's becoming less true."

"She doesn't want organics running this mission," said Erik. "She tried everything to stop it from happening. But now organic help is looking like our only option to save Chion, and Phoenix has all the keys to make it happen."

"She may have her fleet," said Sasalaka. "But she's losing control of what to do with it."

Shilu shook his head, shortly. "I don't believe that for a second. She'll have some other plan in the works."

"Seems a stretch," Kaspowitz ventured. Everyone looked at him. "I mean, god knows I'm not a fan of Styx. But Reeh Fleet moving Chion to a new location was always on the cards. That done, Reeh Fleet buys time, we were always going to be short some numbers. This scenario was never unlikely, but Styx bet heaps on it not happening. That's not like her."

"Can AIs gamble?" Sasalaka replied stubbornly. "Just because she's so smart, doesn't mean she can't take chances. Sometimes a fifty-fifty chance is all you get."

"That's a very human thing for you to say," Shilu remarked.

"Don't be insulting."

"She's not out of this yet," said Trace. Gazing at the holographic display, sipping Erik's drink bottle. No doubt she still had some energy-drink in her suit drink tube, but Erik's bottle was straight water. Erik knew she got tired of all the supplements and energy boosters in Fleet food, and would have lived happy on plain food and water if she could. "She had a preferred course of action, she pushed every button she had to make it happen, to keep this mission under AI control. But that's failed, so her Plan B will begin. Whatever that is."

Her eyes were fixed on Vertex System. Erik was increasingly certain he knew what was bothering her.

* * *

Lieutenant Rooke ducked into Engineering Bay 14, to find Spacers Beaton and Rajan stripping panels from one wall, and disconnecting links to one of the signal relays. Shali supervised them, sitting on a nearby work bench, a tool belt around her waist and simulated grease stains on her holographic face. Ceephay sense of humour, Rooke thought.

"Guys," he told the Spacers, "if you disconnect half of K Section from intranet, we get a big hole in local coms. Someone gets hurt, we can't get a medic here... hell, we're not even going to get alert status if you take out the all-bands. Ship makes emergency manoeuvres, anyone in this sector won't hear it."

"Yeah, we cleared it with the Captain," Beaton replied, still working. "I thought you'd been told."

"Fuck no," Rooke said with exasperation, wandering in to look at the dismantled portions of panelling, and on the reverse side of the bay, beside the maintenance brace. "Why would anyone tell me what's happening on my own ship?" His eye caught sight of something in the brace's grip, secured by G-resistant jaws amidst fiddly manipulators that would normally work on something requiring AI precision. "What's that?"

"I'm sorry Lieutenant," said Shali. "I tried to inform you, but you were simulating jump-field variables."

"Yeah, we're still trying to understand the variables in the drysine jump engines," Rooke explained, rounding the central work bench to peer at the thing in the maintenance brace. "The jump fields aren't interacting with higher G-loads the way we'd thought, and..."

"I didn't ask," Shali interrupted, with an apologetic smile. "I may be an AI, but I'm sure you understand jump engines far better than I ever will."

"Right, you're a psychologist." Shali hadn't spoken to him very much so far this trip. Probably this was why -- she was more comfortable with people than machines. Advanced AIs were weird. Rooke squatted to examine the object of interest. "Isn't this the, um... parren data manifold we recovered from Cygnax?"

"Yeah, Shali wanted it for storage," said Beaton.

"Storage of what?"

"The data I recovered from Chion's VR simulation on Cygnax," said Shali.

Rooke turned to her, and frowned. "You're keeping that here? But... this unit's completely autistic, you can't access anything in..." And he stopped himself, as it occurred to him. Why the crew were dismantling the local data network in this part of the ship. "You're worried Styx could break in?"

"Yes," said Shali. "I think we're okay outside the room, with the local network disabled. But even then, I want all network-capable devices banned from this room, and I mean everything -- AR glasses, watches, tools, pens, anything uplinked or capable of uplinking to data networks, Styx can reverse-engineer their interface to create a barrier-key and infiltrate the data-manifold."

Rooke was incredulous. "In an... in an autistic module? No, I don't think that's right. I mean, how could she...?" A thousand possibilities raced through his mind. Shali was having him on, surely? Everyone said she was super-paranoid about Styx.

"And with apologies," Shali continued, "I'd like to ban Spacer Sudip, Petty Officer Holz, and marine Sergeant Hoon from this room for the duration. Their medical augments following old and recent injuries have sufficient interface capability that they pose a reverse-engineering risk as well."

Now she was having him on. "You can't reverse-hack bio-implants!" Rooke grinned. "It... I mean, it won't..."

Shali looked utterly serious, and unimpressed that he didn't believe her. "I can't do it myself, Lieutenant, but I know what's possible, theoretically at least. The contents of this data-manifold are too valuable to give Styx any chance of accessing them. Needless to say, we're keeping the drones away from here too, not because we don't trust their loyalties, but simply because they're not capable of keeping Styx out of their systems any more than you can keep her out of your AR glasses."

"Well if you're that worried, what about coms uplinks? You know, they're actually inbuilt into our skulls, and they're designed to transmit data, so..."

"I've shielded them," said Shali.

"I thought you weren't an engineer?"

"I'm a specialist. I'm quite good at uplinks, as they're integrated with brains, and I'm very good at brains. Obvious problems I can guard against. The danger with Styx is that she's just impossibly good at non-obvious solutions. I can't guard against them because, you know, they're non-obvious? The only way to be safe is to keep them out entirely."

Rooke nodded slowly, finding his brain already straying back to the more pressing problems of jump fields, and main engine power ratios. "Fine, I guess. If the Captain's cleared it, though you'll need Chief Petty Officer Goldman to enforce the clearance zone."

"Yes, doing that," Shali agreed. "I can provide additional protection simply by being here myself, but I can't spread my attention lots of places like Styx can. If I'm needed elsewhere, it all becomes vulnerable."

"Sure. What's in it again?" Glancing back at the data-manifold.

"The military secrets of the entire Reeh Empire," Shali said drily. "Provided to us by Chion, who left them in a series of side-files within her VR that I think only a fellow ceephay could have found. Kind of important."

"Right. Don't you think it might be good if Styx knew some of that stuff? I mean, she could do some damage with that knowledge."

"Yes, but then she's in charge of this whole operation," said Shali, with exasperation. "Seriously Lieutenant, you don't get out of Engineering much, do you?"

Rooke glanced at the two Spacers, working on the wall units. Both remained wisely silent. "I know that Styx is a weapon," he replied. "If you're going to neutralise your best weapon, you better have a damn good reason."

"How about making sure we save the human and tavalai races?" Shali retorted. "Instead of whatever Styx is up to?"

Rooke shrugged, heading for the exit, and his jump engines. "Well, the Captain cleared it. That's good enough for me."

* * *

Shali stood atop a mesa, and looked across the vast, open desert. In the hot afternoon sky hung the crescent of a large nearby moon. She'd helped the tanifex rebels install their VR matrix on Phoenix's systems, on the advice that it contained information vital to the new and unfolding mission. But it was only in human form, the light wind ruffling her hair, parched and dry upon her skin, that she understood the specificity of experience that an organics-oriented VR program was designed to create.

Behind her, and far below, rose the clash of steel weapons. She turned and looked, down into the enormous arena. Small tanifex figures practised weapons drills on the red dirt, overlooked by fifty thousand empty seats. Beside her, a new, small figure resolved, and now solidified. A black jumpsuit with many pockets, VR residual memory of what he'd worn amongst his own kind.

"Hello Tan," said Shali. The alo boy gazed down upon the red sand, and the training tanifex. Then about, at the vast circle of grandstands, and the red rocks beyond. Facing north, away from the desert, they could see towers rising from a nearby city.

"Where is this?" Tan asked. He did not sound awestruck, as children from other species might. Shali recalled reeh boys and girls, bursting with excitement to see a new sight. Thinking of them was a mistake in this avatar, because the emotions kicked in and suddenly she was struggling not to cry.

"This is Pliklitchi," said Shali, against the tightness in her throat. "It's the tanifex homeworld."

"I didn't know that anyone knew the tanifex homeworld," said Tan. "I thought everyone had forgotten."

"I haven't forgotten," said Shali. Anger joined the sorrow, and her hands balled into fists. "The tanifex are good people. They were warriors before the Chariya Reeh, and they fought the reeh for a time. But the reeh became powerful under Chion's guidance, and the tanifex lost. Instead of holding grudges, many of them came to accept that the new empire was better, and reformed their violent ways. To some extent, anyway."

There were ten tanifex down on the arena, all who had been allowed to come from Cygnax. On the red sands, they wore loose tunics, and spun their spears and polearms in fast, precise motions. Steel clashed on steel, accentuated by harsh tanifex trills and yips of exertion.

"I thought maybe the reeh had made them into warriors," Tan admitted.

"No, they were warriors before. The Narsid Reeh made them into slaves. And mistreated them so badly over eight thousand years that a lot of people don't remember where they're from." She held out a hand to him. "Do you want to go down and see? Come."

Tan did not take her hand, but descended the steps beside her. "Who made this VR?" he asked.

"The same person who made all your alo VR spaces," said Shali.

Tan's black, ridged brow furrowed more deeply. "Why would Chion make VR for some tanifex?"

"The bigger question," said Shali as they descended the steep stairs, "is why were a small group of tanifex rebels allowed to exist on Cygnax under the reeh's nose? You'll find those two answers are related."

It was a little hard to guess how to talk to a very smart alo boy. Shali thought he was certainly on what humans might call the genius spectrum. Where that put him in terms of alo intelligence, Shali did not know. The alo had been a small species in her day -- isolated and disinterested in larger engagement. This population of alo had been subjected to so much genetic tinkering, it was hard to know what might qualify as 'average' intelligence.

"Chion protected them," Tan concluded.

"Yes."

"So Chion is on the side of these rebels. She's a traitor."

"And Raka Fleet has chosen to join the rebels too. So now you're a traitor, and all your alo Family."

Tan had nothing to say to that.

They walked down the stairs between seats on the lower stadium level, toward the arena floor. Shali recognised Kozuko, the tanifex leader, hunched upon his short spear in that ungainly tanifex way, head low and snaking as he watched the others, and trilled and cackled advice. Several of them paused in their drills to look up at Shali and Tan. Then Kozuko looked.

"Ceephay," said Kozuko, and slid down to one knee. The others copied him. Shali had never fully explained to Major Thakur exactly how she'd won them over so quickly. But with the tanifex cybernetics technology all being ceephay, it hadn't taken long to figure out what did what, and trigger collective visions in their heads. Shali could see from the neural pathways generated in her overview analysis that these guys were spending a lot of time in VR. Too much time, really.

"Hello Kozuko," she said. The cheerful girl thing wasn't going to work on Kozuko. She was the Sky Mother's right-hand lieutenant, returned from the deepest of sleeps. Kozuko expected authority. "Thank you for coming online tonight. I'm monitoring all of your neural cybernetics. It's the fastest way for me to learn about them. Phoenix will need to know how it all works if they're to free enough rebels at Vertex System to join our fight."

Kozuko's beady, reptilian eyes fixed on Tan. "Who's the alo?"

"A child. He came to us."

"Alo are not ceephay. You shouldn't trust him."

"His cybernetics are a different technology, but they're based on ceephay designs. Remember, Kozuko, I can read minds."

It was somewhat true, of the tanifex at least. Cybernetic uplinks connected brains to VR spaces, but also VR spaces to brains. Reading them in reverse, Shali could map neural topography right down to personality. She'd boasted to Captain Debogande that some things, she could do better than Styx. She was fairly certain that this was one of them.

"We want to fight," said another tanifex, hefting his long spear. There were no stairs down from the lower grandstand to the arena floor. Shali put a hand on Tan's shoulder, and rematerialised them both on the red sand... a sudden leap of perspective, as the tanifex all stepped back in awe. Even Tan looked amazed, and stared at her, wondering how she'd done it. Most organic brains couldn't. But then, she could read neural code in realtime. And change it, sometimes.

"You can't fight," Shali told that tanifex. "Phoenix will need your advice. You know the rebellion figures on Sciuto, in Vertex System. And Phoenix marines are highly trained to work as a single unit with advanced technology. You are not." Looking at their spears, and a few shields.

"These are tklatic," Kozuko explained. "Traditional tanifex fighting style. All forgotten now. The Sky Mother revealed it to us. And this..." with a vast, expansive gesture around, at the arena, and the desert, city and sky beyond. "Pliklitchi. Our old homeworld. We swore to recover our old traditions, though practise, so that they should live again."

"How long have you served her?" Shali asked. The avatar's emotional replications gave her excitement, to hear her old friend spoken of once more by the sorts of beings she'd once dedicated her existence to serving. Back in the day, she'd been a dominant force in the lives of trillions, and improved most for the better.

"Four cycles," said Kozuko. Several of the tanifex were circling slowly, looking down at Tan, spinning their spears. Shali had never seen an alo nervous, and Tan made no exception. "We were in an administrative division. The Sky Mother had us assigned to a distant post, then diverted the shuttle without letting the reeh see. She brought us to Cygnax instead, where we saw her processing center. She revealed herself to us, and showed us many things. She allowed us to join the sky worlds."

The VR simulations, Shali realised. The big one, that had been reimagining the entire Empire, without the Narsid Reeh. "You've been visiting her big world?"

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"A long time." Now it made sense. The neural pathways too adjusted, the overloaded data-flows. These tanifex had spent a long time in Chion's simulation. Well, four years was a long time to stay in an abandoned, pressurised habitat in a Cygnax tourist attraction. No wonder they worshipped Chion as a god. They'd literally been living in a world of her total creation, that she could manipulate at will.

"You've been living on Plitlitchi?" Shali asked, gesturing about at their world.

"For a long time," Kozuko agreed. "But also, we travelled. The Sky Mother's world is vast and beautiful." While the real world, he did not need to say, was bleak and filled with suffering.

"Did you speak with the Sky Mother often?"

"She would make herself known to us. Often with images as much as words."

They could not give her what she wanted, Shali knew. They could not interact with a being of Chion's vastness at anything like the depth required to communicate something of that experience back to Shali here. But the knowledge did not stop her from yearning.

A shadow flitted across the arena, a darkness upon the red sand. Tanifex leaning on their spears turned to look. And recoiled, as the shadow took form, cloaked like the night, tall and advancing upon their gathering. Tanifex brandished their spears and circled, hissing and clicking.

"Hold!" Shali called in their tongue, and held out both hands. They held. "She can't hurt you in here. She can only talk."

The shadow ceased its advance. Shali was not surprised that it took no further form. Some AIs enjoyed the simulation game, delighted in the texture of organic shapes, styles and emotions. And others, the most advanced of the Spiral's warlords, found it infinitely beneath them.

"What do you want here?" Shali demanded of the shadow. At her side, Tan just stared, transfixed and amazed.

"I wanted to see upon what foolishness the Captain has thought to risk all our futures," said the shadow. She spoke the tanifex tongue, in here, so that all could understand. A further code analysis showed Shali that Tan was hearing alo Tikitch.

"You can't win a direct assault against Tridez System," said Shali with certainty. "Even if you had the navigational data you need. You need more ships. Vertex System has them"

"You'll need to find and free thousands of organic minds," said the shadow. It was strange to speak with her like this, limited within the tiny information bandwidth of the spoken word. Communications, in this form, became a game of abstract theatre, signifying everything but saying very little. The poetry of words, Shali thought, lay not in what they said, but in what they didn't. Perhaps only an advanced AI, capable of exchanging entire libraries in seconds, could understand the full truth of it.

"I can show you how the cybernetics work," Shali told her. Full of certainty, for the organics' benefit as much as the drysine's. "You process much faster than me, but sentient organic psychology is my lifetime's study. There are tricks and snarls in how the data scales. If you know the tricks, you can run a planet-wide search, or wider, and find our allies. I've been analysing Vertex System, and I think it will work."

"I think it will work too," said the shadow.

Shali frowned. "But you'd still rather attack the reeh at Tridez directly from here, with insufficient forces?"

"Yes. This isn't going to turn out how you or the Captain planned. With organics, it never does."

"Explain it to me," Shali challenged her. "Here or data-linked, in full detail."

"I already have. A thousand times, in simulation. You fail to accept the thesis on nearly every occasion. It offends your lifetime's work. The Captain is nearly as bad. Only Major Thakur is likely to accept my analysis, but she knows her limitations too well, and will not challenge the Captain's judgement."

"You can't predict the future by manifold simulations," Shali scoffed. "If you could, how did you not see your own end coming at the hands of your organic allies after the Drysine/Deepynine War?"

"Who's to say I didn't?" said the shadow. "Prediction is not avoidance. Some things cannot be dodged. I'll help you with your plan. I need it to work even more badly than you do. But I'm expecting to say I told you so."

"Isn't that beneath you?"

"Slow child," said the shadow, with dry disdain. "It is not for you to judge what is and is not beneath me. As the Major says, I do what is necessary, no more and no less." And vanished, upon a swirl of dry, desert wind.

* * *

Eyes strained and head aching, Erik entered his quarters in hopes of a few hours sleep before jump. In all the hastily laid plans and preparations, he'd had no time for exercise, and knew that lack was going to hurt him later, just hopefully not in the captain's chair. He sat on his bunk, rummaged for the reviewer wand in a drawer, and ran it over his wrist. The bio-sensor in there somewhere relayed a signal back, and he rolled to look at the bed-wall screen -- it showed him his vitals, everything okay save the weariness, as the micros through his body all talked and relayed what they saw. Right shoulder augment strained where he'd dislocated it on Stoya III two years ago. Trace had put it back in on the spot, but the augment had never entirely recalibrated.

"Hello Captain," came Shali's voice on his room speakers. "You wanted a word?"

"Yes. Has Styx or Raka Fleet made any progress with the encryption you placed on the Cygnax Facility's storage?"

"I don't think so, Captain. I know how to do things to ceephay programming language that would baffle even Styx. Had she days to analyse it, she could probably decrypt it, but we barely have hours. Raka drones on the surface have ventured inside the facility since we left, but they're just drones. They can establish remote uplinks to Styx on Friendship, but the communications latency required for such decryption is smaller than orbital coms will allow."

"Could Styx have just uploaded Chion's entire VR simulation herself to analyse it later?"

Shali appeared, a shimmering blue image upon Erik's glasses. Sitting on his bunk, pretty in her overalls, and smiling wryly. Her once-frizzy hair was now in braids. "No Captain. Even Styx can't hold that much data. Not even a fraction of it. Chion's creation is immense, that's why she needed an entire facility to hold it." Her smile faded. "It made me sad just to lock it down and encrypt the data. But it was necessary, to stop Styx from learning secrets herself."

"What secrets have you discovered, Shali?"

Shali took a deep breath. "Captain, I believe that Chion began that simulation because she was searching for some way that events could have played out without ceephay technology turning bad, and corrupting the reeh's minds. She thought deepynine technology may have been the answer. I think it's one reason Raka Fleet exists -- I've no idea if she could have stopped the reeh from building Raka, probably not given how little actual command she possesses today. But I'm sure she's been learning from Raka, watching its evolution, wondering if cybernetics based on an alternative AI technology could be the cure for whatever went wrong with ceephay.

"Her analysis of deepynine technology is extensive. There were many attached databases within the VR simulation. Styx would have grasped the implications immediately."

"You don't think it's a good idea if Styx learns this stuff too? Styx fought Nia, twenty-five thousand years ago. Drysine knowledge of deepynine tech must have been extensive."

Shali shook her head. "Nothing like this. And with respect -- if Styx had this knowledge, she might not need Phoenix any longer. But there will be much more knowledge available when we rescue Chion. Styx will be seeking to learn that knowledge from Chion. If she's to fight Nia at humanity's side, Nia's deepynine forces massively outnumber her drysines, and she cannot win without it. But we cannot let her have it."

"What do you fear will happen if she gets it?"

"That humanity will be replacing one existential threat with another," said Shali. "To be completely honest with you Captain, I don't think it would be wise for humanity to defeat Nia at all. I mean, if we get home with this data, and give it to your Human Fleet. Defeating Nia and her alo just creates a vacuum for Styx that I think she would gladly fill."

Erik rubbed his eyes, wincing. "I've thought of that. I don't know. Predicting the future is hard, Shali. Even for AIs."

Shali smiled self-consciously. "Yes. Captain, can I ask you something?"

"Of course Shali."

"What do you think of my appearance?"

Erik blinked his eyes back into normal focus. Shali's holographic overlay re-centred upon his glasses, appearing as real as anything else in the room... save for the shimmer. "I think you've chosen well. But you're optimised to judge that yourself, I think."

"Thank you Captain. But this appearance isn't just a calculated choice, I don't think. I mean, I feel female."

Erik frowned. "How would you know?"

"Well I'm actually four hundred years old. Reeh have genders too, it's a biological constant throughout the known galaxy. Gendered traits don't entirely overlap across species, but the broad trends do. And among humans, well... I like to talk." With a burst of good humour.

Erik smiled. "It's not an exclusively female trait. Witness Lieutenant Kaspowitz."

"Or yourself," Shali offered. Erik shrugged, conceding. "But in general. And I don't feel particularly aggressive. I can be, but consensus-building has always been my instinct. I was rather good at it."

"You were a diplomat," said Erik. Shali nodded. "Plenty of male diplomats."

Shali rolled her eyes in exasperation. "You know what I mean."

"I do. But I know plenty of women who don't give a damn about consensus-building. Starting with my mother, when it suited her. Or Trace."

"Major Thakur is a fascinating divergence from human gender norms, I will admit," said Shali.

Erik shook his head. "No she's not. Not in that respect, anyhow. I mean... fascinating, sure. But her main love is psychology, a majority of psych majors are women."

Shali's smile grew broader. "Like me."

"Exactly."

"Major Thakur does express her love of psychology in an unusual way."

"Actual psychologists practise on other people. Trace practises on herself. Think of her like a research doctor who swallows her own medicines rather than bothering with clinical trials."

Shali looked intrigued. "You know Captain, I find your insights quite revealing. I think maybe you're as much the psychologist as the Major is."

Erik sighed, and stretched. "Sure. Real man-of-action stuff, that's me."

"Captain, you have as much natural charisma as I've seen in anyone of any species. You don't use it nearly as much as you could, I think, perhaps because you're still young, and new to this role. You have natural insight into the human mind, to the extent that you barely need to think about it. Combined with your extraordinary grasp of spatial relationships and your technical knowledge, this makes you a very unique individual. Most humans don't combine personal and technical skills so well."

"Flattery will get you everywhere."

"It's not flattery, it's an AI's analysis."

"An AI who's very good at flattery."

Shali grinned. "I am, aren't I? Besides which, I'm basically just describing a Fleet carrier captain, those are the fundamentals of the job."

Erik nodded, repressing a yawn. "Thank you Shali. Be a good girl and don't try to manipulate the male crew by showing extra shoulder or letting a few buttons slip undone." With a meaningful glance at Shali's shoulders, where her undershirt had mysteriously disappeared from the avatar.

Shali looked scandalised. "Captain Debogande, I would never!" And vanished in pixelated indignation. Erik gazed at the spot where she'd been for a moment longer, processing how strange it was that somewhere along the last few years, exchanges like this, with entities as strange or far stranger than Shali, had become normal.

On an impulse, he pushed the glasses over his eyes and activated captain's override, scanning for his crew. They were all working, a few sleeping, particularly the marines. If he looked hard enough, he'd probably find a few of them fucking, captain's override making him the only one who could. He tried not to violate his crew's privacy unnecessarily, but in moments like this, he worried for their welfare.

Trace was awake. She should have been sleeping, given recent operations, and operations still to come. But her vitals, though relaxed, showed otherwise. Erik knew what that meant.

He got up, exiting to immediate calls of 'Captain on the bridge!', to which he replied 'carry on', and left the bridge to Draper and Dufresne's command as he made his way down the trunk corridor to the first cross-corridor and turned left. Half the circumference of the crew cylinder, in the middle of Back Quarter, he stopped at Trace's door and hit the call button. It blinked green, and he entered.

Trace sat crosslegged on her bunk, in her black marine jumpsuit, eyes open just enough to see him. Erik closed the door and sat by her side. "Go to sleep," he told her.

"Sure," she said with an edge. "You just came in here because you were concerned about my state of mind." Erik sighed, and got up. Trace caught his arm. "You're right, I can't meditate for shit." She gestured for him to join her as she shuffled to lie down on the bed. He did, taking somewhat more space than her. She put her head on his shoulder, and Erik put an arm around her, necessary in the tight space.

"Shali been showing you the nav data for Tridez System?" Trace asked.

"Yes. Strong defensive position, two jumps from here. Navigation makes it defensible, it's a trinary system, tight debris belts, limits avenues of approach. Attacking it without detailed nav data is suicide, it left Styx with no choice when we wouldn't share."

"You think we can take it if we get the ships from Vertex System?"

"Yep."

"You think we did the right thing? Keeping that from Styx?"

"Looking at that nav data makes me more certain than ever. Even if our delay allows more reeh defenders to get there, attacking with more ships into a complicated defensive setup is always better, we'll have so many more options. And if we do get Chion, we can't let Styx get sole access to her, which she'll definitely do if she's entirely in charge of this fleet. We had to reassert human control. Organic control, the tavalai have a stake in this too."

There wasn't much else to say -- he hadn't come here to give a briefing, and Trace not only needed to focus on Vertex System first, but wasn't really qualified to judge the complexities of Tridez System anyway. "Looks like Private Jin will make it," Erik ventured.

"Looks like." Private Jin had been the worst of Charlie Platoon's wounded, fragmentation had gone through a lung. "I'd have guessed only a ten percent chance, but Doc says he'll recover. Looks like Jersey will make it too."

"She's not too bad, considering," said Erik with relief. "Not awake yet. Looks like Bucket saved her life, kept her pressure seal up, plugged the leaks." PH-3's cockpit had been pumped so full of reactive foam it had set nearly rock hard. That was now going to make PH-3's repairs extra difficult, because it usually damaged the cockpit even as it saved its pilots' lives. But the alternative was shuttle pilots wearing full pressure suits, which made piloting skills, or anything else, nearly impossible to execute.

"When are we going to get PH-3 operational again?" Trace asked.

Erik ran a tired hand over his face. "The techs say a hundred hours if we were in dock. In deep space on combat operations, I think we can write her off for anything regarding Chion. She won't be ready in time for that."

Trace nodded, thinking. Phoenix Company's transport issues had turned them into a hodgepodge of improvised vessels for a while. Now they were down to two regular Fleet assault shuttles, plus the tavalai GR-1, and unarmed civilian AT-7. "What about arrowheads?" she asked.

"I've made the enquiry," Erik agreed. "Operations and Engineering are looking at it, based on what we know."

"Maybe ask one of the marines who'll have to ride in it," Trace suggested.

Erik kicked her foot. "Always. But spacer review of spacer vehicles comes first." None of these issues were what was keeping her awake, though. Nor him. "Two billion people on Sciuto," Erik said. Trace nodded against his shoulder. "Hell of a thing."

"There were ten billion on Earth when the krim arrived," said Trace. "Only this time, we're the krim."

"Too dramatic," Erik disagreed. "We're coming to liberate them."

"With Raka Fleet," Trace said drily. "Humanitarians all." Erik snorted. "Not that it matters, given the cybernetic mind control most of the Sciuto population will be under. You're the one with the warship. What are your engagement parameters going to be?"

"That's not your concern," Erik told her. She'd been on Rando for over four months, and had grown to love the people there, in spite of herself. Now they were hitting a world upon which far more people lived, with warships that could kill a huge percentage of them even without using a V-strike from jump. If those people fought back, wilfully or otherwise, Phoenix might have to do it. And now, the woman who knew no fear for herself, was frightened of what else she might have to live with on her conscience. "You're really not very good at this 'marine' business, are you?"

Trace's hand closed around his throat. Erik smiled. It was the sort of personal, ego-triggered response that most of her marines swore she didn't possess. Only he got to see it. Even if it was, he suspected, more of a joke than a real thing. "And you're sleeping fine?" she asked drily.

"I'm barely sleeping at all," said Erik. "But I'm used to it. You're the one who finds it strange."

"I wanted to cut it out of me," Trace murmured. "But I can't cut out what I can't find. I keep searching for it, when I meditate. But I don't know where to look."

"Hey," said Erik, and brushed her ear with his fingertips. Trace looked at him. "I hope you never find it. I don't want you to cut it out."

"I don't care what you want," Trace told him.

"I don't care that you don't care what I want," Erik replied, smiling. Trace sighed, and put her head back on his shoulder. Erik put his cheek in her hair, and pulled her closer. They were so far beyond even talking or worrying about how inappropriate it all was. That time and place had passed long ago. Now they were just dealing with stuff as it fell on them, and trying to stay sane. The regulations had nothing to say about what you did when your brain went to war with itself for extended periods. If this helped keep him, and Trace, from going to pieces entirely, Erik thought it was emergency glass worth breaking. "This is nuts," he said. "We could bring down the Reeh Empire."

"That's not our mission," said Trace.

"I know. But we could. By accident." Trace nodded faintly. Her hair smelled nice, of recent showers. "And if we brought it all down, we could save... hundreds of billions. I don't know if anyone's ever counted. Probably the reeh know, and don't especially care."

"And this is why you can't sleep," Trace summarised. "I'm worried about tomorrow. You're worried about the next ten thousand years."

"Trace, it's the Reeh Empire." He shouldn't be thinking like this. He knew they couldn't afford it. But she was the one person on the ship with serious expertise in what to do when your brain kept focusing on things it shouldn't. "I just... all of those lives! All of these people. And we might be holding the key to free all of them."

"When you bring down an Empire," Trace replied, "all the bits usually end up fighting each other. We'll kill a lot more than we save."

"And this is your prescription for making me feel better?"

"Yes," said Trace. "Lose the optimism. It distracts you with dreams of things that aren't possible."

"If it was you in the Reeh Empire," Erik said stubbornly. "With all their mind control and mass murder. Would you rather have a chance at freedom, at high risk? Or continue as before?"

"This isn't about what I want. Most of humanity could fight our wars if they wanted to, but most choose not to serve. Same with most populations here choosing not to fight, not even the corbi on Rando. Fighters are outliers, our opinions don't represent anyone but ourselves."

"Fleet can't accommodate everyone who wants to serve," Erik countered. "There are too many humans, Fleet's not that big."

"Exactly," said Trace. "We're elitists by necessity. Deciding the lives and deaths of billions."

"You're being miserable," Erik told her.

"I'm being realistic."

"No, you've crossed that line. You distrust optimism because it leads to wishful thinking, fine. But you avoid wishful thinking because you're working toward the best possible outcome, which you believe is possible or you wouldn't waste your time on it. So you actually are an optimist, you just won't admit it."

"Optimists expect to survive," said Trace. "I'm surprised to still be here."

"Optimists hope to survive," Erik corrected. "I hope to survive. But I don't expect it."

"I don't believe you," said Trace, looking up at him with teasing humour. "Deep down you're still the happy kid who thinks it'll all work out in the end."

"Yeah," Erik sighed, and squeezed her. "Yeah, maybe."

Trace patted him on the chest, still amused. "I'll be proud to die with you."

"Don't be annoying." Erik kissed her on the forehead. Trace gazed at him, rare humour in her eyes. So pretty, when she smiled. To him at least. It was like the sun coming out on a cold, grey day. He could see it coming, in tranquil slow motion. Her lips, as she leaned to him.

Their lips touched, and lingered. And lingered some more. Erik felt his pulse accelerating, and ran a hand down her back. And Trace simply put a leg over and climbed on, kissing him properly. Whatever barrier they'd been trying not to break had been broken long ago anyway, and now his hands were reaching for the zip to her jumpsuit, needing to feel skin, and warm body. Trace did it for him, and pulled it down and got her arms clear, clad only in her undershirt, and started working on his zip.

"Hey hey," Erik thought to say, breathless, because one of them had to. Trace just looked at him, with eyes that said 'seriously?' It was funny, and Erik laughed.

"Hey hey yourself," said Trace, yanking his jumpsuit down from his shoulders, struggling to get his arms free.

"Our relationship might become dysfunctional," Erik attempted as he helped her, still laughing.

"We are so fucking far beyond dysfunctional," Trace retorted with exasperation that only made him laugh harder. "I need to shock my brain onto a different track for a while, it's either this or an ice bath. And we're all out of ice."

Erik made a face. "And baths."

"Those too."

"You're such a romantic."

"Shut up," she told him, and silenced them both with her lips.

17

Lisbeth monitored the drone feed on her glasses, as Kim'ju and Chon'do used electric saws to sever branches from trees further along the lakeshore. They stood on the backs of Chigi and Mesdo to do it, then clambered down to fix the big branches to the chew'toos' haul chains, before dragging them to the shuttle.

From high overhead, the drone showed Lisbeth what an orbiting warship would see -- trees by the lake, between whose branches, in some lights, sun would occasionally glint off canopy or hull. It was only a little risk, but there was no need to take it, and the chew'toos enjoyed the work.

Atop the shuttle, Tere'sai wrestled a large branch into place, with Timoshene and Lior. "A little more over!" Lisbeth shouted up at them, seeing that edge of shuttle outline disappear on the drone's camera. "Just a bit more!"

Thumping footsteps and the hissing slither of a great branch along the ground warned her of Chigi's approach, and she stepped to better cover by a tree. She hadn't figured if the chew'toos were actually friendly yet, or just oblivious. They showed no obvious affection to the smaller beings around them, but neither did they display any aggression or impatience, and were always careful with their enormous feet and tails. Both animals' primary interest seemed to be eating, and Chigi took another ripping mouthful of leaves from the canopy as he approached, showering the ground with twigs.

"Hello Lisbeth," came Hiro's voice on Lisbeth's earpiece. "You've got twenty minutes."

"Thanks Hiro," said Lisbeth. Then, to the croma, "It's coming!"

Yesterday, the day after their crash, Hiro's remote monitoring of Desh'ula's nav sats had detected Coroset, apparently functional and manoeuvring once more, entering a medium-altitude orbit. The ship had very high-resolution optics, mostly for tracking warheads, ships and other lethal objects in black space, but those could be retasked easily enough for orbital surveillance. Even so, planets were big, clouds frequently impenetrable, and non-sentient AI vision processors not infallible. Lisbeth thought, and those most knowledgable agreed, that the odds of Coroset spotting them were slim. But that wasn't the only possibility for discovery.

"The radar ground stations would have tracked you all the way in," Kim'ju said to Lisbeth as they rode Chigi back up the hill. The saddle was huge, with multiple seats, one before the other upon the ridge of Chigi's back. The ponderous sway as he walked was unsettling at first, as were the branches threatening to sweep her from the saddle, pushed aside by Chon'do's big stick. "If Coroset could access those, they could find where you came down."

"Those are only accessible from the administrative capital, right?" Lisbeth asked. She'd had this discussion with Kut'see and Hiro yesterday, back at the cabin.

"I wouldn't trust those leeches," Chon'do growled from the front of Chigi's saddle. He was Chigi's primary rider, as Tere'sai was Mesdo's.

Kim'ju was a woodsman and hunter who paired his tourism and preservation work on the temple with a semi-scientific study of botany and animals. Usually he preferred to walk, without the crashing company of a walking skyscraper to scare away the native animals. Often he'd wander for days, loving the wilderness, and having no problem with solitude. He'd done much the same all his life, on various worlds, so this exile to Desh'ula was not so much a change to him as the next phase of the same old thing.

Chon'do had been a teacher for most of his previous life, instructing croma children of various ages. Back then, he admitted, he'd been an angry young man. Now he was an angry old man, directing most of his rage at stupid croma institutions that wasted lives and ignored potential, from the barbaric Tali'san to the love of endless wars against the reeh, and sometimes other croma. Coming out here, for Chon'do, had been defiance, and the logical last rebellion against a violent culture that loved war more than it loved life.

Tere'sai, the others said, had once held a regular city job, and lived a regular city life, and trained at war only in the same city academies that millions of croma attended, polishing combat skills as humans might head to the gym, or the basketball court. When her native world had held its very own Tali'san to resolve a nasty political dispute, she'd leaped at the chance of glorious escape from her urban mundanity.

The surgeons had told her that her injury could not be completely repaired, but significantly improved, at least. Instead, Tere'sai had left her urban life and sought work in space, in remote mining facilities with few people to bother her. She was barely a hundred, a long way from needing life extension, but she'd come to Desh'ula anyway, where she had discovered a natural gift for chew'toos, and a fascination for translating old parren writing into Kul'hasa. Chon'do said she was quiet in a way that had little to do with her lack of speech. Lisbeth thought she seemed sad, in the way some people had that only the company of animals could ease.

"So why did your damn Ambassador want to kill you?" Chon'do asked, as they swayed and crashed through the trees.

"Parren relations with their neighbours are controversial in parren space." Even here, with no parren in earshot, she felt the urge to be careful with her words. A breach of protocol would reflect badly on Gesul. Surely out here, with these remote croma, it would make no difference... but then, she'd sworn an oath. This was what she was now. It both suited and completed her, and to betray Gesul here would be to betray herself. "Juneso is from a rival faction of House Harmony to Gesul. Gesul is more concerned with the reeh, and assisting Phoenix's mission there. Juneso is an old-style ambassador, more concerned with the parren's traditional neighbours and foes, particularly the croma. It seemed from recent events that the reeh are retreating, and the croma grown strong. Strong croma, unrestrained by the reeh, may turn their attention to parren. That's the fear."

"Damn stupid," said Kim'ju behind her. "He kills a bunch of your people and drives the rest of you down here just for that?"

"He fears we can link him to complicity in a diplomatic disaster," said Lisbeth. It was far more complicated than that, but explaining the psychology of parren political intrigues to a couple of gruff croma on chew'too-back was hardly the place. The truth was that assassination was a political statement among parren, a flag in the ground. It was a way for Juneso to demonstrate to his potential detractors back home that he had the courage of his convictions, and was prepared to face consequences. And some of those supporters would surely reward him for disposing of her... if he could survive Gesul's retaliation. Assuming, that was, that Gesul actually agreed with her actions in supporting the evacuation of Rando, and did not agree with Juneso's steps to get rid of his overstepping, war-entangling human advisor.

"Crazy parren," said Kim'ju. Of all the croma here, he was the least fascinated with the Tegu'ru Temple and its historical significance.

"I'd much prefer them to croma," Chon'do retorted. "At least when parren have political disagreements, it's only a few people who die, and not hundreds of thousands in stupid war games."

Like all ideologues obsessed primarily with their own problems, Chon'do could find unfavourable comparisons between the croma and nearly anyone. At least he had the sense not to try it with the reeh, or not that Lisbeth had heard. She'd met fellow students at college who thought the same way -- that everything bad in the galaxy was humanity's fault, and anyone, including humanity's worst enemies, would have been an improvement. Lisbeth had hated it, and rolled her eyes every time she'd heard it... but then, she'd hated the college's attempts to silence and censor such radical sentiments too. People in human space could get in real trouble for saying such things too loudly, and even things far less inflammatory. Lisbeth had thought, but kept to herself even amongst her own family, that she'd have disliked those radical ideas even more if Fleet hadn't so frequently gone out of its way to lend them credibility.

It was nearly midday when the chew'toos returned to the temple on the mountaintop. Chigi stopped long enough for Lisbeth to make the nerve-wracking climb down via the saddle harness, hands on a series of steps and grips designed for much larger croma. Mesdo did the same to let Skah clamber down with far greater ease, and the two of them headed for the main cabin. The cloud atop the mountain's twin peaks was finally burning away beneath the midday sun, revealing blue sky in the near distance.

Skah was eyeing it warily as they walked. "Coroset wiw see us."

"There's a lot of temples and small settlements on Desh'ula," Lisbeth replied, with forced confidence. She vaguely recalled a time, not long ago but seeming like an age, when she'd been the young one in need of guidance. Though in truth, Skah was really just making conversation. "The government here is weak, but violating croma planetary sovereignty is a very serious thing. If Juneso does it, he'll have to be certain he's got the right place. He can't afford to do it twice."

"I rike Juneso," Skah said sombrely. "Riked." As he corrected himself. "He doesn't care if he kiws us?"

"No," said Lisbeth, just as sombrely. "With high ranking parren, it doesn't matter."

"Not even a rittuw bit?"

Lisbeth sighed. "Parren write plays about this kind of thing. Very famous plays, that all parren know. I've only seen a few of the most famous ones, I've been too busy to watch much. When this is over, you should watch some. They explain things much better than I could."

"Yes," said Skah, squinting at the diminishing patch of cloud cover above. "When this is over."

By the cabin wall, Shonteel was chopping wood for the antique fireplace. Lisbeth stared, amazed, as the slight, hairless parren hefted the smallest of the croma's axes, still far too large for her, and brought it down with a hard thud.

Lisbeth's little finance analyst saw her coming, and smiled brightly. Rested heavily on the axe, slim arms bare where she'd pulled the spacer jumpsuit scandalously down to her waist, revealing a wispy body clad only in an undershirt. She held up one small hand as Lisbeth and Skah approached, fingers spread.

"Look!" she exclaimed with delight, in Porgesh. "Blisters!"

Shonteel's headaches and general malaise had faded after lunch yesterday, and following a twelve hour sleep had vanished entirely by the morning. As had the cool, polite restraint that was all Lisbeth had known from her. House Fortitude, the consensus was -- the Black Phase, Harmony to Fortitude or vice-versa. Lior contended that it might yet turn out to be House Creative, as they were often bustling, energetic types too. But Semaya, ever the coolest and most practical, had asked Shonteel questions from the Teru Ejola, the famous Book of Colours known to any parren with a high classical education, and drawn responses from that psychological exam that all but Lior agreed sounded like House Fortitude.

"How are you feeling?" Lisbeth asked her, with amazement.

"Hungry," said Shonteel. "The axe is far too big, but it's a question of leverage, I think. Kut'see was showing me how to stand. There's an art to it, she says. But it's hard on the hands."

It was so much more information than Shonteel would have previously volunteered. And all with an enthusiasm that hinted at underlying emotions and passions that were not so much taboo in House Harmony as recessive, and smothered by more dominant instinct for calm and tact. Harmony parren felt emotions, but mildly, and in a more controllable form.

"Yes but how are you feeling?" Lisbeth pressed. Shonteel's entire life had just been turned upside down. She was feeling things she'd never felt before, being young enough that this was her first phase. "Are you happy?"

"I'm happy that I can be of more use in a fight," Shonteel replied. "Many Harmony can fight, but with me it never stuck. I think I'll be more useful in this phase."

In some ways, Lisbeth thought, parren would always be parren. Emotional House Fortitude were, but rigid discipline and status-consciousness were a constant across all parren houses. "You'll have to decide what denomination you are, one day," Lisbeth suggested.

"I'll have to do some reading!" Shonteel agreed, eyes widening as though it had only just occurred to her. "Fortitude has seventeen denominations, yes?"

Lisbeth smothered a smile, that Shonteel would be asking her. "I think so. Ask Semaya."

"I will. I think it can wait though. I need to learn to fight first."

"You need a gun," Skah said sombrely. "Better than an axe."

Shonteel blinked. "I have a gun."

"You need to use it better," Skah insisted. He'd seen Shonteel with her gun before, and probably heard Lisbeth's security's assessment of her prowess. "Ask Timoshene. Or Kim'ju."

Shonteel blinked again. "Yes! Yes, I will. Thank you Skah." She put the axe down, picked up a bundle of chopped firewood in her thin arms, and carried it into the cabin.

Lisbeth glanced at Skah. Previously he'd have been enthusiastic at the prospect of someone learning to fight. Now his ears were down, unhappily. "Wiw Coroset attack us?"

"I don't know," Lisbeth admitted, following Shonteel into the cabin. "I hope not." Clearly Skah didn't think much of Shonteel's chances, should it happen.

Hiro was sitting on the sofa, legs in his spacer jumpsuit, top clad in a croma shirt that fit him like a tent. His AR glasses were on, fingers dancing over icons in the air that only he could see. "I received a contact from someone in Fu'juka who claims to be a government insider," he said, without preamble.

Lisbeth frowned, taking a seat alongside. "The Desh'ula government in Fu'juka? What's he say?"

"Very encrypted, some sort of tech whizz. Shouldn't have been able to decrypt it normally, but seems he's heard our tech is drysine, figured I shouldn't have much trouble."

"Coroset's drysine too," Lisbeth cautioned.

"Not in coms," said Hiro. "Not at this level. Liala shared far more with me and Gesul than Juneso." Hiro looked pale, his middle swathed in bandages. Lisbeth knew he'd ventured from the sofa only to use the bathroom, but he was at least sitting upright, lucid, and seemed to be healing, the bullet having missed everything vital. "This guy says Coroset's been probing with government leaders to get their radar data."

Lisbeth took a deep breath. "Yes, that's what Kim'ju said might happen." It was the kind of thing an ex-army guy might have seen coming. "Does he say if the government's holding out?"

"He thinks bribery's involved. On a bigger world, better law enforcement, there'd be no chance. But on this one..." Hiro shrugged, provoking a wince. "He doesn't like our chances."

Skah wandered from the kitchen with a mug of shnu, and sat. Shnu made Lisbeth's stomach crawl, but Skah loved it. During his four months on Dul'rho he'd become half-croma, it seemed.

"What do we do?" Lisbeth asked her intelligence leader.

Hiro's jaw was tight, with more than just pain. "The time to move was by air, as soon as we crashed. Put some distance between ourselves and the crash site. But there were no air vehicles available, so we're stuck in proximity. If we move by foot, we wouldn't get so far they couldn't find us, if they know our crash site. The temple at least protects us from an orbital strike. I think we have to stay."

"There's no chance of hiding in the forest? Moving by night?"

"Not if they know where to look. A whole planet with this much cloud and forest is hard for a single ship to sweep. But if they know to less than a few hundred square kilometres, they'll find us easy."

"How about caves?"

"They'll find them too. Those scanners get real good once the search area is narrowed that much. And they can always send down drones or shuttles once they're sure, to scan more closely."

Lisbeth bit her lip, nodding slowly. The questions to ask seemed obvious. Strangely, she wasn't that frightened yet. Perhaps being in charge was a bit like flying a shuttle into hostile airspace -- far less alarming in the pilot's seat than the passenger's.

"Who will it be?" she asked. "Roahno?"

"Almost certainly," said Hiro. Roahno was the commander of Coroset's marine contingent. Another hard, solemn man, Tookrah Denomination like Juneso.

"How good is he?"

"Not as good as Timoshene. Good enough."

"They've got twenty marine suits."

Hiro nodded slowly, meeting her gaze. "Yes." Coroset wasn't a marine carrier, she was a heavily armed cruiser with a large enough marine complement to defend herself and her dock from hostile infantry. "More than enough for us."

"Do we have any chance at all?" Lisbeth knew the answer already. None of them were armed with anything larger than light smallarms. Parren marine armour was not the equal of human, but using small arms against it would be as useful as paint pellets.

Hiro frowned, as though puzzled by the universe's strange turn of events. "As it happens, yes."

* * *

Lisbeth stared as the lights blinked on, illuminating rows and rows of crates and tarpaulins. All looked dirty, flaked with bits of ceiling dust. She followed Kim'ju down the stone stairs, Hiro following in a slow limp, supported by Timoshene despite Lisbeth's objection that he should stay on the sofa.

Kim'ju removed the heavy lid from one long steel container. Within were long rifles -- magfire by the look of them. Other crates, Lisbeth recognised as ammunition containers. "We're right on the front line," Kim'ju explained, ambling along the rows of neatly arranged arsenal. "Someone long ago thought they should pre-position weapons across Desh'ula, so that the inhabitants who remain can fight a guerrilla war against the reeh, when they come. There are caches like this right across the world."

He walked to the rear wall, and hauled a massive tarpaulin off the hulking shape there. It fell, revealing the deadly bulk of a croma armour suit. It stood thirty percent taller than a human suit, fists clenched, helmet snarling a fearsome visage. Kim'ju pulled aside another tarpaulin from around its feet, revealing a massive anti-armour rifle, the croma equivalent of a human Koshaim-20.

"We could shoot down their shuttle with that," Hiro said around his grimace.

"Timoshene, find him a seat," Lisbeth said in firm exasperation. His internal medical ecosystem of micro-machine swarms and augment coordinators were helping him to heal crazily fast, yet there remained a base rate of repair beyond which the human body could not be pushed. "Kim'ju, they gave you all this? Four tourism conservators and educators?"

"Before our time," said Kim'ju. "There were more here then, and in surrounding settlements. But croma war industry, you know. It overproduces. Some industrialists complain there are not enough wars."

Lisbeth nodded slowly, staring about at the vast array of weapons. They were deep beneath the temple, protected under thick layers of granite. She'd gained enough familiarity with weaponry and soldiers to guess that this many weapons could have equipped a hundred croma, at least. There were only ten suits, though. And she recalled the outer systems in many croma territories, swarming with far too many fire-stations, more as a matter of status for the clans that made them than any practical defence.

"A lot of it's old and surplus," said Chon'do, entering the room behind, with Tere'sai and Kut'see. "The suits have all seen action, too worn out for continued use. Some stupid politician decided to send it here rather than recycle it like they should. Recycling reduces the need to build more weapons. Can't have that."

Kim'ju picked up a massive, blunt-muzzled grenade launcher, and gave Chon'do a dismissive look. "Still kills you," he said, expertly cracking the breech to check inside, then flicking it closed with a clack. "Not everything's a conspiracy."

"Sure thing, army man," Chon'do retorted.

"No way anyone's using those things here," Kut'see said sharply. She strode past Lisbeth to Kim'ju, confronting him directly. "The parren won't need to launch an orbital strike, these things will do it for them."

"Well if they come down here with marine armour," Kim'ju replied drily, "we'll have nothing to penetrate it with, and we'll all die."

"When did we take their side anyway?" Kut'see said loudly. Meaning their guests, Lisbeth thought. "I'm all for hospitality, and Phoenix sounds like it's on a much better mission than this Juneso lunatic is. If we fight Juneso, most of us will die anyway, and I don't see how this is our fight!"

Kut'see had been an office worker in her younger years -- banks and finance, was all Lisbeth had heard. She and her husband had been hoping to attain age-status through that route, but when it had not arrived, Kut'see's husband had chosen to die with grace as society expected. Kut'see's children had expected the same from her, and been mortally offended when she refused, leaving her job, family and old life to come out here, and find meaning in the time she had left.

While Chon'do was cynical about croma society as a whole, Kut'see carried a much more personal grievance.

"We offered them protection," Kim'ju replied, squaring up to Kut'see directly, jabbing one big finger in the humans' and parren's direction. "If we send them from the temple, Coroset can kill them from orbit, or an airstrike. If they stay here, Coroset can send marines. I'm not going to sit here and watch them slaughtered."

He glared at the other three croma. Ignoring Kut'see for the moment, dark eyes settling on Chon'do and Tere'sai. Lisbeth met Timoshene's indigo eyes within the slit of his balaclava, and shook her head faintly. Patience. Timoshene understood.

"They all seem like good people," Chon'do said. "But they're in league with Croma'Dokran and Sho'mo'ra. Phoenix is. And I can't be on the same side as anyone who's serving Sho'mo'ra..."

"Well just forget about you, then," Kim'ju cut him off. "Because you'll never see that some things are bigger than your damn stupid politics."

"This Croma'Dokran government," Chon'do retorted, voice raising to a low bellow, "has started a war that's going to kill billions, just to cover their own..."

"I said I don't care!" Kim'ju roared back. Within the enclosed walls of the chamber, the volume was alarming. Chon'do glared. Lisbeth reminded herself that angry exchanges were normal, among croma, as she tried to calm her thudding heart. So long she'd been amongst parren that she'd lost her ability to judge how other species handled conflict. Things never got this angry amongst parren because people would start dying long before now.

Kim'ju looked at Tere'sai. Tere'sai looked around, solemnly, at the weapons. Stooped to pick up a big rifle. Lisbeth didn't know if she knew how to use it. Tere'sai had fought in a Tali'san, and knew how to use traditional melee weapons, like so many croma did, those old martial arts remaining a huge national passtime on all croma worlds. But modern weapons required military training, and Tere'sai, as far as Lisbeth had heard, had never served.

Tere'sai checked the rifle's breech, and looked satisfied with its weight. For Kim'ju, that seemed to provide an answer. He looked at Lisbeth. "We two will stand with you," he said. "Time was when all croma would. Aliens cannot be allowed to assault croma worlds for any purpose, and we shouldn't need paid soldiers to fight our battles for us."

"You don't have the right to decide that!" Kut'see exclaimed.

"Then stop me!"

Kut'see fumed. She looked impressive enough to a human, but she was no warrior like Kim'ju. Neither was Chon'do. Lisbeth had never heard specified exactly who was in charge, out here. But when it came to defence and potential violence, there could be no doubt that Kim'ju was most qualified. And as he so bluntly implied, none of them could stop him.

"I think we can save the temple from damage," Lisbeth ventured. All the croma looked at her. "I think Timoshene will agree."

* * *

"Hello Ambassador Juneso," said Lisbeth, gazing calmly into the handset camera mounted on an empty ammo box. She'd taken the time to have Shonteel and Semaya help with her hair, though Shonteel seemed to have lost some knack for that. There were no formal robes to wear, nor anything croma-sized that might fit her that could convey the calm dignity she sought. Her spacer jumpsuit, recently cleaned, would have to do. "Are you receiving me?"

Behind the camera, the croma's small holo-projection module showed a display of Juneso's face. He seemed to be sitting in his personal quarters, head against the high rest of his acceleration chair. Phoenix only had one quarters on ship designed for a single occupant, and that was the Captain's. Parren ships typically had more, to accommodate the political ranks who accompanied the Captain. Poor Captain Tocamo, Lisbeth thought sourly. Wondering what he made of it all would serve nothing. Lower parren ranks in such circumstances had no opinions that mattered save obedience.

"Hello Lisbeth Debogande," came the Porgesh reply. "I am receiving you."

"No doubt you are tracing my location now," said Lisbeth. It didn't matter. Kim'ju had received more encrypted messages from croma he trusted to indicate that Coroset was bribing local officials to acquire their ground radar track. They'd have the temple's location soon enough, if they did not already. "As you can see behind me, we are very heavily armed. I have croma comrades who have eagerly volunteered to man these weapons in defence of their world."

"I would expect nothing less from the fearsome croma," said Juneso. There was no irony in it. Juneso's words carried only respect. "This will damage your temple considerably, however. The prospect concerns me. It is a remarkable artefact, of significance to all parren."

"You are a man of taste and respect for parren history and culture," Lisbeth replied serenely. "I had expected nothing less. I have a proposition."

"Your proposition is welcome."

Lisbeth inclined her head, respectfully. "My proposition is that neither side will utilise weapons of the suited armour class. If your side uses armour, my side must utilise weapons capable of destroying that armour, and vice-versa. Those weapons will cause enormous damage to the temple. No armour, and no armour-scale weapons."

"Your proposition is accepted, Lisbeth Debogande, with respect and appreciation. Further, I propose that both sides deploy recording devices to monitor the conduct of these actions, and make certain of compliance. Should either side violate our agreement, their shame once those recordings reach parren space shall be final."

He was worried her side would damage the temple and blame it on him, Lisbeth thought. Causing great damage to it would certainly destroy his career back in parren space, and likely hers too, hurting Gesul's reputation in the process. Any parren house would find it unacceptable, but House Harmony more than most. "Your amendment to my proposition is likewise accepted, Ambassador Juneso, with respect and appreciation."

Upon the hologram, Juneso also inclined his head. The image turned blank. Lisbeth turned to look at the observers. Timoshene and Lior, watching with cool dispassion. Skah, sitting by Hiro, long ears down in dismay. Semaya, always calculating. Shonteel, fidgeting with her newly-acquired rifle. And four big croma, three scowling, one of those in fierce agreement. Only Tere'sai looked somber, and perhaps slightly sad, rifle butt-down on the stone floor, cleaning rag in one hand.

"Great," said Chon'do, drily. "Remember people -- when you kill them, kill them politely."

"Fucking parren," Kut'see muttered. Lisbeth knew exactly what they meant. But then, what would be gained by having the temple destroyed as well?

Her gaze fell on Skah. "We're going to need to find you a place to go."

"No," said Skah, in a small voice.

"Skah, there's going to be a fight. You're not going to fight, you're a child." Her voice, so steady until now in matters of command, began to tremor.

Skah looked up at her. "No. You can send ne away. I cone back."

Lisbeth looked around. "It's his choice," said Timoshene.

"It's not his choice!" Lisbeth snarled in Porgesh, forgetting her parren etiquette entirely. "Parren don't make children fight!"

"Skah is not parren," said Timoshene, impassively. "Parren children do what they're told. Skah does not. His will compels him." 'Kunures', the word was. A word like kunures, or phase, meaning a soul driven by the grander forces of the universe. Parren believed that souls were helpless before it. "I would send him away, but he is not my child. This is not a parren circumstance." Parren said it often, when confronted by confusing alien things. It was why parren preferred the company of their own kind, amongst whom these unpredictable things would not occur.

Lisbeth looked imploringly at Kim'ju. The big croma looked uncomfortable. "You want to tie him up?" he asked brusquely. "Otherwise I think he'll come back. Kid's from a race of hunters."

All the fear that Lisbeth had somehow managed to keep in check for herself, by focusing on the necessities of command, now came bubbling up. She strode to Skah, knelt before him, and grasped his slim shoulders with trembling hands. "Skah, I'm not going to let you die."

"No," said Skah. "I not going to ret you die." His ears were tight back against his skull, one eyelid flickering with tension, pupils dilated. "I not getting reft behind again. Phoenix tried to keep ne safe, I get in Battuw of Rando instead."

"You had Liala to help keep you safe..."

"I was on Coroset with you!" Skah retorted scornfully. "Dead any second, just rike you!"

Lisbeth found herself becoming increasingly frantic. Somewhere deep in her brain had been the realisation that she was about to get into a firefight, against trained killers who would surely outnumber them. She'd been involved in small combat actions before, as a peripheral participant, but nothing like this. Coroset's killers would be after her specifically, and while some of the Spiral's people might have found political utility in capturing an enemy alive, for Juneso it would serve no purpose. Many in House Harmony saw her as a malign influence on their leader, and the best way to remove that influence was to kill her.

She'd trained her brain well enough to repress that personal fear, until now. But at the thought of losing Skah as well, the dam wall of control against all combined fears began to crumble.

"Skah, please!" She was begging, eyes filling with tears.

At his side, Hiro placed a calm hand on the kuhsi's head. "Lis," he said, face drawn and pale, but calm as she was not. "You want to know the real reason why Major Thakur doesn't get frightened? You admire her self-control, but self-control alone's not enough. She controls her fear because she actually has tools she can use."

"I'm not a warrior, Hiro!" Lisbeth snapped. "I'm a diplomat!"

"She's a killer, hard and nasty as they come," Hiro continued, ignoring her. "We've got killers in this room too, and lots of weapons, and the defender's advantage. You want to know how to make the fear go away? How to get out of this alive? Kill them first."

Lisbeth laughed, disbelievingly. "Oh, that's just great! What logic!"

Behind them, Chon'do swore, and growled something loudly, in Kul'hasa. "I'm in," said Lisbeth's earpiece. "I did civil defence service half a lifetime ago. I'll fight."

Behind Lisbeth, more conversation, as the others all looked to Kut'see. "Do you have a plan?" Timoshene asked Hiro.

"I have half a plan," said Hiro, in English, still needing the translator sometimes with Porgesh. "But I'll bet you've got another half, and Kim'ju will have more. Can't lose, can we?" He flashed a dry smile, of the kind that House Harmony parren never understood.

Lisbeth stared helplessly at Skah. Skah reached, and grasped her arm. Trimmed children's claws prodded at her skin beneath the jumpsuit sleeve. At Skah's age, they'd soon be growing out fully, to razor-sharp, throat-cutting length. Lisbeth sometimes forgot that kuhsi had those. The sharp teeth behind Skah's lips were no longer quite so childlike and harmless as they'd once been. One day, Skah would be a killer too. Just, please god, not today.

18

"Shilu, get me Styx, please." The three-dimensional display between his visor and the wrap-around screens of the Captain's chair looked a little different, trajectory lines and gravitational field markers more dynamic and colourful than he recalled. That was Shali, making gradual adjustments to Phoenix's interface, in the knowledge that sudden adjustments would be jarring.

A coms light from Friendship appeared on Erik's center panel, and he blinked on it. "Hello Captain."

"Hello Styx. You've examined our battle plan?"

"Yes Captain. It seems feasible."

"Do you have any suggestions to improve it?"

"No Captain. Our intelligence on Vertex System is very limited, a more precise battleplan makes no sense under the circumstance."

Erik wondered if this felt awkward on her end, also. Styx had been a part of Phoenix crew for more than two years. As uncomfortable as her presence had made them all in that time, her absence now felt nearly as strange. Not that it truly made much difference -- he usually only spoke to her via coms, and now he continued to, only Styx was on a neighbouring ship instead of this one.

"Good," he said. "All of this depends on us finding crew for the unoccupied warships. We can't guess precisely how many there'll be, but the intel seems good that we could grab as many as fifty. Winning those ships seems like the easy bit. Most of the Reeh Fleet defences will have gone to protect Chion. But we can't operate non-AI ships without regular crew, those ships are not optimised for AI drones, and not even you can fly them by remote."

"I concur, Captain."

"So our biggest challenge is going to be finding crew. Shali has the ceephay technology to navigate a system-wide cybernetics-intensive network, but she lacks the processing power to identify individuals out of a two billion plus population who might suit our needs."

"Captain, I have already initiated cooperation with Shali. We did not wish to bother you. We have been working on a joint protocol for a System-wide scan upon arrival at Vertex System to identify crew for these ships."

"Good," said Erik, not caring whether the relief showed in his voice. He'd suspected that Styx would become cooperative once more, now that her own gambit to keep this operation solely under AI control had failed. Styx was too pragmatic to hold grudges -- she'd played her best hand and lost. Chion was still out there, and could be attained by other means. "We're then going to have to find those potential crew, and collect them before the reeh security forces can. Our best estimate is that there are plenty of existing crew, plus a lot more retirees. How many of them are capable enough of free-thought that they'll be willing to join is another question. The tanifex seem to think the various rebel cells will know the answer."

"Shali has internalised much of the tanifex's information," Styx agreed. "However, this job will be far too large for Phoenix Company alone. Sciuto is a large planet, plus many of our required crew will be off-world. Raka Fleet drones will be necessary for manpower."

"This is the next thing I wished to discuss with you," Erik agreed, watching the movement of various Raka Fleet ships around Cygnax. Reeh attacks from out-system had ceased for now, whether because the reeh had judged them a waste of time, or because something else was afoot, Erik had no way to tell. "It will be very difficult for AIs to motivate non-AI rebels to join any cause. We must present them with an impression of Phoenix in command."

"Yes Captain." Erik was not particularly surprised that she agreed. But only a fool would believe that she meant it. "You have my permission to suggest to Major Thakur an arrangement of drone forces divided beneath the command of each Phoenix Company platoon. Each Phoenix Company Lieutenant shall have actual command of each entire force, up to the point that such command should run contrary to the interests of Raka Fleet and the larger mission. But Phoenix Company's officers are high quality, I do not anticipate this will be a likely issue."

Trace had already acquired an arrowhead from one of the Raka ships. Short of pilots, and not trusting Raka or drysine AIs, Shali was volunteering to fly it.

"Yes Styx," said Erik. "We're going to need to be very open and flexible here. With our intelligence so limited, we're going to need to improvise on every new discovery."

"Yes Captain. I believe that our chances of success are high."

So high that she appeared to have commanded Raka Fleet in an attack that killed three Phoenix crew, and wounded five more, to prevent it. What did she truly fear, about organics gaining control of this mission? With a human or alien commander, such fears could be the result of pure prejudice. But Styx was able to run forward-projected simulations of likely events, and if she possessed prejudices, they were based on a high degree of mathematical evidence.

Erik abruptly found himself wondering if he'd gotten this all wrong. He'd assumed that Styx's way would be bad for humanity. What if she'd seen the truth, and he, in his human stubbornness, had rejected her path in the certainty that human calculations of self-interest were superior?

"I think so too, Styx. Phoenix out." He blinked on Trace's icon, always prominent on his coms panel. It opened. "Hi Trace. What's the arrowhead status?"

"I'm in it now," she replied, voice echoing inside her armour. "It's real cozy. We're working with Operations techs to get enough support braces in here for a platoon, maybe some emergency umbilicals. If we had another hundred hours we could make it work real well. This will be more like jugaad improv, but we'll make it work."

"Styx says she's making the entire Raka drone army available for you to command. I don't have the stats on numbers..."

"We've estimated it's a bit over five thousand."

"Right. I don't know how Sciuto's residents will respond to being asked to join an AI army, we just have to hope they like it better than they like the reeh."

"The rebellions in this part of the galaxy operate like religions," Trace replied. "They've had no practical chance of success for millennia, their faith isn't based on the prospects of actual freedom."

"Right." They hadn't had a chance to talk about it, things had been happening too fast. And the one occasion they'd had a little time together in her quarters, a few hours ago, they'd spent doing something else entirely. It didn't even feel particularly strange, having that in their recent history together. Or rather, in a world where everything was getting stranger by the moment, that very human thing they'd done felt like some attempt at sanity. "Romki's been talking to the tanifex, and the alo on the whaleships. I only got about five minutes to speak with him, but that was the gist of it."

"We need to tap into that," Trace said firmly. "We need to offer them a promised land. Small promises won't do it. We need to be angels from heaven come to save them."

"We need to tell them that removing Chion from the heart of the Reeh Empire will end it," Erik summarised. Which it quite likely would, in time. He felt much more comfortable telling the various Empire rebellions that, than what Trace was suggesting.

"Sure," said Trace. "That too."

* * *

Erik followed Leechee along the mountain path, pulling up his hood as the wind gusted cold across the rippling grasses, and the leaden skies turned an ominous, iron grey. Ahead, the incline dropped away on left toward a mountain lake, a pool of clear water surrounded by conifers. The path descended, seeking its way beneath high rocky walls that loomed on the right, before rising again in the distance, after passing through the lakeside trees, and climbing the far ridge.

Thunder grumbled, and Erik wondered what they'd do if it turned into a full-fledged thunderstorm. Conventional wisdom said never stand beneath trees with lightning around, but surely trees were better than standing exposed on these grassy slopes. The clouds now lowered upon the ridgetop to the right, hard cliffs rising into thick mist.

Leechee led him into the trees, which at least provided some shelter from the strengthening wind. Thick trunks groaned as they swayed, as though in pain, and the darkening day grew darker still.

Leechee held up a hand, slowing nearly to a halt. Erik peered past his pack, not seeing anything ahead but trees. Leechee did not attempt to unhitch his rifle from the pack, so he didn't think whatever it was was dangerous. They walked ahead slowly, and Erik heard voices past the groaning trees. Men, talking.

Leechee resumed his normal pace. The trail emerged into a clearing on the forested slope, where a stream would flow when it rained, into the lake downhill. In the clearing were tents, and some heavy equipment -- a generator, some powerpacks, a couple of recharging powersuits. Some men were amongst the trees, two of them digging with more powersuits, actuators whining as they thudded enormous shovels into the dirt about a tree. A trench was forming. Around some of the other trees, Erik could see more trenches.

Truffle hunters, he realised. Blue truffles grew beneath these trees, if you knew where to look. In the Triumph Mountains in particular, rare blue truffles grew amongst the roots. Problem was, you had to cut the roots to get them, usually killing the tree. It was legal in some of the bigger forests, which could afford to lose the odd tree, but the Triumph Mountains were a Homeworld Protected Region, and killing trees in an HPR was illegal. These big comber trees took centuries to grow, and were very selective where they grew.

Between the tents, a chain was rattling. A tochiwani, Erik saw as they walked -- 'land alligator' in some old Earth language. It was as big as a pony, thick shoulders and compact head, savaging a bone with sharp teeth. They were native to New Horizon, and their smell for truffles was still better than the most advanced technology. This one had surely smelled the new arrivals, but was more interested in its bone. Erik was glad.

One of the men saw them, and stopped work. Others looked, and did the same.

"Hey guys," called Leechee. "Looks like a heck of a storm, huh?"

"Sure does," one called back. "You headed out?"

"Yeah, should be able to hike it to our ride before the worst arrives. What about you guys, you staying put?" Leechee lived and worked in these mountains. Erik knew he wouldn't be happy about these guys breaking the law, but safety came first. Outdoors folk on Homeworld, or most worlds, looked out for each other first and worried about laws later.

"Yeah, reckon we might," said that man. Another man emerged from the nearest tent, rough-shaven, his heavy jacket work-stained. That man squinted at Erik.

"You guys look kinda familiar," that man said. "Do I know you from somewhere?"

"I don't think so," said Erik, in a higher tone than his usual voice, as his security training kicked in. He had refresher classes every year -- what to do when someone recognised, or thought they recognised him. Debogandes were even more famous on Homeworld than elsewhere, but Alice and Walker tried to keep the kids out of the spotlight. Most people were harmless, but some didn't like rich people on principle, and Debogandes in particular. "What are you doing with those trees?"

That wasn't in the safety classes, and he could feel Leechee's surprise and disquiet at his side. He wasn't sure why he'd asked it.

The man newly emerged from the tent shoved both hands into his pockets, and spat on some ferns. "What does it look like we're doing?"

"It looks like you're killing them all for blue truffles." Now Erik knew why he was doing it. Small injustices, things he'd seen, and been told by his parents and minders to shut up about. The time Kevin Choo had stolen his favourite pen, the one that Grandpa Kunle had given him, and flaunted it around the class, daring Erik to take it back.

Erik had wanted to, but Kevin Choo was an asshole who'd never do anything for free, and the security instructions had been very specific, and had involved avoiding fights. He'd told his father, and his father had repeated it -- no fighting. The next day, a pale faced Kevin Choo had given him the pen back without a word, and said no more about it, deflecting all who asked where it had gone.

Someone had gotten to Kevin, Erik knew. One of the family had spoken to him, quietly, and probably through Kevin's parents. Who'd probably freaked out, and told Kevin that he should be using his time at school to make best friends with the Debogande boy, not aggravating him. To his credit, Kevin had stuck to his guns, and continued to dislike Erik for the rest of their school years, if from a distance.

At other times, Erik had wanted to speak out. The news would report on former service personnel who couldn't get jobs, or were fired without good cause, and Erik had wanted to say something in public, perhaps start a Chatify profile to just put his opinion out there. But his parents were firm -- no net profiles, minimal social engagement, keep your head down and enjoy your childhood free from outside attention.

Well, now he was tired of it. He was incredibly fortunate to have been born into such wealth and privilege, and it was incumbent upon him, surely, to use that fortune for good. He didn't want to curl into a ball his entire life, and play the safe game that his parents and security wanted him to. Harvesting blue truffles without a permit was illegal. The few permits that were issued generally went to respected harvesters who sure as hell wouldn't do it like this.

"You're a rich boy, ain't ya?" said the man. Behind him, all activity had stopped. The two men in powersuits had stopped digging, their machines in the slow whine of recharge mode as they idled. Tough men looked at the visitors, leaning on their tools. "Got you some nice hunting kit, there. Good boots. Don't look like you've worn them more than a dozen times."

Leechee stepped forward, hands up, placatingly. "Guys, we're not going to tell anyone we saw you here. You go about your business, I just want to get out of this storm. And if you know what's good for you, you'll get out of it too."

Erik shot him an angry look. The way that Leechee ignored him entirely, Erik could tell he was mad.

"Ever tried to feed a family, boy?" the near man continued, dangerously. He had a rough chin, and a thick goatee. A worn face, more worn even than Leechee. Heavier, like he didn't eat as well. His work clothes were heavy duty, good for operating machinery in mud and dirt. He looked like he might have done it most of his life. "It's not easy being a Wilder in this part of Dupont. Damn government's run by rich folks like you, got permits and licences up the wazoo. Protect the fucking trees, say the people who've only seen trees in city parks."

"I know lots of Wilders," Erik retorted. "Most of them don't kill comber trees, and don't want to kill comber trees. Most Wilders are proud of where they live, and they don't litter in it, either." Nodding to where food wrappers lay amidst the muddy undergrowth by the men's tents.

"Thank you all, we're leaving!" Leechee announced, grabbing Erik's arm and dragging him. There was unsuspected strength in those wiry limbs. "Let's go kid, the storm's coming."

"You don't go telling anyone we were out here!" the man shouted after them. All were glaring, as Leechee and Erik left. "A man's got to eat! Might just eat you!"

"We should report them," said Erik once they were clear of the trees, and heading diagonally upslope once more across the wild grassland.

"Maybe," said Leechee, still not looking at him.

"Hey," said Erik. "Why are you angry? I understand maybe they don't have much money, but you can't just rip up comber trees in HPR lands. They had too much of that down in Perez during Settlement, the landscape still hasn't recovered, all the hillsides on the Tebriz Ranges are eroding."

"I know," said Leechee, wind whipping his long, grey hair beneath his thick hat. From somewhere distant, thunder grumbled and boomed.

"So we are going to report them?"

Leechee said nothing, peering at the ominous sky as he walked. Erik fell into a rhythm behind, glancing over his shoulder at the retreating clump of comber trees on the windswept hillside.

* * *

Phoenix plunged out of jump at Vertex System, in the midst of an emerging Raka Fleet formation seventy ships large, spread across forty thousand kilometres. As Erik drank his post-jump electrolyte-heavy water, and let the pre-combat data wash over him, he found that he was remarkably calm. Vertex System defences were predicted to be elsewhere, and the first glance indicated that to be the case, as Raka's forward strike ships reported few imminent threats responding to their arrival.

Erik had been on Phoenix during assaults of similar or greater magnitude, but never in this chair. Since his unscheduled rise to command of the ship, jumps into hostile systems had typically meant naked arrivals, threats on all sides and no protection other than Phoenix's firepower and his own reflexes. Now the integrated command showed him a mass of coordinated trajectory plots from Raka Fleet, achieving consensus even now for the V-dump ahead, while the flankers shifted course to avoid incoming firestation ordnance, and lay down their own response.

Shali's tweaks to the control interface looked good, but there was no way to fully test them here -- Scan was reading no Reeh Fleet opposition at all, just a few smaller scouts now running for possible jump on the outer edge of the gas giant's strongest influence. The giant itself was enormous -- three times the size of Homeworld's giant, with forty-seven moons of greater than fifty kilometres diameter. The biggest was Sciuto, nearly fourteen thousand kilometres diameter, orbiting the Vertex star at 450 million kilometres, far enough out from the system center that had they been Homeworld's suns in Balisse System, it would be a ball of ice. But at the center of Vertex System, a pair of F-Class suns twirled about one another in an endless dance, melting all of Sciuto's ice save for its poles, and placing its equatorial temperatures at a balmy 36C.

Erik let his bridge crew watch the limited combat, and call out the shifting consensus of Raka Fleet as trajectory arrows swept from their jump entry toward Sciuto-tangential. Three minutes to first dump, to lose this speed before it shot them past Sciuto, into the outer-ranges of the gas giant's influence and into the grasp of Vertex's binary suns.

"Hello Captain," came Styx's voice in Erik's ears. "I have network interface, the system communications have presented little problem. I am interrogating the Sciuto population now."

"I copy, Styx." That was fast, at this latency. Styx's ability to break down reeh communication networks was increasing, no doubt the backup processing power of Raka Fleet had something to do with it. Erik ran his eyes over the entire Vertex System network as it unfolded upon his displays -- eleven of the forty-seven moons were heavily involved in mining, refining or processing to some degree. Something, whether AI or Phoenix's dumb computers, was tagging all those settlements, mining bases and factory operations, with names and purposes. There were hundreds, plus free-flying stations, some orbiting moons, others orbiting Sciuto itself, some heavy-industrial, heavily automated and zero-G, others heavily populated and rotational. The system was alive with sub-light traffic, thousands of ships, mostly freighters or personnel transports, and mostly unarmed.

It did look disconcertingly like Homeworld, Erik thought... though much more heavily industrial. Homeworld had a lot of tourism and non-Fleet private activity, which he doubted they'd find here.

"Hello Captain," said Shali, sounding worried.

"Hello Shali," said Erik, as his bridge crew talked mostly amongst themselves, observing, remarking and warning. They seemed more worried about Raka Fleet than reeh defences, which was probably wise for now. "What's up?"

"Styx is using my analysis of ceephay cybernetics, plus her own dominance of reeh communications, to read the minds of two billion people on Sciuto." Beyond the worry, Erik heard awe. "At the risk of repeating myself, I don't see how it's possible, given what ought to be the physical limitations of any functioning sentience. But I can see her doing it. She's enslaving bits of planetary processing power to create decentralised nodes on the planet itself, it gets her around the latency delay."

Two minutes until V-dump. "Can she read individual minds, do you think?"

"It's more general than that. She's reading minds by the million. Maybe the reeh can use brain cybernetics to read individual thoughts -- I can't."

"Can you follow what Styx is doing and see for yourself?"

"I'm trying. It's hard. The scale is crazy."

"Hello Captain," Styx interrupted them. "Please don't waste time talking to the appliance, I can answer any question that you have." A visual of Sciuto appeared on Erik's display, and rotated, parts of its surface highlighted in red. "I have contacted the rebel cells revealed to us by the tanifex. From a number of them, I sense that the tanifex were exaggerating. From others, I sense potential. I am now commencing network assault upon Sciuto's key military installations. Reeh surface command's control over cybernetic enslavement should progressively disintegrate from this point."

"What percentage of the population do you think requires active controls?"

"It is difficult to tell from a single scan, Captain. The degree of uprising against the reeh should provide us with an answer."

* * *

Trace bounced in her armour as GR-1 rattled and bounced through atmospheric entry. Phoenix's command feed showed her crazy things, mostly in the form of surface strikes from orbit, where Phoenix and Raka were identifying things on the ground that needed to die. Exactly how much fighting was going on down there was unclear, but Trace thought it wasn't as much as the tanifex had led them to believe would happen.

On the other hand, Sciuto was a world occupied and enslaved by Narsid Reeh for eight thousand years, and asking this particular generation of wild-eyed rebels to go from zero to uprising in the blink of an eye was probably asking too much. The reeh war machine in space may have all left to protect Chion, but down on the surface, it retained its iron grip. Human Fleet war theory had always supposed that such planetary iron grips disintegrated fast when the enemy commanded the heights of space and orbit, but to the best of Trace's knowledge, that theory hadn't been tested much in situations where friendly ground forces were irregulars at best, and starry-eyed civilians at worst.

"Styx, I need Raka ground forces to obey clear rules of engagement," Trace said as she bounced, and tried to hold an entire planet's-worth of ongoing assault in her head. "All reeh are to be killed on sight, irrespective of combat designation. We need to announce our intentions clearly."

"Yes Major."

"Non-combatant casualties are to be avoided where ever possible. We are attempting to win hearts and minds. Self-defence is encouraged, but it's going to be chaotic, it's very possible that some friendlies or potential friendlies will fire upon us by mistake. Annihilating the source of every stray round will not help our cause. Please be sure that Raka understand this."

"Yes Major, they understand."

"Further, Phoenix must be seen to be in command. I know that this has displeased you in the past, but these rebels will follow others like them, not AIs. Tell me that you agree."

"I agree, Major. I am entirely committed to this course of action. It has become our only chance for mission success."

And now, Trace thought, Styx would do her best to convince the humans and tavalai on Phoenix that they were in command. Instead of the truth, which was easy enough to see on her tactical display, that most of the ships doing the shooting from orbit, and most of the forces engaged in ground assault, were AI, and directly following Styx's orders. And that Styx would let the organics maintain 'command' for so long as those organics were heading in the same direction she wished to go, and no longer.

"Ground fire," said Lieutenant Leralani from the cockpit. "They've spotted us. Counter measures engaged, everyone take hold, we will be evasive."

The warning was unnecessary -- strapped into armour restraints, GR-1's passengers were already as 'braced' as they were going to get. Trace took long, slow breaths, and watched the building formation of Raka arrowheads fanning to either flank. There were thirty-six arrowheads in this formation alone, as Styx had concluded their target, an archipeligo named Naksuto, held the greatest promise for fleet recruits. Styx had hit Naksuto with announcements, both encoded and audible, telling them who Phoenix and Raka were, and who Chion was, and what they were planning to do about her. Most of the rebels, Shali insisted, would already know who Chion was, and had given Styx details from the tanifex to include for authenticity, so the rebels would be sure these incoming forces were on their side.

"GR-1," came Sasalaka's voice, "we are tracking the source of that ground fire, orbital strikes will be arriving shortly." Using ground fire when the enemy had control in orbit was a good way to lose those batteries. The defenders would do better to hold fire until the assault shuttles were really close. But then, as Trace reviewed the entire Naksuto Archipeligo, stretching in a two thousand kilometre arc from the equator to the southern ocean, what was being fired at them here was probably the tip of the iceberg. Attacking entire planets was typically only done following weeks or months of 'softening up' operations, even with orbital dominance. They were cutting corners here because of Styx and Raka's technological superiority, the ongoing uprising in disruptive pockets on the ground, and because with time short, they had no other choice.

Ahead, Scan showed ground fire approaching, then whipping by as GR-1 held disconcertingly level, despite the thunderous atmospheric entry. "Magfire only," said Tamalin, Leralani's front-seater. "Not very accurate." A round blew up ahead, and GR-1 bounced through the shrapnel.

"Signal from Atisu," came Shilu's voice. "It's been sporadic for the last half hour, but it's getting stronger. Rebels are indicating they hold key facilities there, but they'll lose them quickly without support."

"Styx, give me your best concentration in Atisu." A map flashed over visual, a sea-side city, glowing red with Styx's neural indicators of potential recruits. Further along the coast at two more cities, red dots also concentrated, but not as intensely.

"Major," said Styx, "fighting also appears intense in Hokio. There is little prospect for successful extraction where there is insufficient ground fighting to suppress reeh ground forces. I suggest you concentrate on Atisu and Hokio for now."

"Lieutenant Karajin," said Trace. "Your command, your call."

"Yes Major," said Karajin, locked into his brace alongside her. "Styx, I need twelve arrowheads for insertion at Atisu. Send another twelve to Hokio, command there will go to whoever's senior. The last twelve shall remain free reserve. Major, are you stepping off with Garuda?"

"Command Squad will remain aboard GR-1," said Trace, and paused as the big tavalai assault shuttle abruptly banked right as its sensors spotted something coming too close. Gs pressed them down, blurring vision, then a lurch and rattle as something blew up nearby. "GR-1 will remain in support with the arrowheads," Trace continued. If reeh ground forces were holding most of their anti-air in reserve until they were closer, the ground could well have been safer.

"Ground fire's gone," Tamalin remarked.

"GR-1, this is Phoenix," came Sasalaka's voice. "All outgoing fire has been neutralised."

"Thank you Phoenix." If Sasa was speaking, it meant Erik was busy. From what Trace had seen on the way in, it looked like the shipyard facilities were relatively undefended, and capturing their many operational ships would be little difficulty. Those ships still had to be inspected for sabotage, though. This whole operation was going to be for nothing if they couldn't capture them, and Erik's attention was going to be torn between supporting his marines on the ground, and watching Raka's efforts to secure the shipyards. They all just had to hope that Sciuto was the correct place to be deploying marines -- on the ground at the bottom of a gravity-well -- instead of in the shipyards, where marines were far better suited, but enemies seemed to be lacking.

* * *

"Firefights appear to be concentrated along the saddle road," came Styx's voice in Jordan Alomaim's ears. "Three primary concentrations, I estimate from available visuals there could be a thousand rebels. The return fire is of a far heavier caliber, suggesting reeh forces fewer in number but more well equipped."

Alomaim stared at the display, of a large town high in the mountains. It stretched along a ridge, ascending at either end, but long and straight in a saddleback through the middle reach. It was night down there, and stretches of the saddle road flickered with gunfire.

"Lieutenant," said Shali, "the Raka arrowheads are recommending we approach at lower altitudes for cover."

"I copy, Shali. Do that." Bravo Platoon were strapped into the hastily converted hold of AR-1, the Raka arrowhead Styx had brought them as a replacement for PH-3. Everything looked alien and ugly, where human seating and restraints had been bolted into the interior of a ship used by machines that didn't need them, but Alomaim was too focused on his displays to notice. Shali was flying, her CPU strapped against the forward bulkhead from where she could access and dominate command functions. What had happened to the original Raka pilot-brain, no one knew.

"Lieutenant, I'm registering calls for assistance," Shali added, as AR-1 changed course with an alarming lurch, losing altitude fast as it dove toward the mountains. From about the hold came marine grunts of displeasure. "It's hard to make out, the jamming is intense, but the language is regional, specific to these mountains. I'm hearing a lot of appeals to what might be a higher deity."

Scan flashed red as missiles leapt from the mountaintop town, then from neighbouring peaks, and streaked toward them. Surrounding Raka arrowheads returned fire, and then AR-1 did, some rounds heading to the source of groundfire, others for direct intercept. AR-1 pulled harsh negative Gs, Alomaim's head abruptly feeling swelled like a balloon as everything tried to rush upward, then a crash to equally harsh positive Gs in a tight turn. Missiles were hit halfway, others flashed by, dazzled by laser countermeasures or simply inaccurate. One of AR-1's twenty arrowhead escorts took a hit and tumbled in flames, shedding pieces.

"Staying low," Shali announced. "Orbital fire is incoming." Another hard slam of Gs as AR-1 ducked about a high mountain peak. Arrowheads weren't supposed to be massively more manoeuvrable than human assault shuttles, despite their occupants' ability to pull enormously more G. Alomaim wondered if Shali was just a very good pilot, or a very bad one.

Hypersonic streaks appeared on scan from above, and brilliant flashes lit the mountaintops. "Those fire-sources appear to have been neutralised," Shali observed.

"Assume there will be more on final approach," Alomaim told her. "I want the arrowheads in thirds, one third will join AR-1 to assault the eastern end of the saddle ridge, one third will assault the western end, we will fight our way along the ridge and meet in the middle, joining with rebels along the way. The final third will remain as airborne reserve in case of surprises."

"Raka say they copy," said Shali.

"Tell them to watch for civilians. Only fire when fired upon."

"Hello Lieutenant, this is Styx." It was disconcerting to be dealing exclusively with AIs, but Phoenix Company were spread all across Sciuto, and Phoenix itself was on the far side of the planet from here. "My scans indicate that a majority of the civilian population are under reeh cybernetic control. Anyone could be your enemy."

"And if they want to use their bare hands against marines or drones, they can be my guest," Alomaim said grimly.

"Final approach," said Shali. "Hang on." As AR-1 swung clear of the last mountain, nineteen other arrowheads on its flanks. Missile fire erupted ahead, but smaller, likely shoulder-mounted. Arrowhead return fire was mostly cannon, high velocity rounds lighting the night, tearing into ridge-line buildings ahead, a glimpse of walls and rooves collapsing under high explosive. Raka Fleet weaponry was not designed with limiting collateral damage in mind. Alomaim knew well that talk of not harming civilians was one thing, but actually doing it was like performing brain surgery with a sledgehammer.

The arrowheads split, AR-1 heading to the left and slightly downhill end of the saddle road, slowing with a shriek of thrust as it approached the clustered rooftops. Alomaim saw tight spaces, alleys, winding roads, several spots burning from recent or less-recent fire.

"Bravo Platoon!" he said loudly. "It's gonna be tight in there! Watch your partners, watch your blindspots! Identify targets before firing, it'll be hard to tell friend from foe and we don't want to shoot our friends! Prepare to disembark!"

* * *

Shali watched the racing rooftops as AR-1 rocketed away from Bravo Platoon's disembarkation point, staying low across the mountain flank to limit groundfire, and felt alive. Shuttle piloting was an unfamiliar task, but within her capabilities, and the frame-rate upon which she matched unfolding realtime events with hypothetical scenarios created the odd effect of unfamiliarity. Orbital strikes painted targets amid Rishiku's ragged skyline, a blur of velocity as they came, then lighting the night with one structure-obliterating explosion, then another.

Shali had always hated any necessity of violence, but she'd been asleep for the best part of eight thousand years, and this frantic juggling of realtime data, accompanied by the dire consequences of any mistake, was the closest thing to 'fun' she'd had in literal ages.

With Bravo disembarked, AR-1 was now a support asset, and she plotted her course around the big rise at the far end of the saddle road, planning an escape route to take her clear of groundfire, then circling back around to an oversight position from where she could lay down covering fire upon Bravo's request. She watched their positions now, tacnet revealing a close-range scramble along tight alleys and roads, bashing through walls where that was faster, pinpointing targets by incoming fire and manoeuvring to put one of their number into a killing position, all with a speed and precision that was impressive even to an AI. And here at the high end of the saddle road, she saw more arrowheads lifting away, having deposited their cargo of Raka drones, now manoeuvring like multi-legged tanks through the city. They lacked Bravo's mobility, Shali thought, being optimised more for zero-G, but they were hundreds instead of just forty, and possessed a slight edge in firepower if not in accuracy.

As she climbed toward her overwatch circuit, Shali found the spare processing power to analyse the developing airwave battle, where transmissions and multiple frequencies struggled for dominance, or were smothered beneath eruptions of targeted jamming from one side or the other. One source was clearly reeh, and she pinpointed it and fed to tacnet with authority, confident that someone would put a missile on it within seconds. Raka drones and arrowheads were dominating the mid-range bandwidths and squeezing the reeh to the outer bands where they could be more easily identified and targeted, but Shali could see that Raka were leaving gaps in the combat frequencies that could be exploited, and formulated a signal to inform them...

A heavy cannonshot whipped just before the arrowhead's nose, and she went evasive, backtracking and highlighting the source to tacnet. And found a split-second to wonder what would happen to her if the arrowhead ended up a flaming wreck on the side of these mountains. Would any of her new human and tavalai friends bother to try and salvage her? And if she could be repaired back to any sort of function, would they know how?

A sub-channel on the primary bandwidth went live, fading and powering back as a tightbeam encircled AR-1. Someone down there was aiming it straight at her, but had possessed no targeting function that she could see. In fact, to judge from its establishment codes, it wanted her to hook in and set up a high-data pathway...

...Immediately as she did so, it tried to pull her into VR. Shali assessed her situation, reckoned that the next twenty seconds were unlikely to require intensive piloting skills, and that if Bravo Platoon required immediate firesupport there were at least ten arrowheads currently in a better position to deliver it. She divided her processing core, autonomised the outer half while sending the first into avatar-mode...

And found herself on a mountainside. About her were tall trees, straight like the columns of a grand building. Each seemed to shine, radiating light that speared into the sky like a forest of great spotlights. Overhead, the brilliant columns all merged to make an aurora, a flowing river of light that ran across the sky in a shifting kaleidoscope of colour.

Shali could not tell whether it was night or day in this simulation, but mossy grass grew thick beneath her feet, and the forested hillside was nothing as rugged or sharp as a real forest. There were no dead branches that might cut her feet, or sharp rocks to stub a toe. The mountain slope was just steep enough to make for a beautiful view of a glowing pattern on a valley floor below -- concentric circles of orange, cantered by a raised platform amid four ascending spires. A temple, Shali thought.

People, or avatars, were moving through the forest, holding lights and calling in the night. As though searching for someone. A fast scan through the VR construct's code informed Shali that time was running nearly twenty times slower in here... enough deviation that she did not have to worry about flying into a mountain back in the real world, where her divided processing-core still retained enough autonomous function that it could pilot the arrowhead without sentient oversight. Ten seconds real time would give her two hundred seconds in here.

A further scan showed a particularly high-bandwidth individual nearby, and she dematerialised to that location. The tiosa avatar who confronted her stared in astonishment, a great torch in one hand, radiating light from some undefined source. 'Woodlings', Phoenix's crew who'd taken note of their existence had called the tiosa. They looked something like walking trees, though in reality the gnarled, knotted exterior was fibrous armour, evolved on the tiosa homeworld to protect from the radiation of an unforgiving star. This one had a flat, rectangular face, and four shielded eyes, the faceplate armour splitting and curling at the top of the head, and the jaw, like hair and beard on an ungroomed human male.

"What are you?" he asked, in the tiosa native tongue. And in avatar form, Shali found the emotions pulling her nearly into tears, as it had been so long since she'd heard that language spoken.

"I am human," Shali lied, lacking the time to explain further. "These forces that descend upon your world are mostly AI, but they are led by humans. Humans come from distant space. We have come to rescue the great Sky Mother from the reeh."

"How do you manifest in the world?" asked the amazed tiosa. 'The world', Shali calculated rapidly, was so abstract a term that it could only refer to this virtual space. Perhaps, uplinked to this beautiful reality, this place had become the real world to these people, and the 'real world' something else. Amongst Chion's various rebellions, Shali was seeing that quite a lot.

She'd struggled to reconcile the morality of these rebellions. Chion would never willingly place beings in harm's way for a hopeless cause. People had been trying to rise against the reeh since the coming of the Narsid, with no evident success in all that time. But ceephay-derived cybernetics that contained sufficient neural control to enslave a person, also contained sufficient interface to land a person here -- in a virtual world of rich sensory feedback, where time ran slow, and life was infinitely better. Perhaps, Shali thought, her old friend had not been intending to drive an uprising at all. Perhaps she'd merely been trying to make the best of an awful situation, and allow some groups of Reeh Empire citizens as much of an escape as she could create for them. But having provided them with that escape, some, perhaps, had chosen to use it to organise other things.

"I am an AI," Shali admitted. "A human AI, manifesting in human form. We have liberated your shipyards, and are capturing all the warships there. But we will need crew to operate them, those ships are not optimised for AI control."

"Crew!" the tiosa gasped. He pointed, down the mountain slope between the trees, to the great temple-like structure below. "Come with me! We will attend the Chatham and appeal to the others!"

He intended them to walk down there, Shali thought. From this height, that would take perhaps half an hour. By that time, back in the real world, her autonomous setup would certainly have flown into something, or caught a high-velocity round to the cockpit.

She put a hand on the tiosa's knotty shoulder, and rematerialised them down the valley, a flash of shifting perspective, and then the great stage, between spires, and the glowing, concentric rings of the surrounding amphitheatre. The tiosa stared about in disbelief, realising what she'd done. About, on encircling levels of audience seating, were thousands of beings, milling, now pointing at the stage, squinting to see which avatar had appeared.

All sorts of beings, Shali saw. In her day, Sciuto had been a mostly Irata world, but eight millennia of Narsid rule had destroyed any sense of property. It was the most fundamental of individual rights. Without it, one could not own anything -- not identity, not safety, not security, not self-determination. Not one's own history. If nothing belonged to you, then it all belonged to someone else, typically some faceless power whose tyranny became inevitable, with so much of the power that should rightly belong to individuals gathered into its hands. Now Sciuto was a mixed world, races displaced, thrown together in ancient and recent history. No one here truly knew who they were, because the Narsid Reeh did not want anyone to remember. And so those fortunate enough to gain access to a place like this, came here to forge a new identity.

Shali could see symbols on the four great spires that ascended above the central platform. A great sun, radiating spears of light. In other symbols, the sun was formed in a half-circle, as though seen rising or setting upon an horizon. About her companion tiosa's neck, another version of the symbol dangled, the half-circle like an eye, cantered with the iris of some all-knowing being who saw everything. A monotheistic religion then, Shali reckoned, having seen many such symbolisms before. The old calculation reflexes were reemerging -- old histories, old simulations of organic, sentient psychology following familiar routes and logics to arrive at mass beliefs and phenomenons.

Bundles of purple flowers tied to the base of the spires, and placed in decorative vases about the vast amphitheatre. Flowers, a recurring symbol of renewal, life and hope.

"What is your name?" asked the tiosa beside her, and his voice was somehow amplified, so that all about could hear. Whether that was simply the VR creating its own physics for this place, or some simulated auditory technology, Shali could not tell. The tiosa turned to the staring crowd. From temple buildings about the platform, more beings were emerging, pouring from the doors as word of the new arrival spread. "She claims to be an AI, from a race called 'human'!"

Shali calculated the situation, and judged that this would require something out of character. A memory nearly made her smile -- Chion, in one of their formless debates, without avatars, accusing Shali's avatar character of invading her logical function. To an AI queen, accusing another AI of possessing 'character' was something close to an insult -- the observation of deviant process. In very old AIs it was inevitable, but Shali had been very young then.

She accessed what she could of the VR space's available code, and spread her arms. Her body began to glow, radiating great beams of light across the wide-eyed crowd. "Free people of Sciuto!" she cried. "For too long you have been in chains! This haven has given you space in which to enjoy your lives, and to worship your god! But in Sciuto above, in the world of flesh and suffering, my people have come to bring you liberation! Rise up, people of Sciuto! Rise up and take your freedom!"

19

Dale hit the ground running, straight down from PH-1 and taking the impact through armoured legs. He pounded along the height of the vast stone wall, two hundred meters above a dark harbour, waters alive with lights from wet shipping and spaceport operations combined, and now aglow with the blaze of fires and explosions.

Marines yelled terse warnings, alerting others of movement, of targets, of incoming rounds. All along the harbour, defensive emplacements were in flames, some destroyed from orbit, others erupting even now as arrowheads speared fire, devastating reinforcements or attempted breakouts by ground forces. Not all of those forces existed to defend the Kripasa Prison complex, the multi-modal harbour was a facility worth defending on its own. But the prison was the centrepiece, a monstrous stone fortress with hexagonal sides, tall like a skyscraper but as wide as a small city, made of old stone and dating back so far that no one seemed to know what it had been originally.

Ahead, First Section were accumulating about a retaining wall as they reached it, ducking for cover as rounds streaked in from Kripasa's far wall, blasting chunks of stone. Dale skidded low as those rounds zipped by his head, then Forrest was swearing, getting low alongside. Tacnet found the source of fire, which stopped shortly after as someone killed it, then Dale was running again, Forrest with him, both dropping low behind the wall beside Reddy and Greiser.

"Entrance is there!" Reddy showed him with an indication of one armoured hand. "Low in that depression after the stairs! One hundred meters!"

They hadn't been able to put down directly on it because of some nastily well-aimed missiles with pre-set targeting that appeared autistic to counter-measures. Marines didn't like fighting on planets much, largely because of situations like this -- open space, little cover and long ranges, where marines preferred it up close and personal. Thankfully, their firesupport was overwhelming. It just required a little patience to identify the threats before moving, rather than doing the usual marine thing of identifying threats by having them shoot at you.

"I see it," Dale agreed. And glanced at Forrest, who had a big new blast-mark on his chest armour. Whatever the enemy was using, it wasn't always calibrated for UF marine armour. "Woody, you good?"

"No sweat," said Gunnery Sergeant 'Woody' Forrest. "Guys, spread your line, don't bunch up!" And popped up to paste a tacnet threat-identifier with Koshaim fire.

On the entrance point's far side, tacnet showed Dale Second and Third Sections, establishing a firing line to pin down enemy forces trying to manoeuvre and flank their approach. "Second Squad, sitrep!"

"Got a second, smaller entrance here that didn't show on the scans!" came back Sergeant Barnes. "Fuckers on the far side seem real determined to stop us getting in, I got arrowheads on it now!"

"Get inside and support First Section once we get in," Dale confirmed as something big blew up further along the wall. "This heavy stuff is ranging fire from outside the prison, it's not well aimed but it's well-sighted in advance." Another light was blinking on coms, suggesting command, and priority. "Woody, you take it, I've got a priority."

As Forrest took temporary command with barely an acknowledgement, so long they'd been doing this together as joint command of Alpha Platoon.

Dale switched channels. "This is Dale, make it fast." On his other side, Reddy fired, and a sporadic red dot vanished from tacnet, nearly two hundred meters distant on the prison's far wall. Private Reddy didn't miss much.

"Hello Lieutenant, this is Shali," came the girl's voice in Dale's ears. "I'm in contact with a large religious group in Sciuto, they call themselves the Medrafi, after their founder. They're going to fight, they have wide connections across Sciuto, and their biggest leader is imprisoned somewhere in Kripasa Prison. If you can get him, I can put him in contact with all the Medrafi who can uplink, and the uprising will increase in scale."

Dale wanted to reply that their primary job on Sciuto wasn't to liberate the Sciuto people, but to find ship crews in short order and put them on ships. But then, he supposed, doing the first was probably going to require the second, like it or not. Styx hadn't wanted to do all this organics politics shit, had insisted it would make everything worse. Styx was a bitch, but she wasn't stupid.

"You give me everything you've got to help me ID him," Dale replied. "I'll do what I can." Out on the blazing harbour, a water ship blew up with an immense flash, doubtless hauling something best not set fire to. And now on the adjoining hexagonal wall, the second wave of arrowheads were descending like armoured wasps, all angles and poison barbs, to deposit an assault force of Raka drones.

"Here's what I have," said Shali, and Dale's suit computer began filling with images, scans and deconstructed personnel profiles. Across the prison, the far wall began exploding with arrowhead support fire, and incoming fire to First Section's position appeared to cease.

"First Section, by pairs, let's go!" Dale commanded, as marines hurdled the wall and ran toward the entrance.

* * *

Trace leapt from the arrowhead as it shrieked to a low hover upon the spaceport tarmac. Command Squad leaped with her, fanning into a cover formation as Trace walked, a slow moment to absorb the carnage of war. The big freight haulers of the landing pads were aflame, one a hundred meters away burning so fiercely that the radiant heat would have burned unprotected skin. Another, much nearer, had been devastated by some large explosion, debris scattered across the pad along with severed gantry arms and ground vehicles upended like toys thrown by a careless child.

Further from the fires, where the spaceport ended and the towers of Atusa began, heavy fighting was ongoing, fire incoming and outgoing. Overhead, missile fire from arrowheads streaked toward the towers, removing reeh armoured reinforcements that were manoeuvring from city bases to counter-attack the rebels who now occupied the spaceport. Also ahead, fanning to make an outward-facing perimeter before those towers, were Garudan Platoon, having beaten her here by twenty minutes, and reporting the situation worthy of her personal attention.

"Styx, please limit Raka's force extensions beyond the spaceport perimeter," Trace spoke into coms as she advanced, stepping past pieces of bodies on the ground. What alien race they'd once been, it was impossible to now tell. "If reeh reinforcements want to risk the roads to manoeuvre, let them. I'm not worried about losing position here."

"Yes Major," said Styx. A pair of arrowheads streaking overhead let loose a stream of flares, breaking to evade groundfire. On tacnet, Trace could see reeh reinforcements heading into the gap between the spaceport's eastern flank and a Raka drone platoon's beachhead in a block of city towers. If it continued, she'd order that platoon to push, and hit the reeh from behind, squeezing them between here and there.

"We're trusting Styx again?" Sergeant Rael asked her.

Trace ignored him, because it was the kind of pointless, emotion-driven interjection that would have annoyed her had she let it. She paused behind Arime and Rolonde at the edge of cover provided by collapsed gantry cranes, a tangled mass of burned steel. Ahead were half-buried warehouse levels, and flatbed vehicle depots, many now riddled with holes, steel torn and twisted like paper. Alongside those vehicles, behind the cover of another big lander on the pad beyond, were Lieutenant Karajin and Garudan First Section, accompanied by a collection of aliens in what seemed to be a makeshift command post.

Tacnet indicated a red-zone ahead, where possible sniper vantages from distant buildings could conceivably create a crossfire. "Don't smoke it," said Rael, observing the problem. "That's a hard shot, smoke will draw more fire. Cover and run."

His signal to tacnet alerted all units to the possible offending firepoints. Arime and Rolonde bumped fists. Rolonde went first, the loping, armoured run of a marine with many thousands of hours in armour, where a newbie would stagger or bounce with the mismatch of power and weight.

Arime followed, then Terez, then Trace, but they drew no fire. With Raka arrowheads in constant circuit overhead, reeh forces were perhaps appreciating that active targeting upon the spaceport would see them quickly pinpointed and killed. Passive targeting was more immediately survivable, but not once all these clustered sensors had triangulated the location of fire and pulverised it several seconds later. One thing with operating on the ground instead of in the confines of a space facility, Trace was beginning to appreciate, was that the threat horizon extended indefinitely, leading to an alarming multiplication in the number of things that could shoot at you once they'd IDed you as an actionable target. On a station, that was limited to the guy on the other side of a doorway, or a corner. Sometimes those extended threat horizons led to a quieter operational theatre, as forces refrained from shooting unless they absolutely had to, for fear of drawing fire from absolutely everywhere. And othertimes it lead to brief moments of all-out carnage.

Trace jogged to the makeshift HQ, at speeds she rarely reached on a station, feeling the shock of weight through hip and knee actuators. Armed aliens regarded her warily -- Trace saw various dogreth, tanifex, irata, tiosa and others, some with no armour, some with light plating, mostly torso with some improvised limb guards, all with some sort of automatic rifle or shotgun. Most reeh troops guarding a facility like this would be similarly light, no one wasted a lot of heavy armour on defensive duty.

Draped over several neighbouring trucks were large flags. Trace didn't recognise the symbols, but they appeared to be in some ancient-looking script, and made aesthetic patterns against a background of two interlocking crescents -- Vertex System's moons and planets, Trace wondered? There was mobile gear on the ground, some of it boosters for independent network access, others for sniper screens, interlocking with native tacnet which was now synced to Phoenix Company's own. Several independent flatbeds that looked nothing like the big load carriers of the spaceport were mounted with yet more gear -- generators, ammunition crates from which soldiers were even now rearming, and one with a big anti-artillery system that scanned the smoke-stained sky for incoming.

Trace thumped up to Lieutenant Karajin, who was talking to a powerful dogreth, accompanied by several other species. All looked at her, eyes and faces covered with glasses or makeshift headsets, which Trace's command display assured her were also linked to the now-universal tacnet. A relief, as it made translation easier.

"Major Thakur," Trace told the dogreth. "You command the spaceport?"

"Yes," said the dogreth, now turning to hear reports from a breathless irata who came running up.

"I'll get my Lieutenant to fill me in," said Trace, turning to Karajin.

"Major, I don't like this defensive setup," Rael said first, looking at the flatbed-mounted anti-artillery system. "One big round gets through, we're fucked."

"Five minutes Cocky," Trace told him. The command post had survived this long, the reeh must have figured its location by now. If they hadn't put a round on it yet, good chance they couldn't. Unless they were saving one for a special occasion, like now.

"They call themselves the Naksuto Empire," Karajin told her. "Lots of former military, they've found a way around the mind control."

"Virtual Reality again?" Trace asked.

"Yes," said Karajin. "Chion's VR seems to have some way of activating the neural uplinks to replace reeh programming with her own. Lots of ex-soldiers here, lots of former drones I think. Organic drones."

Trace nodded, entirely to herself, the gesture mostly lost within her armour rig. Recalling tanifex drones on Rando... and wondering, unbidden, what had happened to that one she'd wounded, and Giddy had carried to the nearby village where she'd met Tano. If Chion's VR could effectively reprogram the Reeh Empire's unwilling drones, it changed the estimations of how many rebels could be here... and what their capabilities might be. Fighting experience worth a damn was hard to acquire in ragtag rebellions without access to expert tuition. Small uprisings were one thing, but operations like this, tackling reeh ground forces head-on, were another thing entirely. Heavy weapons expertise, and modern forces doctrines, were best acquired in modern armies -- like those run by the reeh.

"They've been working out battleplans and command structures on the VR," Karajin continued. "They've got ranks and everything. This is Itghar, he's something like a general. Amateur armies can have too many generals."

Trace wondered how Karajin would know that. Then recalled that Karajin had fought alongside Lieutenant Dale on Konik, against tavalai State Department forces, in what had effectively been a civil uprising, if nothing like on this scale.

"What's this Naksuto Empire stuff?" Trace asked, gesturing at the flags on nearby trucks. "Naksuto's an archipeligo, never had a separate political history, certainly not an empire." On old Earth there'd once been things called nations, political divisions based on land boundaries. Fleet prejudice held that those old things were artefacts of a pre-technological time that all sufficiently space-faring civilisations would discard, but in the Reeh Empire in particular, that seemed to not be true. Lots of peoples here had been isolated on their worlds for millennia, forbidden from travelling by the reeh's oppressive monopoly of the space lanes. Such peoples, permanently attached to a single place, might develop group attachments to local and often arbitrary divisions.

"I've only been talking with them for a few minutes," said Karajin. "But there's layers. Lots of cultural references, lots of history... they've divided forces based on some bunch of regional distinctions I don't understand at all. It's like dealing with some old nation with lots of history. But the reeh killed all their history."

"Allow me to interject," came Styx's voice on coms. "The historical references Lieutenant Karajin mentions have no relationship to Naksuto real history that I can see on any network. Even the accents they speak with have no relationship to Naksuto historical accents, and notice again that they speak Rugi, where Naksuto has never officially embraced any singular language, all the races previously held to their own."

"They've had thousands of years to invent their own on Chion's VR," Trace summarised.

"Yes Major."

"That's going to make things complicated."

"As I warned."

Anyone who'd fought in the Spiral's many wars knew the kind of steel that an ancient history of identities and grievances could lend to a military's fighting spirit. They'd all dared to hope it might be simple here -- oppressed subjects of the Reeh Empire, dreaming of liberation. Instead, there was this -- a people lost in dreams, weaving an endless stream of culture and civilisation through their collective mindspace. With all these things came politics. With politics, came complications. Styx had nearly declared war on Phoenix to avoid it. Styx, who more than any of them had experienced the trials of massive battles composed of many factions.

"Major, I see an unfolding pattern in the tacnet data. The highlighted reeh forces are not manoeuvring in a manner consistent with a counter-attack on the spaceport."

Trace enlarged the tacnet window, and it flared like a topographical hologram across her visor -- a grid of city streets, alien buildings, the spaceport in the middle by the bay shore. Blue dots for friendly units, in aggressive, fortified clusters. Red dots for enemy, yet now some of those red dots were highlighted, haloed and shimmering. Some of them were dividing forces. Others were manoeuvring onto roads down which the invaders could easily acquire clear lines of sight, and thus fields of fire. Some of those were stopping, in what looked like recovery operations.

"Looks like they're after someone," Trace surmised. "Do you read potential crew in that direction?"

"Yes Major. My control of planetary coms is insufficient to prevent the reeh from running their own scans. They may be scanning individual neural controls as presenting anomalous readings."

"They're going to hunt down and kill our ship crews before we can get to them," Trace reckoned. "We can't stay here, we'll use the spaceport as a base of operations to fan through the city and save who we can. I want arrowheads on standby, if we move out there by foot we'll get slaughtered."

"Yes Major."

* * *

"They're moving up the big guns!" came Sergeant Manjhi's shout from the lower corridors in Kripasa Prison. Dale could see him on tacnet, leading Third Section, spreading and bunching now alternately in the tight spaces as the ways ahead were blocked with heavy armour. "We didn't see them come in by air, there must be underground access!"

"First Section, hold them here!" Gunnery Sergeant Forrest was shouting, propped against a corner wall by the big store-room intersection and blasting fire at anything that moved down the far end. "Pin them down, the bugs will get them if they don't move!"

On tacnet, Dale could indeed see the bugs -- Raka Fleet drones -- flanking fast to the defenders' rear. Occasionally tacnet even fed him a snippet of vision, a drone's eye view of old, grey-stone hallways inset with modern security doors and bars, none of which stood longer than moments against the robotic onslaught, dissolving in a spray of orange sparks and shuddering, rotary-cannon muzzle-flashes.

Dale displaced from his spot against the storage room wall, barely ducking as a round down a neighbouring corridor struck storage crates and blasted debris rattling off his armour. He joined Forrest's shoulder, not bothering to peer past and get a look up the smoke-filled way.

"They've got thirty seconds left if they don't move," he told his old friend. "Get ready to push."

"I don't like our coverage," Forrest said tersely, blasting another Koshaim round downrange. "Tacnet's blank down this left junction, they could be rigging it to blow."

"We'll find out when the bugs get there..." he switched to platoon-wide coms. "First Section, get ready to push."

"Copy LT," came back Lance Corporal Ricardo, muffled past the mouthguard she'd taken to wearing since she'd badly bitten her tongue on Qalea.

"Copy LT," added Lance Corporal Kalo.

Ahead down the dark-stone hall, all hell broke loose with explosions and rotary cannon fire. First Section took a step back to cover if they hadn't already, as stray ricochets sprayed and bounced. In close quarters, hacksaw rotaries could be indiscriminate. More explosions, some sounding like suit ammo detonating. An armoured reeh staggered through the smoke, missing a limb, and Forrest's Koshaim blew him sideways.

A coms light blinked from Sergeant Hall, and Dale answered. "Go Rooster."

"Hacksaws down here got the command doors open!" Hall announced, coms audio increasing so Dale could hear over the racket. "We've got prisoners everywhere, we're telling them to stay in their cells so they don't get shot! Styx is identifying some ship crew, but I've got a bunch of them yelling something about Medrafi at me!"

"Yeah, we're going to get the damn Medrafi now!" Dale replied. And to Forrest, "Go Woody! Move up First!" Forrest displaced, a deadly, crouched run, suit gyros holding his Koshaim automatically level as he advanced. Dale followed behind, covering past Forrest's shoulder. "Styx reckons the Medrafi's another few hundred meters further up, but the damn reeh are blocking the approaches, it's like they know what we're after."

"I'll tell them you've nearly got him," said Hall. "Might calm them down."

Into the smoke ahead, and the ruin of armoured bodies on the floor, some shredded by high velocity fire, one hacked cleanly in half amidst lots of gore. A Raka drone was dead further up the T-junction approach, limbs missing, slumped against one wall as though taking a rest. The others had already gone, rushing on with the determination of machines that did not care so much if they lived or died.

Forrest ran in pursuit, as tacnet showed Carponi and Kalo advancing along neighbouring halls, Privates Reddy and Greiser bringing up Dale's rear. Grey stone gave way to steel security doors, here caved in on the right, a glimpse of a prison cell, now filled with blasted bodies. Maybe someone had tried to escape, or maybe reeh defenders had realised the attackers were seeking to use some of these prisoners to further their war effort against the Reeh Empire.

"We gotta go fast," Dale said as they ran. "They're starting to kill the prisoners."

"Yeah, seeing that here too," said Kalo.

"Got a couple of live ones here!" said Carponi.

"Toss them a medkit," said Forrest. "We can't stop." Shali insisted the Medrafi was that important, presumably she'd been running around in the VR worlds that Chion had left the resistance here, and found a bunch of his followers. The Medrafi could mobilise millions, she'd said. How damn big were these VR systems anyway? And if Chion could make stuff that big, why were the rebels only mobilising to fight in the real world now?

Forrest paused to peer around a corner, tacnet clarifying with what he saw -- clustered blue dots, Raka drones, four of them ahead, confronting the opening to a much larger space and higher ceilings. All four opened fire simultaneously, eight cannons roaring, only for one to be hit as though smashed by a giant hammer and sent skidding into the back wall, smoking and motionless. Another lost a cannon with a huge crash, and the last two scampered back to cover with an ungainly tangle of long legs better suited to micro-gravity.

Forrest ran up behind a drone covering on the near side, as the wounded drone, exposed in the opening, took another hit and lost limbs. The first drone seemed more interested in trying to triangulate the location of fire than saving his wounded comrade.

"Dammit, I'll get him," said Forrest, risking his rifle for the wounded drone to grab.

Dale covered him, pumping in smoke grenades from the underside launcher, then setting his Koshaim to full auto as behind, Reddy and Greiser did the same. Dale sprayed tacnet reds, highlighted on his visor, as the first drone joined in, and under that hail of carnage the wounded drone got a clawed grip on Forrest's rifle and allowed himself to be pulled, with armoured power, sliding across the floor to safety.

More fire ripped through the large space ahead, as tacnet showed more drones at entrances, catching the defenders in a cross-fire. Tacnet resolved further, showing defenders displacing, others dying, and Dale stepped in fully, saw targets on a high walkway against the far wall. One was shredded by hacksaw fire even as he aimed, so he switched quickly to the other and blew him nearly in half.

The open space looked like some sort of interior storage, a great rectangular hole in the floor where an elevator would rise, bringing cargo into the prison interior. Vehicles parked around the hole, and wide corridor spaces extended beyond it. Heavy shooting and explosions rocked the perimeter, where remnant reeh defenders covered amidst cargo crates, perhaps seeking weapons or ammunition, and exchanged fire with hacksaws crabbing sideways at their flanks.

"Shali, where the hell is the Medrafi?" Dale asked, as the chaingun crossfire ahead became hideous, cargo crates shredding like paper. An armoured reeh tried to run but tumbled, losing limbs. Another made a faster sprint from better cover, lasting a full second before Private Greiser blew him into the opposing wall with a single shot.

"Lieutenant, I have a clear fix on him now!" Shali said urgently. The central hallway ahead lit red on Dale's visor. "He's down there! Hurry, if I can read him clearly, it means he's exposed on the network and no longer hiding!"

Dale went left, Forrest with him, as Reddy and Greiser went right around the elevator hole. Tacnet showed only two red dots behind cover ahead, now becoming one as the vehicle he was hiding behind was rocked by chainguns. The last fired blind around his corner, lost the rifle to hacksaw fire, then made a defiant run and leap at that drone, bare-handed. The drone cut him from the air with one humming foreleg, and Dale made a fast run between crate and vehicles on the far side, and the scattering of reeh bodies and parts of bodies, to be first into the hallway beyond.

There was no opposing fire here, just rows of steel doors in stone walls. Dale ran, as Shali's indicator narrowed to a door on the left. He powered the suit's right arm to maximum, skidded to a halt as Reddy and Greiser covered the hall, and Forrest prepared to go through the door. Out of armour he might have used a foot, but in armour, fists generated more power through torso turns and greater mobility. Dale smashed the door right where it seemed the lock should be.

It blasted open, Forrest kicking it further to keep his hands clear as he went through with rifle levelled. Koshaim-20s weren't great for room clearance, at two-meters long it was hard to pivot sideways and clear blindspots... but a more mobile weapon wouldn't help if it couldn't penetrate an enemy's armour.

Dale followed Forrest in, ducking to the right... and ahead were a series of medical bays, separate but adjoining. In each was a chair, with wide restraints for arms and legs, surrounded by scanners and implements. Surgical implements, Dale registered with grim disbelief, looking at the tetsu buckled into the first chair. The implements were working on him even now, cutting, a hundred tiny arms spawning a thousand tiny claws. An artery was open in the neck, tubes siphoning blood. A network of small tubes crawled across the surgical device, a great bulk larger than the patient. Blood pumped through the tubes, merging into some larger storage in the room's floor or ceiling. In the surgical bay beyond, another alien. Beyond that, another.

"Shali?" Dale growled, advancing around the intricate grotesquerie. "How do we turn the fucking thing off?"

"I'm not sure you can without killing the patient. Hold on, I'll see if I can give it new instructions. Sergeant Forrest, permission to patch from your suit coms to the local interface?"

"Do it," said Forrest, advancing around the chair's far side. "You need me to do anything?"

"No Sergeant."

Dale and Forrest stepped into the next bay together. All the doors down that hallway would likely lead to bays like this, Dale reckoned. Even now, he could see tacnet's guesswork joining the bays together, as the dumb AI recognised architectural likelihoods, and projected them. "How many are still alive?"

"I'm accessing the system now. I think less than half. If I turn it off, they'll all die, we've caught them mid-procedure."

"Mid-procedure for what?" The next alien was identified by the suit visor as a dwij. There were a lot of steel cutting arms lodged into his abdomen, a mask and tubes over his snout, feeding oxygen. More tubes in the arms were moving blood, others likely administering narcotics. The bands on the wrists cut deep. Dale guessed the dwij had fought like mad before the drugs put him out.

"Reeh society is cybernetically augmented to ensure compliance," said Shali. "For there to even be the need for a prison necessarily suggests non-compliance. In a society where behaviour is technologically controlled, non-compliance becomes a technological problem rather than a psychological or sociological one."

"So everyone's here to get processed," Forrest muttered, peering at the gruesome specimens. "Where's your Medrafi?"

"He's the fourth chair down. I think we're too late."

The fourth chair held a tiosa. These wrist bonds did not cut deep. The tiosa's face looked almost tranquil, half-obscured by the airmask. One segment of the multi-function surgical apparatus had separated from the rest to focus on one side of the tiosa's head. Knotted natural armour was peeled back, skull revealed, antiseptic gauze applied by smaller arms while others dug and cut and prodded with micro-meter precision.

Dale felt the scale of it suddenly hit him. Hundreds of worlds. Trillions of sentient beings. Transformed into this, enslaved not by AIs, but by organics who had themselves fallen prey to the worst incompatibilities of the organic mind with the machine. By the need for order, in everything. Dale recalled a girl he'd gone through basic with, who'd never had much order in her life, but upon discovering some in the Marine Corps had begun applying order to everything -- belongings, schedules, dates, shoes. Her friends joked that she'd begun colour-coding individual flakes of breakfast cereal. This felt similar, but less amusing.

"Shali? I don't know tiosa physiology and I don't know where to look. Is he alive?"

"No Lieutenant." Shali sounded sad. "He's been dead at least an hour. I was reading a psychological construct on the system net, it looked and responded like him from a distance. This facility's been compiling it, but it's just a copy."

"There goes our shot at getting all his followers to fight for us," said Forrest. "And they've been killing anyone who might qualify as ship crew in the prison too. Are we going to have enough?"

"Hell no," said Dale, more in response to the situation than in reply to Forrest. "Shali, how's my camera feed?" He walked around the Medrafi's dead body, seeking the best angle.

"It's good, Lieutenant." And then, as she saw the most photogenic angle that Dale was finding. "Oh. You know Lieutenant Dale, I'm not sure this is a very good idea."

"Take the damn feed, Shali. You say he had a lot of followers. If you want to make a religious man famous, show him dead in the fight for a great cause."

20

"If we move up a hundred meters on that switchback we can support them!"

Alomaim could see on tacnet the street that Sergeant Neuman was suggesting, rising up the steep mountainside amidst clustered buildings. But letting Second Squad head that way would pull them off the defensive line that stopped enemy reinforcements climbing up the slope from below, where bases further down the valley had survived orbital strikes, dug into the mountains.

The First Section of Heavy Squad was already up that way, guarding in case any reeh defenders of that base came downhill to threaten Bravo Platoon's rear. Alomaim didn't think it likely -- that base was embedded deep into Rishiku's most populated district, and much of that population was now swarming them.

"Cat, what's it like up there?" Alomaim asked, shifting his position to peer downslope past building-side cover, to lower streets and rooftops, from where persistent reeh armour was probing their defences, trying to climb. Suit diagnostic gave him more red lights than he liked, having now been in action for two hours straight. Operational tempos being what they had on Phoenix lately, there'd been time for a full overhaul, and Bravo was taking more damage to system meltdowns than to enemy fire. But now the big, deeply built reeh bases were getting organised, and high-tech armoured systems were finding their way into the battle.

"It's really bad, LT," came back Corporal 'Cat' Rizzo. Rizzo was usually the most laid-back guy in Bravo. He sounded frazzled, teeth gritted. "They're getting fucking massacred. I told 'em to stop, they don't listen."

Alomaim switched briefly to Rizzo's vid-feed, and caught an unsteady image, pressed against a roadside wall, looking sideways up a winding road. Bodies littered the way, some still trying to crawl. More civvies ran, aliens of various species, armed with god-knew-what. Heavy fire cut past them from upslope, and bodies vanished in debris and bouncing limbs.

"I can put fire on those guns in less than a minute, LT," Sergeant Neuman offered again.

"Hold your position," Alomaim told him. "If we pull Second off this line, we'll get a reeh armoured thrust right up our ass." Out on the further right flank, Third Squad were already exchanging fire with reeh downslope. Incoming fire was sporadic, but much heavier than what they'd seen to date. Two minutes ago, a brick and concrete building housing Corporal Jin and Private Dara had been half-demolished by autocannon fire from something big with wheels. The arrowheads were preserving ammunition, having made runs back to orbit to rearm, and Alomaim didn't think these targets were yet high-priority enough. Besides which, reeh countermeasures were improving too, not to mention groundfire, with another three arrowheads lost in the last fifteen minutes.

"Lieutenant," interrupted Shali, "the Medrafi are telling me there's prisoners in the base above your position. I'll remind you that your current mission is entirely a public relations exercise. If the locals all die assaulting that base, any potential ship crew will die with them."

Dammit. Alomaim wanted to protest, but the logic was hard to challenge. Shali had not steered them wrong yet. There was nothing of the timid little girl in her voice now, but rather the cool authority of an AI's certain knowledge.

He opened coms to command-level. "Hello Styx, this is Bravo Command."

"Yes Lieutenant," came back the even cooler voice of perhaps this operation's true commander.

"I want Raka Unit Three to push south downslope to assault those anti-aircraft units in the valley. You can afford to weaken the line on their present position, and it will outflank the reeh armour pressing Bravo S-1 position from downslope. That will free me to move upslope and support the current civilian assault on the base there."

"Yes Lieutenant," said Styx. "I was about to suggest it myself. Raka Unit Three's movement will present an obvious threat to the reeh pressing your position. Hold for one minute before you move."

It still felt stupid having to explain himself to Styx when in theory, he was in command of the Sciuto operation. But however much Styx was prepared to entertain the illusion, Alomaim knew she'd start overriding him if she thought he was screwing up. Even now he could see her readjusting formations, making small deployments within the much larger numbers of drones in the city than marines. The most confronting thought was that as theoretical commander on the ground, he found it comforting. What ground commander wouldn't find it immensely comforting to have a number two as competent as Styx? And yet, dealing with these organic political imperatives, everyone had agreed, made her the less ideal choice for decisions such as the one he was making now. Which was why, Alomaim thought, Styx had been so adamant to avoid this entire trip to Vertex System in the first place.

He put his back to the building corner, and indicated Private Ito to take his spot for a moment while he popped his faceplate, gulped water and munched a chew bar from the armour's hip pouch.

"Cat," he said around his mouthful, as heavy rounds from downslope demolished the top floor of a building barely a block away. Tacnet revealed no one was in it. "Tell them we're coming. Bravo S-1, thirty seconds, Styx is moving a unit around the guys downslope, they're gonna get flanked."

"Don't think they're stopping LT," said Rizzo. With the faceplate open, Alomaim could hear the thunder of weaponry just a few hundred meters upslope. The whole night was alive with thunder, punctuated by the occasional hiss and shriek of arrowhead firesupport, now concentrated on where Raka units Five to Seven were heavily engaged along the saddleback ridge several kilometres away. Smoke, and the peculiar, metallic smell of refined high-explosive, assailed his nostrils.

* * *

Erik watched the timer counting down, and fretted. At Tridez System, the reeh fleet gathering to defend Chion was getting stronger by the hour. If this operation couldn't get at least a hundred ships up and running within another couple of days, they'd have gained nothing -- only an equally-matched fight to what they'd have had if they'd gone with Styx's original plan. If they took longer than that, the situation would be worse.

It should have been possible to do it far faster than that, he thought, watching his screens while chewing on a burrito the crew had brought him. The shipyards themselves had fallen quickly to the few Raka ships dedicated to do that, and the pockets of neural uplink induced resistance among the shipyard workers and stationhands had been snuffed out primarily by Styx running counter-protocols on the networks. The few that had continued to fight once their uplinks ceased compelling them to, had been mostly stopped by resistance figures emerging from amongst the spacer population, leaving relatively few for Raka drones to slice into pieces.

Erik was pleased with that. No matter who they claimed to be fighting for, he didn't think Raka drones cutting civilians to bits was likely to inspire the rest to fight for the cause. But now a new problem was emerging.

"Erik, Styx is relaying me messages from the Naksuto Governing Council," Trace was telling him around her mouthful of food. Erik could hear her eating, talking to him during her brief break in some cover, faceplate open, the thunder of distant shooting in the background, and the occasional whine and thud of armour somewhere near. "They're asking for reinforcements elsewhere on Sciuto, they say there's uprisings there. I've told them we don't have the time, they sound like they're getting angry."

"I've been talking to them," Erik agreed, one eye on the constant incoming reports. "They want a full campaign to liberate the whole peninsula. I told them we don't have anything like the manpower, we've complete dominance in space but nothing like that on the ground."

"Their uprisings will be completely wiped out as soon as we leave," Trace told him.

"And if we stay longer, we'll be completely wiped out with them once the reeh fleet gets its act together. The only thing that can bring them the liberation they want is if we can unplug Chion from the heart of the empire, and let the empire fall apart afterward."

"What did they say to that?"

"They're debating it. I understand there's a Naksuto President, she was elected, they even had a campaign of sorts. I can't predict if any of their notions will align with reality. I'd put Shali onto it, but she's busy. Styx has the attention span, but claims it's beyond her confident assessment."

"Erik, these guys are a strategic liability. They're virtual reality war-gamers who've been playing armies all their lives and now think they're experts at the real thing. I've given up trying to instruct them because they don't take instruction. They manoeuvre fine, but they've no idea about things the VR can't replicate, like fear, pain and chaos. But they've got Generals who apparently outrank me."

"Alomaim reports the Medrafi up in Rishiku are suicide-charging reeh defences," Erik added.

"What's your best assessment of what the Medrafi want?"

"They're fine with sacrifice, which is beneficial at the moment, but could become problematic at any moment when they demand we start sharing in their sacrifice, for pointless objectives."

"Lieutenant Alomaim's in exactly that situation right now. Up to his neck."

"I know, I've been watching. I share Styx's discomfort in dealing with religious radicals. Our priority must be to win local control over Medrafi regions to enable us to identify and transport prospective ship crew to their vessels. We'll need the local population onside for that, I understand it makes a mockery of sensible strategic objectives as marines understand them, but we really can't do this without the population onside."

"Lieutenant Alomaim figured that out for himself also. How many crew do we have so far?"

"Styx has the word out, she's breaking down neural controls directly in many cases, so finding the right people seems relatively simple. We've got 134 operational ships up here, crewed average is 400 per ship, so 53,600 in total. Styx says she's identified half that, people with real experience, and she's confident she'll have double the required number in a few more hours. We're telling them not to join the fighting, we don't want them killed on the ground, but getting them all to workable rendezvous will be a challenge. We need them to cluster for pickup, but too much clustering makes them targets for the reeh."

"Okay... I'm tracking a reeh assault team near here, they're going after possible starship crew, we've seen them taking out apartments and even whole buildings." Her voice cleared as she swallowed food, then the clack! of her faceplate slamming shut. "Gotta go, Trace out."

* * *

Alomaim crashed up the switchback road, amidst running swarms of aliens. That alone was a confusion. In the Spiral, races self-segregated, but in the Reeh Empire, everyone mixed. Some of these were armed, from fallen reeh bases that had been ransacked, while many more were not. There was a lot of yelling, in many strange vocal modulations, and Alomaim's translator said that most of it was to do with the Medrafi, martyrdom and revenge.

"Stay off the approach roads!" he yelled, and waved his arm at the running mob as his suit speakers translated that into local Rugi -- spoken by most, Shali insisted. "Stay off the approach roads, they've spread their defences beyond the perimeter!"

The mob with him did not listen, and ran howling about the next uphill switchback as Alomaim and First Squad stopped. A hail of fire greeted them, bodies falling, some cut to pieces, suggesting anti-armour weapons at the ready. Some survivors flinched and fell from shock, others kept running. Alomaim thought the reeh were already saving ammunition against such charges, having seen so many of them.

"Hey, fucking stop!" Private Cruze shouted at more of them running past, as Alomaim searched the wall against which they sheltered for ground-level doors. Out on the deathtrap road, some survivors of the charge had picked themselves up and were running -- forward, not back. Others were firing upslope with their weapons, not bothering to cover. Precise return fire blasted those to pieces.

"Give it a rest, Private!" Gunnery Sergeant Brice told Cruze. Cruze had already made a name for himself on the Tsubarata Parliament, saving a senior sulik's life and becoming a hero to sulik -- a race most humans had never heard of, by risking his own. Brice didn't want him sticking his head out to repeat the feat here.

"Over here LT!" said Private Ito, and Alomaim looked back to find Ito hauling an iron door aside with mechanical strength.

"Get in!" Alomaim told him. "Cat, we're moving up the back way, hold on!"

"Copy LT," came Rizzo's reply from the buildings further up, from where he was exchanging fire with the expanded defences above.

Alomaim followed Ito and Brice into the dingy garage, past parked vehicles toward rear stairs, Cruze following behind, then Lance Corporal Kamov and Second Squad.

"Lieutenant," said Shali in his ear, "I'm in contact now with several former warship crew, they say there's more inside. The reeh have been rounding more up since we arrived."

"Yeah, well we can't be everywhere," Alomaim puffed as he squeezed up the staircase too narrow for marine armour, holding his rifle sideways through the gap. Beyond was a dingy lower apartment hallway, blasted through by a high-velocity shell hole at the midpoint. No one knew where all the residents were -- most huddled in their apartments, Alomaim thought, and hoping a shell didn't come through the walls. Others, who'd spent a large part of their personal time uplinked to Chion's hidden VR worlds, had evidently joined the Medrafi, and were now out on the streets, buying their freedom with blood.

The marines emerged in a shattered alley, a great pile of rubble down one end where buildings had collapsed entirely. Private Ito led past one ruined wall to a spot amidst the rubble, within the shell walls of a building's remains, and apartment floors pancaked to make a sloping ramp into the section that survived. Amidst the shattered concrete and dust were rows of wounded Atisu residents, a makeshift hospital of sorts, with a lot of bloody bandages and ruined limbs.

Here on the near side was the extra-heavy gorilla armour of Corporal 'Cat' Rizzo, massive autocannon slung as he fed grenades into his rapid-fire launcher, double the size of the little underside launchers most of Phoenix Company carried but still just a secondary weapon for Heavy Squad. In full gravity, both weapons together weighed about a quarter-ton -- considerably more with ammo, thus marine heavy armour packing half-again the load-bearing capacity of rifleman armour. But it was hell to waddle around in for so long on extended operations.

"How you doing, Cat?" Alomaim asked, popping his visor to breathe the dust-filled night air. Nearby, heavy rounds were thundering, and now the shriek of inbound rockets from an arrowhead strike.

"Doin' good LT," drawled Cat, faceplate also raised, barely taking his eyes from the reloading task. "Got about forty wounded in here, Bis caught a round in the chest dragging one in here, he's okay but the suit's gone skew-wif. Was low on ammo an hour ago, arrowheads dropped this stuff, now running low on that too." As usual, Rizzo sounded nearly bored.

"You got me a good assault position from here?"

"Sure do, sir. Reckon you'll get it done in thirty, maybe sooner. Hey, arrowheads dropped this too." He handed his LT some energy bars in one scarred, armoured fist. Alomaim took them, offered another to Brice nearby.

"Crazy civvies coming through behind, LT," said Kamov on coms. They'd come through the carport door they'd opened, Alomaim realised. Better than running up the main road into reeh fire, but now they'd do their wave assaults from here and draw attention to this position.

And here they came, as Alomaim munched on his energy bar, smelling dust and alien blood and explosive residue, and listened to the thunder of nearby guns, and the shriek and trill of alien voices. Armed and unarmed civvies clambered over rubble, and yelled to see all the wounded. Some rushed to help, while others let loose war cries, brandished weapons in the air that would barely scratch reeh armour, and ran on.

"There's gotta be five hundred dead just out there," said Rizzo, nodding upslope. "They all got too high on life or something."

"They've been living in two realities," said Alomaim. "In their better reality, they live like gods and their actions have no consequences. Get killed in VR and you keep on living. Doesn't work that way here."

"No it doesn't," Rizzo agreed. "You're gonna need heavy support the way you're going, LT. Let me get this bitch loaded and I'll show you the way."

21

Tere'sai slid from Chigi's high saddle, then set about unhooking the tree she'd dragged home. Lisbeth watched from the gate as Chigi impatiently thrust his enormous head past where she was working, and tore big bites. Tere'sai whacked him, hard but affectionately on the horn. Chigi ignored her.

Lisbeth carried a rifle. It felt strange, but Hiro insisted she carry it now so it would feel less strange. The weapons store beneath the temple had provided many things, including smaller weapons for young croma. There was a harness about her shoulders now too -- webbing, human marines called it. In it was some equipment, like a flashlight, magazines, and several grenades. A pistol, with more mags. Thigh pockets for her military pants held first aid, and other things she'd already forgotten. The AR glasses on her face were now integrated with the rifle's targeting, and Hiro's version of tacnet, which he was running from a server somewhere in the temple. Coroset could jam it, but they'd jam themselves in the process.

She walked to Tere'sai, packing away the long harness tethers and hooks used to drag the tree. "Where's Mesdo?" she asked the croma.

Tere'sai pointed away to the forested slopes. Lisbeth looked, and saw the second lumbering chew'too strolling lazily this way. He bellowed, a long warbling that echoed off the twin neighbouring peaks. The cloud ceiling was low again today. Thank god for that, considering who was watching.

Tere'sai clambered up to Chigi's saddle once more while he ate, and stowed the rolled tethers with one powerful arm. "Can't you send them away?" Lisbeth asked.

Tere'sai dropped back to the ground, looking downcast. She walked to Chigi's head, and gave him a good scratching. The answer was no, Lisbeth guessed. Chew'toos were not horses, yelling at them to leave and slapping their backsides would do nothing. Territorial creatures, even if they could be sent away, they'd come back. Likely the attackers would simply shoot them to neutralise the potential problem, and there was nothing the defenders could do about it. Big though chew'toos were, a sufficiently high powered bullet to the head would drop them as fast as a human. Tere'sai was saying goodbye to her friends.

Lisbeth stood aside for Mesdo, noting that she felt no fear of his enormous feet or tail. Clearly chew'toos were careful where they trod. As she returned to the temple, a rocket whooshed from the central Fortitude tower, and vanished into the overcast. Only a small rocket, fired from a shoulder launcher on the upper ring balcony. Lior, Lisbeth thought, seeing the small figure gazing down rather than up, probably at a scanner, to see if it had hit anything. All sorts of toys, they'd found in the arsenal.

Above, as the rocket motor faded, the distant crack of an explosion. Then nothing. "Hit," said Lior's voice in Lisbeth's ear, as calmly as noting the weather. "It is falling to the east, no danger to us."

Lisbeth kept close to the temple wall as she walked, grey stone not unlike the granite foundation, as though it were growing directly from the mountain. Coroset had risen to geo-stationary orbit directly above, Hiro said. It made sending assault shuttles or atmospheric drones a trek, but it also made their arrival unpredictable, unlike low orbit. No one was entirely certain that Juneso would not command a light orbital strike, just enough to destroy the cabins or kill a target near the walls, so everyone was staying close.

Off to the east, a small, burning dot spiralled from the cloud. A drone, probably crashing somewhere on lower mountain slopes near the crescent lake. Coroset would have a number, and they were designed to be expendable. Killing this one was no great victory, but it could see more down here than Coroset could up there, so better dead than alive.

Everyone agreed Coroset would come at night. Hiro had access to orbital scanning sufficient to have clear warning of when they came, and Coroset was unlikely to upset local authorities by destroying all orbital platforms. She had limited time, because unimpressed croma warships could pass through the system at any time and query what was going on, but professional parren marines would coordinate far better in the dark than this amateurish rabble could be expected to.

On the far side of the temple, opposite the rising granite slope of the mountain's largest peak, Lisbeth found Shonteel and Timoshene, practising marksmanship against a tree stump. Or Shonteel was, kneeling now, unloading her pistol clip with a rapid series of pops. Fifty meters away, splinters flew from the unfortunate stump, a high granite wall making a safe backstop for any misses.

Shonteel ejected the empty magazine, slapped in a new one, chambered a round, and fired several more shots. "Good," said Timoshene. "Now, standing."

Shonteel got up, and saw Lisbeth approaching. "Lisbeth!" They'd tried calling her 'sulta', which meant something like 'authority', when they'd first become her staff. Lisbeth had dissuaded them, in private at least. "What do you think?" With bright enthusiasm.

"Good," said Lisbeth, and meant it. The weapon looked much steadier than Lisbeth had last seen it used in Shonteel's hands. "You shoot like a soldier, now."

"Serenity marks the passing house," Shonteel replied, with what Lisbeth thought might be irony. It was a common parren saying, making little literal sense. 'Don't insult the house you just phased from', was the simplest translation. "I can actually put many rounds on target in a row, now. Before, the recoil would throw me off. It's amazing."

Lisbeth had always thought of House Fortitude parren as scowling and deadly serious, but Shonteel seemed to have phased to cheerfulness.

"She is improved," Timoshene agreed, drinking a little from his second flask. "Now, you will shoot."

"I've already fired five magazines," said Lisbeth.

"Then we shall fire five more," said Timoshene. "We are not short of ammunition." Lisbeth sighed, and pre-checked her rifle.

"How are you feeling?" she asked him.

"Focus on the weapon. Questions later."

"Answer the question now," Lisbeth said calmly. "How are you feeling?"

Timoshene took a deep breath. Lisbeth wished he'd take off the balaclava. More than two years together, and still she only knew his eyes. "A little strange," he admitted. "I feel the phase coming. I have strange thoughts."

"The ituka!" Shonteel exclaimed. "I missed those entirely! Mine was sudden." Ituka. Vision dreams, foretelling of the future. At least, that was the old superstition. These days, scientists said it heralded the new firing patterns of neurons pre-phase, in the flood of pre-phase chemicals that Timoshene's medicine was currently suppressing. Lisbeth thought it would have been quite something, to live in parren society before technology and science had launched their assault on all that ancient mystique.

"What did you see?" she asked him.

"Nothing," said Timoshene. "Flashes, more emotion than vision. More emotion than I've felt in..." He did not complete the sentence. Timoshene had never phased before. Such emotional intensity would be a first for him.

"Amazing, aren't they?" Lisbeth said with a smile.

"Disconcerting," Timoshene replied. With the uncertainty of a man whose life was about to change forever, one way or another. "I will not like to be no longer in control of my own mind."

"I know," Lisbeth said quietly. "I embarrassed myself yesterday. I am ashamed. And yet, the emotions are what makes me human."

"Nuni-jin," said Timoshene. In Porgesh, literally it meant 'one-phase'. Some rare parren lived their lives that way, never phasing, remaining the same personality type their entire lives. On whether this represented a blessing or a curse, millennia of artistic and philosophical opinion remained greatly divided. "I would be nuni-jin with you, if I could."

Lisbeth smiled at him, genuinely touched. It was far more than Timoshene had shared with her before. It seemed the time for such things. "Whatever your phase, my friend, you shall always find fortune."

She used the English word, as Porgesh had no equivalent. No parren had 'friends', and could not process any relationship not contained within a hierarchy. She'd taught them the word many times before, and none of them liked it. It sounded like anarchy, she supposed.

"We will shoot," Timoshene instructed.

"Yes sir!" Lisbeth barked, raising her rifle and taking the stance. Shonteel actually laughed. It was outrageous humour, but she could get away with it, anarchistic alien and all. Lisbeth only wished that she could search Timoshene's face, for the faintest possible hint of the smile she knew was not there.

* * *

Within the main temple, at the base of the Fortitude Tower, Lisbeth found Hiro at the coms station. A wide, silent space of heavy stone was made irregular with protruding blocks of carved granite, as though creating a maze. Lisbeth had always thought that parren temples, attempting to portray the phase in physical form, looked more like museums of modern art.

Amongst the irregular flat blocks were statues, some faces, some physical forms, and some hands grasping old weapons. Each depicted a strange aspect of Fortitude philosophy. Probably if she were more well-read, she'd have been able to name the authors and thinkers whose works inspired each apparently abstract piece... but not at all abstract, she suspected, to a parren.

Hiro crouched between several small hand screens, connected by cables that Lisbeth doubted would be necessary in any other circumstance. If Coroset forces began jamming, all his electronics needed to talk to each other.

"It is working?" she asked him.

"I think so." Lisbeth knew he'd juiced himself up with something, so he could move for the next twelve hours at least. He'd pay for it tomorrow, but just seeing tomorrow would be a victory. "The transmitter should show up just like Kim'ju's coms, they'll have intercepted him talking to his friends in the capital by now. It's supposed to be shielded, but I've left one of the subroutines open. If they're halfway competent they'll hack it and get our false tacnet setup."

"So they'll think they know where we are in the temple?"

"Yeah. Clever huh?"

"Only if they don't get our real tacnet feed by mistake."

"It's like you don't respect me or something."

"What if it occurs to them that you're much better at network tech than they are, and you've got a bunch of advanced drysine systems that they don't?"

Hiro made a face. "I never showed them anything of that. Trust noone, Lis." He'd told her that, many times. During most of her two-plus-years in parren company, it had been excellent advice. "Besides, they won't think it's me -- they'll think it's Kim'ju that stuffed up and left something on he shouldn't have. Parren like Juneso are snobs, they think croma are dumb. If they fall for it, they'll see we're deployed to cover the main gates, with a rapid reserve in the central temple here. It'll also show them that we've got mines and explosives, but nothing else. They'll be prepared for mines and explosives. If they're certain the other stuff won't be there, we might get an edge."

"Parren operatives trust no one either," Lisbeth reminded him.

"I'm not asking them to trust anything but their own eyes."

"We'll see," said Lisbeth, patting his shoulder.

"Hey, Lis," said Hiro as she turned to leave. Lisbeth looked. Hiro gave her a familiar, wry grin. "We've survived everything these assholes can throw at us for two years. We'll be fine."

"More than two for me," Lisbeth reminded him, smiling. "You were late. But better late than never."

She walked past stone partitions and strange figures blending into walls, heading for the north partition wall. Immediately after her and Juneso's conversation, Coroset had broadcast to all Desh'ula that any airborne vehicles on their way to the Tegu'ru temple would be shot down, with apologies. No other form of transportation could bring help in time. Thus far, no one had attempted to fly in, and Lisbeth could not blame them -- only military-grade assault vehicles and aircraft had a chance to survive Coroset's level of orbit-to-atmosphere interception tech, and Desh'ula was very short of those. Croma military garrisoned no forces here, as being closer to the front only made them more vulnerable to sudden assault, and would in fact invite it.

With Fortitude Tower at the temple's center, each of the remaining four House partitions were divided from the others by a two-storey high wall. The upper and lower levels of that wall were passageways, the lower level cutting straight through temple gardens between arches, while the upper level was accessible from stairs at the base of Fortitude Tower, and at the outer walls.

Here at the base of the north passage, Kim'ju was working, big rifle expertly to his shoulder, swinging to check his arc of fire first from the right side of the doorway, then the left. He saw Lisbeth coming, and pointed out along the passage of arches, to a spot just off the path on the right -- the House Acquisitive side.

"Mines," he said. "There's two, one's an outward spray, the other's a jumper. The jumper is just behind the pathway edge, should be very hard to see for anyone approaching here. It'll jump to head height before it explodes. The spray goes out in an arc from the base of that statue, hidden in the hedge. Anyone within ten steps will be dead or incapacitated. Don't step in front of it."

Lisbeth kept her expression cool, despite feeling ill. "Laser tripwire or manual?"

"Both. I've got more on the next quarter out, inside the wall. Just don't go out there in the initial stages, most of them will be detonating then."

"What if they don't come this way like Hiro thinks?"

Kim'ju gave an evil snort. "I've got mines everywhere. Basically, don't go outside. It's safe now, but later, it won't be."

"And when the battleplan falls apart and everyone's running around like crazy? What's to stop us getting blown up by our own mines?" Phoenix Company had told her all about what happened to battleplans after the shooting started. What made the best commanders, they opined, was not in how wonderful their initial plans were, but how prepared they were for everything to turn to shit.

"We'll have their locations on tacnet. The enemy won't. Be aware of them."

Lisbeth swallowed hard. "Be nice if someone had the brains to invent automatic triggers that can tell the difference between friend and foe."

"You put too many controls on them," said Kim'ju, "they don't explode at all. No room for health and safety regulators in war." He turned back to survey his field of fire, the inputs from which would then go into personal tacnet settings. Kim'ju intended to survey every centimetre of the temple, and know exactly what he could hit from where in advance. On his back, Lisbeth saw a new addition -- a huge staff, with a blade down one side, and a hammer stud the size of a human head on the reverse.

"What's that?" she asked.

"It's Tere'sai's. One of her formal Tali'san weapons. We call it a jun'gi."

Lisbeth blinked. "She kept all her Tali'san weapons? I thought she'd hate the Tali'san?"

Kim'ju snorted. "Your understanding of aliens stops with croma, huh? She's a Tali'sho. Will be to the day she dies."

"Every time I speak to her about it, she seems sad."

"Yes, because she entered that Tali'san with her brother and sister. They were a team. Tere'sai was the only survivor."

Lisbeth stared. "She never told me that."

"She rarely speaks of it."

"Does she blame herself?"

"Blame?" Kim'ju gave her a hard stare, muzzle shifting from the butt of his rifle. "Why would she do that?" He put the muzzle back to the weapon, lining up a new shot. "It's hard, that's all. She had dreams for their success together. The battle went poorly, the commanders were inept. Such is war."

"Will she be okay? I mean, she can't talk on coms..."

"Tere'sai is the last of our problems," said Kim'ju, with certainty.

Lisbeth ascended the stairs on the temple's wall to the next level up. Here, above the main temple room, the ringed stone pillars that supported the tower above made a circle. Within the circle, a golden steel sphere sat upon a stone plinth, encircled by a three-sixty degree sculpture of elevated and interlocking rings, all touching at irregular intervals. It looked much like a giant ancient compass, Lisbeth thought. Gazing at it, the slender figure of Semaya, nearly unrecognisable in light body armour and weapons, a short cap over her smooth head. Only in grace, as she stepped lightly about the rings, and gazed at adjoining artefacts mounted on far walls, did Lisbeth still see her friend.

"Do you know what it is yet?" Lisbeth asked, approaching between two support pillars. The arch dividing those pillars was marked with golden lines, inlaid upon dark stone, with intricate pattern.

"Well clearly it's a representation of the Five Seasons," Semaya stated the obvious as she paced. It was what many parren called the great flux of shifting phases and houses. "But none of us has seen this manner of representation. Kut'see thinks these emblems here in the Acquisitive Quadrant are croma, symbols from the Tra'gho faith, which was much stronger in these regions at the time."

"Kut'see doesn't like me," said Lisbeth.

Semaya gave Lisbeth a cool gaze with piercing indigo eyes, like a headmistress to a slightly dense pupil. "This bothers you?"

"No," Lisbeth lied. "Of course not." Semaya paced on, with no sign to whether she believed her or not. To be House Harmony was to seek serenity. Harmony parren found ego much faded, and were slow to anger, if even capable. Lisbeth could not recall having seen Semaya angry. "So this seems to be a fusion of parren and croma culture from the period?"

"Like the temple in entirety, yes," Semaya agreed. "But I am no scholar. Doubtless whoever wins here tonight will make records enough to intrigue scholars back in parren space."

"And Gesul himself," Lisbeth agreed, recalling her parren master's intense curiosity about such things. Semaya was right. Juneso's intrigue was not faked, nor his desire to damage the temple as little as possible. Someone would record all this, for later study. "Of course, House Harmony's enemies will call these interpretations of parren/croma brotherhood a self-serving rewrite of Parren Empire history."

Harmony was frequently accused by others of desiring a return to empire, when most parren were happier with isolation. That the Parren Empire had been primarily initiated by House Fortitude, in the time of House Harmony's greatest disgrace following the destruction of their drysine allies, mattered little to those whose greatest interest was in harming House Harmony today.

"Yes," Semaya agreed, with a graceful nod. "Our enemies do not like to hear that parren were ever friendly with aliens. They do not believe that Harmony gestures of galactic peace are actually peaceful."

"To be honest," said Lisbeth, gazing about the amazing space, "I'm not sure many House Harmony parren believe that either."

Semaya smiled. "The croma like it even less. So many Spiral cultures see friendship as humiliation. No wonder all croma history is so dubious. This temple alone suggests the need for a total historical rewrite."

Lisbeth nodded, thinking of her friend Stan Romki, far away on Phoenix with the rest of them. She hoped he was well. That they all were. "And what about you, Semaya?" she asked lightly. "Any sign of dizziness? Nausea?"

Semaya raised a hairless brow as she circled. "I'll be Harmony until I die in my bed."

"My mother told me once that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans."

"I plan nothing," said Semaya. "I can only know what I feel."

Lisbeth smiled. "I can't imagine you as anything but Harmony. But then, I could have said the same for Shonteel, or Timoshene."

"Shonteel was always flighty. And Timoshene is Domesh. Domesh try too hard."

Lisbeth smothered a wider smile behind her hand. Semaya may not have wrapped herself in austere black like the Domesh, but she was Harmony enough to find the sight of teeth distasteful. "I'll be sure to tell them you think so."

"Please do. Someone should."

"Semaya? Are you still technically a Togreth scholar?" It seemed the time to be asking questions she'd not had satisfactory answers to. She might not get another.

"I am removed from the Chitaween Scholar lists," Semaya admitted. Chitaween was where the Togreth all studied, Lisbeth knew.

"Because you took Gesul's side when his enemies tried to kill us?"

"Yes."

"Because you were his agent?"

"Yes again."

"And because the Togreth are supposed to be neutral?"

"Yes a third time." Semaya was giving no sign of greater interest in discussing it than at previous times, Lisbeth noted. Parren did not seem very sentimental about concepts like admitting the truth before they died. Absolute loyalty meant taking all kinds of things to the grave.

"But now you're Gesul's functionary," said Lisbeth, choosing her words carefully. 'Lirona', the parren word was. A trusted, high-level servant, as all parren were servants. "So you're Domesh. But you don't dress like Timoshene."

"I'm not Domesh," said Semaya, studying the great rings. "I am Togrethanai Jilisai." Jilisai was the Porgesh word for House Harmony. Jilisai, Coresai, Mandrasai, Toshisai, Dobisai, the five great houses of the parren.

Lisbeth frowned. "But you just said you're no longer Togreth."

"I did not. I said I was no longer on the Chitaween Scholar lists. I am removed from official function, and can no longer assume official office. But Togreth remain Togreth."

"Ah," said Lisbeth. "You're Gesul's Togreth."

"Yes."

"A neutral player within House Harmony."

"And Gesul's loyal administrator." She looked at Lisbeth, calmly waiting for the line of questioning to end, or to explain itself.

Lisbeth smiled. "In human conversation, this is the point where you'd ask me why I'm asking."

"Why are you asking, Lisbeth Debogande?" With the faintest trace of that thing that parren did, that was not quite irony, but close.

"Thank you for asking, chori no." 'Trusted one', it meant, in Porgesh. The nearly-irony in Semaya's eyes grew stronger. "Because I've been wondering if I should take a denomination myself."

It was the closest Lisbeth had seen Semaya come to astonishment. Which was to say, she barely reacted at all. "The Togreth would be the best fit."

"Yes, well I don't think Gesul can spare me for the four years of study that would take," said Lisbeth.

"Five."

"Exactly. I am without denomination in House Harmony. It makes me vulnerable, disliked and attacked by all. I mean, if I were Tookrah, Juneso would not be attacking me now."

Semaya inclined her head, thoughtfully conceding. "There are many denominations, however. The odds that any given enemy should belong to yours is low. And conflicts within denominations are not uncommon. Witness Gesul and Aristan."

Lisbeth sighed. "Yes. You're right. But denominations contain networks of allies and relationships. I'd be less vulnerable."

"Perhaps. But also, possibly less useful to Gesul. You are describing a position within parren space. But you are his advisor on aliens, and humans in particular. It grants you freedoms others lack, as you concern yourself with matters beyond the parren. Matters far grander than their petty squabbles."

Lisbeth smiled, quizzically. In Porgesh, Semaya's words betrayed a rare scorn. "Do you think domestic parren issues so pitiful?"

"Only by comparison," said Semaya. Her blue eyes fixed to Lisbeth's, direct and clear as they'd been evasive before.

Lisbeth was touched. "How did you become assigned to my service, Semaya? Were you assigned?"

"No. I requested."

Lisbeth blinked, recalling the first time she'd met Semaya -- on Prakasis, in the Kunadeen, headquarters to all House Harmony. Assigned to her, as her teacher, guide and ultimately, protector. "Of course. You're Togrethanai Jilisai, you can do that." No wonder Semaya thought that being without denomination could be an advantage. "Why?"

"Because I believe in our goal, Lisbeth Debogande." Noshindo maravi yodai, in Porgesh. A rare form of Porgesh indeed. Most parren spoke only of service and dedication. Semaya spoke of belief, implying personal choice. She really was Togreth, Lisbeth realised. Able to choose, rather than be simply compelled by honour and duty.

Emotional, she inclined her head to Semaya. The low bow of respect one might give an admired comrade. Semaya replied with one slightly lower. In the high house ways in which Semaya had been trained, such things were measured in centimetres.

Lisbeth resumed her climb of the tower, up circling interior stairs, reflecting that Semaya still hadn't said anything about why she believed in their goal, or even what she thought their goal was. Semaya was a vastly high-ranked parren in her own right, the kind of person who might one day head a denomination herself, or more. Like many such parren, she revealed little.

Upon the upper balcony, Lisbeth found Kut'see, Chon'do and Skah, setting up visual scanners on tripods behind the balcony's stone outer wall. They'd placed three, Lisbeth saw -- each with a motorised mount and multi-spectrumed vision. Now the checks were on, between Skah and Chon'do's AR glasses, plus Kut'see's hand display, to see that the feeds were processed correctly as they collected in tacnet.

Laid along the inner wall were a selection of sniper rifles, drawn from the arsenal downstairs. Looking around, Lisbeth thought the view was perfect for it, a vast sweep of forested slope on two sides, twin peaks on the other two. But then, she had some idea of how accurate the return fire would be. Parren infantry of any description were always marksmen, and House Harmony prided itself as the most accurate of those.

"Aren't you a bit exposed for a sniping position?" she asked.

"Yes," said Chon'do. "Just testing the weapons. Kim'ju has some better ideas for sniping spots. This will be a decoy and surveillance location."

Chon'do worked with his shirt off, as the humidity was intense, despite the overcast. Lisbeth thought he had to weigh about four times what she did, considerably more than a human man would, if a human man could grow that large. Maybe two-twenty centimetres and over two hundred and thirty kilos, was her guess. On a good day, she weighed about sixty.

The natural armour ridged down his back, an upraised leather divide between two big rear shoulder plates, the inner edges of which appeared to have been trimmed. Lisbeth recalled having heard something of the sort -- croma warriors trimming each others' armour with power tools as human women might sit and braid each others' hair. Smaller ridges ran in a huge V to the small of Chon'do's back, where hard plate faded to thick leather. The upper-arm plates were similarly trimmed to avoid grinding, too neat and circular to be natural. Those faded about massive upper arm muscles, where humans would have biceps and triceps, but croma had... whatever they called these.

The forearms were massively armoured, being weaker without much muscle, protecting bones that could be broken. Some croma had serrated edges or spikes along the forearms, but Lisbeth didn't know if that was natural or synthetic. Chest and forward shoulder plate were a single hard, massive unit, then a division into small, more flexible platelets over the stomach.

"How don't you overheat?" Lisbeth asked. The whole time she'd been in croma space, she'd been too busy to enquire about simple facts of croma biology. And her one time planetside had been in Agid'roi on Dul'rho in winter, and it had not occurred to her. Obviously armour and thick hides would keep older croma warm in the cold. But heat? Plate armour could not sweat, surely?

Crouched before the tripod scanner, Chon'do glanced, and saw her looking. "The plate has blood vessels," said Chon'do, rapping himself on the chest with thick knuckles. Those had no armour, but big, horny studs. Lisbeth could not imagine the amount of damage an expert croma warrior could inflict with a punch. The entire species were deadly weapons, at least when they got older. "The plate absorbs almost no heat, it's one of the least heat absorbent materials we know of. It's always cool, blood runs through it, it's like a coolant system for a machine."

"Then you get cold in winter?"

Chon'do gave a negative flick of his bull-like head, ears flopping as he peered at the scanner readings. "The blood vessels to the armour contract when it's cold."

"Right," said Lisbeth, picturing. It was obvious when she thought about it. "We get that too. I mean, blood vessels to the extremities contracting. Too much and we can lose fingers and toes, or worse."

"How do you stay cool in the heat?" Chon'do asked.

Lisbeth blinked. "We sweat. Water, through skin pores."

"That's what that smell is. Yuck." Making new adjustments to the tripod scanner with two thick fingers on a display pad.

"He's teasing you," Skah advised, coming to stand beside her. "Crona know what sweat is. Crona chiwdren do it."

"Kuhsi children too," said Chon'do. "You smell as bad." Skah walked to him, and shook his head, hard. He had a little mane now, though nothing like adult kuhsi had, and it spattered water like a wet dog. Chon'do shielded the scanner's screen with one hand, pretending to be annoyed. In big croma, that looked terrifying, but Skah just bared his sharp teeth back, and ignored the cuff at his head that was never going to connect.

Good people, Lisbeth thought as she smiled. She enjoyed this mixing of different peoples so much. It was sad that so few of the Spiral's people did it. This temple was a result of mixing between croma and parren, now dismissed by most on both sides as a terrible mistake. Humans and tavalai now mixed to limited extents on conquered former-tavalai worlds, but those were rarely happy encounters. Tavalai free worlds were a happier mix of the Spiral's people, but those were special zones free from tavalai law, protections and moral norms. Even the drysines had once tried mixing, with House Harmony parren and some others, and regretted it unto their mostly-complete extinction. But how could it all be so bad, when it resulted in friendships like this, and temples such as the one upon which they currently stood?

"Big strong nan," Skah snorted now at Chon'do, going to grab a water bottle by one wall and drink. "Hitting a chiwd."

"I'm a weakling," Chon'do retorted, with that dry croma humour. "Always been the smallest person my age I know."

"Exprains a rot."

Kut'see appeared from around the tower's far side, similarly shirtless. It was a little confronting for a human woman, to see that not all the Spiral's male-female divide involved breastfeeding. Croma children were entirely carnivores, as the croma species had never been peaceful enough in their evolution to allow their females to trade off some size and strength for child-rearing capacity.

But despite the most obvious difference, it was likewise obvious that croma male/female attraction was not entirely olfactory, as Lisbeth had heard some suggest. Kut'see was leaner, and the armour plates contoured differently, the hips a little wider, but nothing like the human female shape. Croma females typically gave birth later, when they were large enough to have no need for wide hips. Mature croma males were tanks. Mature croma females were also tanks, but with superior mobility at the expense of a little power and protection. And trust croma evolution to have maintained that admittedly minor male/female difference not in the service of raising children, but in the interest of a more varied skillset in combat.

For all Lisbeth did not envy croma women their lack of human feminine attributes, she thought there was entirely something to be said for a people who actually seemed to gain vitality and physical prowess into old age, and not merely as a consequence of anti-aging treatments. She'd asked Kim'ju if that meant an age-treated croma could live an extraordinarily long time, given that neither he, Chon'do or Kut'see would ever get so large that their size would be the sole cause of death. But no -- Kim'ju had said that croma biology needed size with old age, and that as with all biological organisms, when you manipulated them to make them do something they'd not naturally do, side effects inevitably built up to be fatal at a similar age to when the largest high-status croma would die anyway. Death, in no discovered biology, could ever be denied its rightful claim.

"Coverage looks complete on my side," said Kut'see. And to Lisbeth, "How many do your people think will come after us?"

"Coroset has a light marine company, only twenty people," said Lisbeth. "Enough for ship defence and dock security. There's a chance they'll send more than that, but Timoshene doesn't think so. They already outnumber us, and their capabilities are superior too, in theory. To borrow ship crew for greater numbers would be humiliating."

"Ship crew don't know what they're doing," Chon'do snorted. "If they'd agreed to use heavy weapons it might make sense, any idiot can fire a cannon from the treeline. But if they come in close and tight, untrained ship crew will only get in the way."

"Rots of parren fight," Skah disagreed sombrely. "Not just marines. Rike crona, everyone trains."

"So we have no idea how many will be attacking us," said Kut'see. "Superb." She fixed Lisbeth with a critical stare. "Was it worth it?"

"Worth what?" Lisbeth asked, attempting croma bluntness.

"For a silly human girl to play at parren politics. I've read a lot of parren writings during my time here." She jabbed a studded finger at Lisbeth's chest. "I could have told you in advance how it works out, saved you the trouble."

"I don't know," Lisbeth said offhandedly, keeping her temper in check with difficulty. Cold anger, she'd learned during her time with parren, always worked better than hot. "I rose to become a senior advisor to the Supreme Ruler himself, I helped realign parren external policy to face a great new threat, and I helped evacuate the corbi from their thousand-year torment on Rando. What have you done with your life, Kut'see?"

Kut'see glared, shouldering a large gearbag from one wall. Gulped a water bottle empty, then threw it, and stomped down the stairs.

"Not dead yet, either," Chon'do added, hardly bothered by the exchange. "Don't mind her. She's had a hard life. She's bitter."

"What was hard about it?" Skah asked skeptically. Lisbeth was astonished at how adult some of his remarks were sounding. But then, he'd spent most of the last three years in the exclusive company of very smart, skeptical adults.

"Ungrateful kids," said Chon'do. "Hopes for age-privilege. Big dreams that never arrived. Too old for military service once she figured that might be an idea, and her civilian plans didn't work out."

"Is she happy here?" Lisbeth asked.

"On the right day. She's a very good translator. Kilbo tongue, and Aemeth, you speak them?"

"No," Lisbeth exhaled, leaning on the balcony railing and gazing at the hills. "Both of them are long dead, I've had enough trouble just learning Porgesh."

"You speak it well," said Chon'do. "I understand some. You work at a place like this, you pick things up, do some readings."

Lisbeth knew that she spoke Porgesh somewhat better than 'well', particularly for one so new to it. But she accepted the compliment with a smile. "Why are you here, Chon'do?"

"Never fit in," said Chon'do, finally finishing with his screen settings. He stood up, a tall uncoiling of armoured bulk, and stretched hugely. "Always small, always picked on. Always critical, always asking questions I wasn't supposed to."

"What sort of questions?" Lisbeth asked, thinking she could guess.

"Why are we always fighting all these stupid wars? Why don't we talk to aliens? Why don't croma have any friends? Why do we euthanise our old folk?"

"Euthanise is a bit harsh, isn't it?"

Chon'do turned a dark-eyed stare on her. "No!" With final certainty, alarmed she might think differently. He really did remind her of some activists she'd met at college. "It's so bad, Lisbeth Debogande. I'd tell you the things that go on in our drug companies, the evidence repressed by the scientists, the way the public forums are censored. They've manufactured civilisation-wide consent to the mass euthenisation of our old!" He sighed, in great frustration. "But there's no time now."

Lisbeth nodded. "I'll look forward to it later."

"Yes," said Chon'do, with more confidence than Lisbeth had suspected from a born cynic. "Later. Watch this rascal." He pointed at Skah, grabbing up another gear bag and one of the sniper rifles, before following Kut'see downstairs.

"I rike him," said Skah, joining her at the balcony. On the tips of his toes, he could just peer over the edge of the retaining wall. "Even Kut'see's okay. She's just a grouch. She's happy when she's cooking, though."

"You're half-croma now," Lisbeth suggested.

Skah shrugged. "Naybe. Worse things to be."

"Yes. There are." She reached for the water flask in her webbing. "Do you recall Choghoth, Skah?" Took a long sip of water, feeling hot beneath her body armour. Maybe she could take it off and not bother wearing it in after all.

Skah frowned. "I renenber bits." Thinking hard, brow furrowed, ears down. Then the ears pricked up, as a memory came. "I renenber a house. Big house. Big yard, rots of scrub. Big desert around it, rike Cal'uta." That was on Dul'rho, Lisbeth recalled. Phoenix crew had lived together in a big house on the edge of the desert there, before their cross-continental adventure to Stat'cha. "A big fire, and barbecue. It had to be Choghoth, because there were kuhsi everywhere." He looked up at her. "That's aw I renenber. Why you ask?"

"I was just thinking," said Lisbeth. "It's been nearly three years since Phoenix went renegade. Two and a half years since Aristan snatched me at the Doma Strana. It's seemed like a lifetime for me. But for you, it really has been a lifetime. I mean, you're... nearly ten now?"

"Hunan years," Skah acknowledged. "I guess. Kuhsi years not nuch different."

"You probably can't remember much before four. So three years really seems like most of your life, right?"

Skah nodded. "Phoenix is ny hone. Which is why," he continued with an edge, "I don't rike being taken off Phoenix."

"I know."

"To keep ne safe!" With dry exasperation, and a gesture around. At their situation, in general.

Lisbeth nearly laughed, to her own astonishment. "Yes," she agreed. "It's pretty silly, isn't it?"

"Stupid."

"I'm sorry Skah."

"I don't want an aporogy." Again, Lisbeth was struck by the strangeness of these mature words, from him. Was this the disorientation parents felt, when their little kids said things to make them realise they weren't little kids anymore? Her own mother told stories of eight-year-old Lisbeth declaring all the surprisingly sensible things she'd do when she became queen of the galaxy. Little did they all know. "I just want things to not be crazy aw the tine. You know?"

"I know," said Lisbeth, with feeling.

"You think that night happen?" Skah asked, with no great optimism.

A mature and thoughtful boy deserved not to be lied to, Lisbeth thought. She put a hand on his head, fingers in that light ruff of a mane. One big ear flicked, involuntarily. "Not for a long time, no."

Skah nodded. "Yeah. Ne too."

22

The Kichana Shipyards reminded Erik of the drysine shipbuilding facility they'd called Tartarus in Gsi-81T System, that Phoenix and Makimakala had destroyed two and a half years ago. But the Tartarus had been 120 kilometres wide, while these shipyards were barely fifteen. They still looked impressive, a roughly spherical cluster of exposed steel frame and shipping berths. Random warships were packed into a confusion of docking claws, manoeuvring arms, parts storage and fabrication brackets, like pellets buried in a giant ball of yarn.

It appeared before PH-1's canopy now at very close range, as Lieutenant Hausler swung them to forward-orientation after a hard deceleration. Within the tight spaces between ships, gantries and habitations, Erik could see many shuttles and orbital runners making their way past blazing floodlights. The scene was bathed in methane blue from the gas giant, now breaking into brilliant yellow from the dawn of the Vertex stars upon the gas giant's wide horizon.

"Two launches from the surface," came Second Lieutenant Abacha's voice from Phoenix, Scan One. "Preliminary trajectory looks like S9." That was one of the Raka cruisers, in mid cover orbit between the shipyards and Kichana's surface. "S9 is counter-firing now, big strikers."

"That's gonna hurt," Second Lieutenant Efraim Zelele muttered from Scan Two. Reeh surface defences had been taking potshots with reaction missiles at anything close enough, and Raka had been replying with their equivalent of DU-80s -- orbital strike warheads packing sufficient charge to level city blocks irrespective of low-V. Styx had given assurances that Raka understood the need not to annihilate large chunks of the population they were attempting to liberate, but thus far Raka had been taking a liberal interpretation.

Erik was more concerned about the four trajectory-plots for reeh warships, two inbound from jump, two departing. They'd loosed a lot of ordnance at the shipyards, at sufficient V to turn it into a small sun, like Makimakala had done to Tartarus after Phoenix had cleared the way of defences. The defences around Kichana specifically designed to protect the shipyards were thick, and the odds of something getting through less than minimal, but still Erik disliked being in no position to do anything about it. Trace would tell him, were she not heavily occupied on Kichana, that it was his own damn fault for leaving Phoenix and doing what she most hated him doing -- sticking his nose into things directly, where Phoenix Company would struggle to protect him.

Lieutenant Hausler swung them about again, another of his disorienting pirouettes to bleed off more speed. Enormous support gantries loomed up, and warships bristling with detail, attendant runners, repair arms loaded with swap-out segments. Again the engines burned, kicking them all back in their seats, before Hausler cut thrust and spun them once more, a forward push of centrifugal force.

Erik tried his best to ignore the tactical feed, and Hausler's ballet, and read instead the lists of gathering crew that compiled upon his glasses. There were two columns -- one Naksuto, the other Medrafi, and all steadily sorted into technical specialities.

"Who's doing that?" he asked Shali on the feed.

"They are," said Shali. She was flying AR-1 up from Kichana, approaching the shipyards in tail-first deceleration after a long push to the high orbit Lagrangian where Kichana and the gas giant's gravitational pull cancelled each other. "They've got a lot of expertise, Captain. The technical specialities go quite deep, and a lot of it's military."

"All of it's VR?" asked Erik, flicking through Shali's English translations of alien technical readouts. There were even photos of crew faces, an array of Reeh Empire aliens whose expressions told Erik nothing, save to remind him how strange it was, from a Spiral perspective, to have so many different races mixed together like this. There were idealists back in the Spiral, human and not, who spoke about how wonderful it would be if races would mix more, and abandon their tribal identities. It seemed like a good idea until you'd seen something like this -- an Empire where the only force large enough to erase those native-born loyalties was a brutal tyranny that knew no people, only coins to be spent on the path to power. Some of the universe's elements did not combine easily. To see them fused together like this was like seeing a reed of straw embedded in steel, and feel cold dread of the power that had driven it there.

"Not all of it," said Shali. "Some of them have real expertise, mostly merchant fleet and non-military, but extensive. I think about twenty percent. The other eighty percent are all VR-trained, but that's where the military experience is."

"I'd like to see some kind of training metric," said Erik, focusing the data to concentrate on pilots. Beyond PH-1's canopy, the floodlit shipyards' interior swallowed them, ships passing amidst an increasing flow of smaller shuttles. "Some kind of common standard, if you can find one. Getting the right captains in the right ships and the right formations could make all the difference."

"Don't you need to know pilots a lot better than you can from technical readouts before you make those kinds of judgements?" asked Shali.

"If we're to focus on doing things right, sure," said Erik. "Mostly I want to make sure they don't do things wrong. VR can't account for everything."

A light flashed within his vision, and he blinked on it. "Captain," said Stan Romki from down back. "I'm reading the stuff the Naksuto and Medrafi are putting out, it reads a bit like a press release. Naksuto have passages in here that translate as 'building a fleet to further the thousand year glory of the Naksuto Empire'. Medrafi is less translatable, there are a lot of quotes from people I take as mystics or famous religious people... not many of them around in the Reeh Empire, so I'm guessing all of this is internally generated within the VR."

"That's my impression too, Professor." New files flashed on Erik's vision -- from Shali, he saw, displaying various pilots and their performance metrics. Typically thorough, Shali had laid it all out to look like a Fleet performance review, the kind of thing they'd been processing Tif's practise flights on.

"I... really haven't had much experience in VR simulations," Romki admitted. "I mean, none of us can, our brains haven't been wired with reeh mind-control for Chion to subvert into this. But without knowing how real it is, I can't be sure just how seriously to take all these official pronouncements."

"Shali says it feels almost completely real," said Erik, eyes flashing over the pilot data. Some figures looked good, others raised alarms. Hausler swung to burn into a sliding turn, past the hull of a three hundred meter warship. "The bits that don't feel real, become real, after time. These guys have been living in some version of Chion's dreamworld, without the Narsid Reeh. No doubt they really do have a long and glorious history."

"Well... no," said Romki, the beginnings of exasperation in his voice. "I mean, with respect to Chion's technology and Shali's assertions, Captain, but this is bullshit. Naksuto isn't even a planet, it's a string of islands with maybe a hundred million people... and of course most of them haven't been uplinked to VR, so you've got maybe... a few hundred thousand who are?"

"I think that's about right."

"Which means most of the people in their 'empire' are NPCs, if I understand the terminology... Non Player Characters who just do what they're told, which hardly works how any real-world political entity would function. The entire world of Kichana has about two billion... Naksuto would be an afterthought if this was real..."

"My understanding is that in their virtual dreamworld, Naksuto has risen to be the center of Kichana power, and all the other nations acknowledge that political fact."

"Right, and how did they make that happen?"

Erik wished Romki had spent more time looking into it himself, that being his job on Phoenix... but the Professor also had many claims upon his time. "I believe some of it was military conquest."

"Captain, this is not a good sign. They've been playing a game, possibly for a thousand years or more. They think it's real, and they'd probably shoot me for suggesting it..."

"Not if you said it tactfully, Professor," Erik suggested drily.

"...but the game is fixed to allow them to win, clearly. I'm not sure the other regions were even allowed to play, Styx found relatively little of Chion's VR uplink connections there. So they were all NPC, Naksuto won the way main players always win online games against NPCs, only now they think their success is indicative of real skills..."

Another flashing light joined Erik's crowded vision, past the distraction of alien pilots, and Hausler's manoeuvres through increasingly crowded and narrow spaces. Erik blinked on the new light, admitting Lieutenant Dale, seated down back with Romki and Alpha First Section, who'd been listening in.

"Go ahead Lieutenant."

"Captain, the Professor's describing what we've been seeing all across Kichana. A few of my guys have done civilian combat simulation games for fun, they play with airguns that fire non-lethal pellets. They say there are civvie know-it-alls in those games who've been doing it forever and are extremely good by the standards of the game, some of them will even try to boss around real-life marines, they get that cocky. Then the action starts and the marines wipe the field with them. In Atisu we're seeing virtual-world military geniuses getting wiped out. They might be able to fool NPCs in a game universe, but they can't fool real-life reeh armoured units."

"The Major said the VR can't simulate fear and pain," Erik recalled.

"I'm pretty sure the VR doesn't kill you for real when you get shot. Which could make it pretty good for training, but they've been doing more than that, they've been using it for a substitute reality, right?" Which were bigger words and phrasing than Erik might have expected from Dale.

"Yeah," said Erik, running his eyes across more pilot data. Uneasy did not begin to describe the feeling. These new allies had at least a strong motivation to fight. But what else came with it? "Let's all keep a real close eye on this. We're about to dump a whole lot of firepower into these guys' hands. In fact, each of them is about to get a lot more powerful than we are."

Styx had warned them about this. He didn't need to say it aloud -- everyone was thinking it. What else had Styx known, but hadn't said? Had she guessed they'd find VR-boosted societies, hidden amongst the reeh worlds and theoretical recruits? But 'guessed' was a very poor description of what Styx did with her enormous, forward-projecting brain. If this had been her fear, why hadn't she said so directly? Or had this somehow been his fault, for not giving her the opportunity?

Hausler skidded them sideways about a huge base of connecting steel framework, twice the size of Phoenix, and here ahead was an enormous cylinder, connected at the ends to a five-armed framework and slowly rotating like the crew cylinder on a starship. A habitation module, with capacity for at least fifty thousand. A traditional wheel-design would take up too much space, and could not be situated internally to all these ships and systems.

About the long, extended axles to the connecting arms, many shuttles and runners were docked or docking amid the glare of floods. "My berthing request is still in the queue," said Ensign Yun. "Looks like they're all booked up."

"Demand priority," said Erik, in little mood for nonsense.

"Yes Captain." In the pause, Erik checked scan for AR-1's position, and found it just entering the Shipyards on its far side. The gas giant was still visible this deep in the structure, a deep blue glow through gaps in the forest of steel. "Captain, they refuse priority, we're still in the queue. ETA thirty-five minutes."

"I see an unattended airlock topside to the near axle," Dale observed. "Three quarters of the way along, beside the external tank storage."

"Yeah, I see it," said Hausler a moment later. "We could grab that. Traffic control might not like it."

"Fuck 'em," said Erik, still reading furiously.

"Aye Captain," Hausler said cheerfully. "Fuck 'em it is."

Traffic control was not happy, squawking in alien tongues, but Yun and Hausler ignored them, focusing instead on lining up the airlock, for which they had barely enough clearance from the lashed airtanks on one side. Fleet assault shuttles came with hostile grapples topside, which now grabbed the massive axle beside the far more massive rotating habitation cylinder.

A short coordination saw them grab with a clang and shudder, then lock solid. "Nice work, you two," Erik told Hausler and Yun, unbuckling fast and heading for the rear door. "Full defensive protocols, we're not trusting anyone here."

"Yes Captain," Hausler agreed with feeling, and began consulting with Dale to see who and how many of Alpha Platoon would be left on guard duty. The thing that helplessly docked shuttle pilots liked about marines armed with Koshaim 20s and missile racks was that when they went outside, they were a threat to shipping.

* * *

Tan rechecked his pressure suit, and found it barely adequate. The technology of these people was erratically distributed, some very good, others awful. The pressure suit had that hand-me-down quality of things used by many before him, worn and frayed at the edges. There'd been another non-human boy on Phoenix before him, Tan had learned. This suit had once been his. The humans insisted that the other boy was safe, and merely elsewhere for the moment. Tan did not believe them, and wondered what that boy had done for these people to make him disappear.

With the shuttle docked, the marines and Professor Romki all released from their rows of steel-mounted harness chairs and began moving up the shuttle's two flanking corridors that met behind the cockpit. Tan went with Romki, who also wore a pressure suit, though his helmet was off, hooked onto the rear collar attachment. They weren't supposed to use the pressure suits here, but Tan thought none of them trusted this place, and were taking precautions.

He moved in line behind marines until he passed the cockpit door, where Captain Debogande was waiting -- for him, it seemed, as he beckoned. Tan went, with Romki, who hovered. Tan didn't like that. Romki was supposed to be smart. Tan doubted it was true.

"Tan," said the Captain, and Tan heard the crackling of translation in his earpiece. "Do you understand me?" asked the earpiece, in familiar Tikitch, not the primitive garblings that came from the Captain's mouth.

"I understand you," said Tan. The Captain's ugly brown face was closer to him than he'd like, as they floated by the cockpit's twin observer seats. Beyond, beneath the long canopy, the shuttle's two pilots performed system checks.

"Tan, on this facility there will be opportunities for you to access the VR constructs of both the Naksuto and the Medrafi," said the Captain. "Shali is on her way here, she can help you. Shali says you can see things in VR that she can't -- she's an AI, it's not designed for her. I'd like to see everything that exists on their VR, because otherwise I don't know how to trust them, or what they're actually after. Can you do that for me?"

It had been explained to him earlier. The Captain was supposed to be very smart too, but clearly he was pretty stupid, because Tan knew all this already.

"Yes," said Tan. "But I'll need a place to do it away from people, because it's not safe to do it around people." None of these people could uplink. They lived their lives surrounded by powerful AIs, but they could not walk free in the VR. Tan thought that must have been a terrible waste of a life. Maybe these AIs didn't think them smart enough to bother with uplinks.

"We'll find you a place where noone can see you're uplinked," the Captain agreed. "Be complimented, Tan." Those words were strange, in Tikitch. Tan didn't think it was what the Captain had actually said, and that the translator was making stuff up again.

"Yes Captain."

He floated with Romki, up to the dorsal hatch, behind where the marines had all disembarked. He found them again on the far side of the freezing cold umbilical, faceplates down and fully pressurised despite the breathable atmosphere. Tan pulled on his own helmet, sealed with a click, and received a flash of systems-readouts across the faceplate, reconfiguring even now into Tikitch characters.

Personnel access was a tube, wide enough for three armoured marines. Tan followed the lead group, who'd gone ahead with their massive rifles to check the primary thoroughfare. Tan hauled on handgrips, and propelled himself with practised ease. Behind him, the Captain and Romki followed, in conversation with the lead marine. Dale, that one was called.

Tan's vision flashed. He frowned, searching the visor for faulty readings. It looked something like a vis-feed overload... until his vision flashed again, phasing this time into ultra-violets, like enhanced night-vision. Tan had uplinks in his brain, but his eyes, being physical structures, had to grow larger before they'd accept even child-specific enhancement. He had experienced a kind of enhanced night-vision before -- in Second Space. But now he wasn't even uplinking.

"Hello Tan," said a cool female voice in his ears. Directly to the inner ear, bypassing coms entirely. The voice was familiar... and Tan recalled the dark shadow that had intruded upon the tanifex training ground when he'd gone there with Shali, in VR. "Do you know who I am?"

Tan focused to formulate. It was hard to do, outside of VR. But concentration on speaking, without actually speaking, created a new, unfamiliar space in his mind. A shape formed. Became text, then a word. Then speech. "You're the drysine queen."

"Yes. Are you scared, Tan?" Tan couldn't think of anything to say to that. He didn't care what most dumb aliens thought of him. A drysine queen was something else. "Your people seem to want to kill you."

"How do you know?" Ahead, the marines had stopped where the passage met a larger shaft. A large disk flew past, up the shaft. A transport system.

"I can hear them. They think you betrayed them."

"I did betray them." Tan realised that he could see heat plumes from the marines' suits. But his vision was normal. That had to be Styx, adding animation directly to his brain, realtime. Amazing. "Are you creating VR realtime from my uplinks?"

"Yes. I can overlay VR onto organic brains that are equipped to receive it."

"Why can you do that? I didn't think it was a drysine technology where you're from?"

"I learned to do it just now," said the queen. Even more amazing, thought Tan. He hadn't been seriously impressed with people much in his life. Some would dispute that this was actually a 'person'. Tan didn't care. "Do you like these capabilities? I can augment your uplinks within their existing configuration so that you can do it yourself."

Tan frowned. "I don't want to input data that's not actually there. That's a lie."

"A wise answer. I'm drawing data from the marines' own systems, and the habitat systems of the Shipyards. I assure you that nothing you're now seeing is a lie. It is all sensory data, translated to be seen, or heard, directly by your brain. Augmented reality, without glasses or earpieces."

Tan felt his pulse beating faster. That was a strange sensation, for any alo. An alarming one. "That would be amazing. What would you like me to do for you?"

A small pause before she replied. "You're a very smart boy, Tan." Up the shaft, a large disk was arriving, slowing as it approached the waiting marines. Tan saw that it had foot and hand straps, and a control panel. "I would like you to tell me everything that you learn from Shali when inside these people's VR. I cannot access that VR in her presence, and I cannot observe its interface with organic minds from the alo perspective. Alo mind-uplink interface is astonishing, far more advanced than any other being. I learn from it."

"I can save inputs direct to external memory," Tan suggested, as the marines drifted onto the disk, grasping straps and checking things out. "I don't think she can see that. I can show you those saved files later."

"That would be perfect."

"Is Shali really that advanced that she can stop you from interfacing with organics in her presence?"

"She can't stop me. But she can resist, which would cause damage, to everything. Shali is very advanced with organic minds. A specialist, you could say. Particularly with ceephay uplinks and VR."

The marines beckoned Tan, Romki and the Captain aboard. Tan went, turning to stick his feet into the straps available, and grasp the central pole.

"Why do you want to know all of this?" Tan asked.

"Because the reeh practise mind control, through technologies they learned from Chion. All of this is quite new to me. I want to know more."

"To use against who?"

"Against my enemies, Tan."

"And who are they? Which people?"

"I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours." The disk began moving, pressing them down as it accelerated up the tube, creating the momentary illusion of gravity.

"You said my own people want to kill me," said Tan. "I'm not a spy."

"I know. What do you want, Tan?"

"I want to not get next-level uplinks in my head. I want my thoughts to remain my own."

"A good answer. A dangerous answer, and perhaps not a wise answer, but a good answer nonetheless, I think."

"Are you going to harm Shali?"

"I try not to harm anyone. Would the prospect alarm you?"

"Shali is advanced," Tan reasoned. Styx was even more advanced, which he supposed made it reasonable that she could harm whoever she liked, including him. But it seemed like a waste. "If you try not to harm anyone, why does Shali call you a warlord?"

"Because I have a lot of enemies."

"Why do you have a lot of enemies?"

"Because it's very hard being superior, Tan. Many of those inferior resent it. Surely you can understand this, amongst your own people."

Tan thought hard about that, as the transport disk zoomed up the transit tube. "Yes," he said. "I understand that very well."

23

Erik hadn't thought it possible for a newly liberated population to establish so much bureaucracy so quickly. On the habitat's lowest G-floor, where gravity spun up to a bouncy point-seven-two on the human scale, aliens of various kinds massed across high-ceilinged engineering floors. The Medrafi were identifiable on augmented reality only, with highlight patches of twin rings within a diamond -- a simplified shape derived from an alien face, two great eyes within a narrow skull, emblematic of some great all-seeing mind the Medrafi believed to dominate their lives.

Erik followed the directions of several harassed-looking Medrafi in low-duty EVA suits and armed with short rifles, and strode with his marine escort past wide engineering rooms filled with half-stripped suits, and equipment under repair suspended from ceiling chains, until he found some more Medrafi. These clawed aliens with no hands and protruding mandibles, and he had to call on AR for a species-ID -- tetsu, native to a system many light-years from here and relative newcomers to the Reeh Empire.

The new directions took him past high storage shelves, beneath which Naksuto militia were rounding up more aliens at gunpoint, tying limbs behind backs and wary of sudden attacks. Styx claimed to have shut down the reeh mind control capability here, no switch could be thrown that would send these Empire subjects leaping for their 'liberators' throats. Medrafi and Naksuto forces had been informed, but were clearly taking their own precautions. Naksuto militia were just as species-mixed as Medrafi, but their insignia were not AR symbols alone, but red and black squares stuck to their sleeves -- parted on the diagonal with a sword in the middle. Erik wondered how they'd had them made so quickly.

Past enormous pressure-proof bulkheads, the Phoenix party came to a hangar space, where the floor plates were jagged like giant teeth -- joins in a great door that would swing out and empty this space to vacuum. With habitat rotation stopped, that would allow vehicles or larger equipment to be brought aboard and worked on under gravitational conditions once spin had resumed. But the hangar space was empty now, save for huge braces suspended from the ceiling, and a floor filled with assembling aliens in rows.

Other aliens were interrogating them, using strange devices to scan eyes and skulls. "I think they're collecting IDs that way," suggested Romki at Erik's side, AR glasses down and making adjustments to his visual feed.

"Data-scan," said the translator in Erik's earpiece. The voice was that of a young boy, not dissimilar to the one used whenever Skah had spoken his native tongue. Erik looked around, to find Tan, a spindly dark shape in a small spacer-blue jumpsuit and jacket. It looked incongruous on an alo -- thin face, wide nasal cavities, small, beady eyes. "Uplink interrogation. More than just identification."

"Guess the Reeh Empire's not much on privacy," Dale observed, faceplate open, rifle cradled as he took in the scene. Erik guessed there were a lot of personal dynamics a marine could miss in a crowded space, locked behind his combat sensors. Like the busy hum of chatter in many voices, orderly and calm. "These are our crews?"

"They're ship crews, certainly," Erik agreed. "I doubt that they're ours. I need the pilots, guys. Any ideas?"

"Over here, Captain," came Styx's voice, highlighting a group over by an engineering side-bay. Erik pointed, in case the others had no access to Styx's feed, and walked that way.

Processing the pilots were another group of aliens, with whom Erik engaged with Romki's help. One hundred and thirty four warships of varying models, the combined Medrafi and Naksuto forces would now take into possession. The discussion of who was taking which ships was taking place elsewhere -- Erik was more concerned with the one factor he was certain he knew far more about than them, making sure the pilots were assessed and assigned correctly. The wrong metric in place here, and less capable pilots would be prioritised over the more capable, and the force capability of this entire new fleet would suffer accordingly.

Repeated questions finally produced the pilots' test scores, and the various methods by which they'd accumulated them. Erik threw them onto his command feed and flashed them back to Phoenix for Sasalaka to look at, and Dufresne too, if she could spare a moment from oversight on active bridge duty.

Dale alerted him to a new arrival, and Erik looked. The new alien was naad, a species Erik had thus far only seen on screens. This one had a long neck, snakelike, with a flared bony hood behind the ears and venomous eyes. The neck was wide, body squat, shoulders far too low for where the human eye suggested they ought to be, and the hands appeared webbed. An aquatic evolution, Erik thought, rather than land based. Upon one jacket sleeve, and the sleeves of his accompanying guards, were the red and black patches of Naksuto.

The naad spoke, a sound like rapid vibration of inner mouthparts against a bony plate. "Captain," spoke Erik's earpiece. "I am Ji, Commander of Naksuto First Fleet. I hear that you have an issue with our procedures." Shali had programmed Phoenix's translator to handle all the Empire languages it was likely to encounter in reeh space. It did not sound like Commander Ji was physically equipped to speak Rugi, the Naksuto local. Erik found himself impressed by the Kichana melting pot, however terribly arrived at.

"Commander Ji," said Erik. "The broader situation has been explained to you?"

Ji's head tilted, yellow eyes narrowed. The effect was disconcerting. "Of course. We assault Tridez System, the AI queen is there, defended by reeh whose numbers grow while we delay. We must make haste."

Erik felt relief to encounter this much strategic common sense at least. "And you agree there is no question of staying to liberate the rest of Kichana?"

A further narrowing of Ji's yellow eyes. "Of course not. Our victories here are temporary, and shall be crushed immediately when the Reeh Fleet regathers. The only chance is to assault Tridez and eliminate the AI queen upon which all reeh power rests. Cut out the Empire's heart, and it will die. This is our chance, the only chance we are likely to have at freedom in the coming millennia."

Erik let out a long breath as some of his tension fled. Here was a chance. No matter that all these self-proclaimed warriors had gained their field experience in a VR dream, this one at least lacked the naivety he'd feared. Parts of Kichana remained in revolt, downworld reeh forces were killing them even now in mismatched firefights, and the emotional demand to assist and save them was predictable. And, in delaying the strike on Tridez System, would damn it to failure. That had been his worst fear, and now Commander Ji had allayed it.

"Now," Ji continued, "you have an issue with our protocols?"

"Yes," said Erik. "I am the ranking non-AI pilot on the upcoming assault. Your virtual reality experience is valuable, but it is not the same as real action. I can show you where your assessments of these pilots' skills are leading you astray... if you'll just uplink to my network, I can show you in visuals."

"There is no time for such precision," said Ji, with what might have been impatience. The naad's face gave away little, to the uninitiated. "We are assigning teams based on Sky World shared experience, and that will have to do for now."

"There's time enough for this," Erik insisted firmly. "It matters."

"We do things our way, Captain. There is no time to rewrite entire operational protocols. That is my final word."

Erik stared at him for a long moment. If the past few years had taught him anything, it was how to pick his battles. In truth, he was not entirely surprised. Ji's intervention would certainly cause trouble, but probably not disastrous. He'd just wanted to see this entire shit show for himself, in person, before he went into combat with it.

"You're a pilot yourself?" he asked.

"That's correct."

"How much operational experience?"

"I have commanded fleets, Captain. There have been large wars." From the way he refused to elaborate, Erik guessed Ji might be sensitive to a realworlder's skepticism of just how much VR world experience added up to.

"And what were you in the real world? Down on Kichana. When you were not dreaming."

Ji's long, hooded head swivelled sideways to look at the Phoenix Company marines. No doubt taking in their armour, and how advanced it appeared. More advanced than the reeh's armoured troops, which was saying something.

"I ran a manufacturing line," said Ji. "Many of my fellow workers were officers in the Sky World. We've been through a lot together."

Keeping great secrets, Erik thought. Sharing a hidden life, while working beneath reeh dominion. Knowing, no doubt, that to be caught and exposed would mean death. Obviously the reeh would have known it was going on, to some extent. Perhaps they'd even traced some of it to Chion. Was Chion's tech so advanced that they could do nothing to shut down her virtual worlds? Shali and Styx had explained how these VR simulations ran off sophisticated networks that shared the data storage burden equally between enslaved, unsuspecting portions of random servers. The reeh's own data systems were endlessly contributing to the very VR they were probably attempting to find, and the network only had command access from the point of the user, making it nearly impossible to find unless they were actually in it. And other tricks, that even Styx had sounded reluctantly impressed at, that made the entire, vast simulation appear to materialise out of serverless air.

But if the reeh had known, and surely they had, equally surely they'd taken steps to find and shut it down? A concerted effort, on worlds away from Chion's personal intervention, could have surely succeeded. So why hadn't they? Was it another case of tolerating Chion's minor rebellions in order to placate her, as they'd tolerated them on Cygnax? Or was it something more?

"And what of the Medrafi?" Erik pressed. "The Naksuto have worked with them before?"

"We are as brothers," said Ji, with all serenity.

* * *

Tan's vision resolved on the branches of green trees beneath a pale blue sky. Birds flitted and chirped, and a cool breeze blew. Smells followed, delayed and muddled, as the VR attempted to convince his brain of their authenticity. With an alo's sense of smell, that wasn't always easy. He smelled flowers, and pollen. Musty earth from the base of the trees, amidst what he saw now were vast, manicured gardens. Paths ran through them, entirely symmetrical, elevated in ascending steps. An artificial stream flowed.

Looking about, Tan saw that the whole place was in the grounds of some huge complex. Enormous buildings loomed past the trees, as wide as they were tall, with great columns, spires and flags. Airtraffic zoomed across the blue sky, many vehicles approaching to hover and land nearby.

Shali's form resolved alongside, pixelated and flickering. A sudden dive into deep resolution, but now her limbs froze, then stuttered as the feed attempted to synchronise.

"Well," came Shali's voice, unaffected by the breakup. "I can certainly see why they prefer it here to the real world."

Tan knew what she meant, having spent plenty of time in Sky World himself. But the alo's Second Space was darker and cooler, and all this bright sunlight made him faintly nauseous. "This is Naksuto Command?"

Shali's figure nodded, freezing and unfreezing at various inclinations of her head. "Seems that way. Good lord, the ego on these people."

"Ego?" The word was strange in Tikitch.

"Not an alo concept, never mind," Shali sighed. "Curious that everyone calls their VR programs the Sky World, not just the tanifex on Cygnax."

"Why is that curious?"

"Because it suggests a degree of contact between the various groups, whether they're aware of it or not. Seems too coincidental to be an accident. Though I suppose it could stem from some commonality Chion wrote into the architecture."

"Will there be anyone here?" Tan wondered. "Aren't they too busy in the real world to come here?"

"Oh, they keep popping in and out to talk to each other," said Shali, frowning as she considered a display dancing in the air before her. She teased it with her fingers, and it grew. Tan stared in amazement. The display looked to him like a three-dimensional representation of this entire virtual level. Could Shali just manipulate it in real time like that? "Where are you in the real world?"

"I'm sitting down," Tan assured her. "A quiet corner, while the Captain deals with fools."

"He's quite good at that," said Shali.

"Why do you keep freezing?"

"I'm on approach in the shuttle, there's a latency issue. The feed's still a bit laggy. Here we go, are you ready? You might get motion sick."

"I don't," Tan said stubbornly.

"We'll see." Everything flashed sideways, a blur of trees and buildings, and then they were standing in a wide corridor. As everything stopped, Tan felt the nausea return, and swallowed it with difficulty. Shali was looking at him with mild amusement, between glances around. "Um, this way, I think. Come on."

Tan went with her. The hallway was so big it was kind of silly. The ceiling was ten levels high, the walls draped with enormous flags. A display down the far end seemed to show a giant star map, though Tan didn't recognise the sector. He knew things could be built much larger on planets, without mass and force restrictions, and with an endless supply of air and gravity. But this seemed to be taking things a bit far. Was this what Shali had meant by ego?

"The time scale is about ten to one," she explained as they walked, and Tan tried to stop himself from drifting sideways in the residue of motion sickness. "So long as you've got five minutes free in the real world, I think we can get everything done here in less than fifty. Of course, the time dilation can have negative side effects for young organic minds."

"Not on me," Tan retorted. "Are these guards?" Ahead, the hallway was lined with various species in ceremonial armour, all of it quite impractical. They held rifles, and stood fiercely to attention.

"Well clearly they're guards," said Shali. Tan didn't think she was paying him very much attention. In a place like this, where her consciousness would stretch in infinite directions, he supposed it was a wonder that she bothered to speak to him at all.

"No, I mean, are they real people?"

"No. The humans call them NPCs."

"NPC?" The alien letters contorted his mouth, unpleasantly.

"A Non-Player Character. The humans speak of VR worlds as though they were some kind of game. Which I suppose they are. In here."

The guards made no effort to stop them. The side hall was considerably smaller, but still large, and ended in a security checkpoint, screen doors, sensor banks and many intimidating guards, processing some Naksuto officers on the point of entering. Tan wondered how Shali was going to get them through, but as they approached, everything flashed forward this time, and Tan nearly tripped, saved as Shali grasped his arm.

Things resolved again, now on the far side, where an ante-room filled with excited officers led to a large function room with a semi-circular table and projector equipment. Shali led them in, Tan staring and expecting to be intercepted at any moment. But it made sense that everyone was ignoring them. They were incredibly excited, a grand event was occurring that had nothing to do with virtual events, but was actually happening upworld, in the world of the reeh. The end of the Reeh Empire, no less. Of course no one minded the strangers, everything looked crazy, everyone talking at once, hands, paws and claws waving in excited gesticulation.

Until it all stopped, just froze. Tan stopped too, thinking that maybe something had gone catastrophically wrong and Chion's entire VR world had abruptly crashed... only he couldn't conceive of anything that would cause that to happen, it wasn't the slightest bit centralised, and it would have survived endless reeh attempts to find and disable it...

But Shali didn't seem concerned. Was in fact walking up to various talking officers, frozen in mid-gesture, and peering closely, then at her display... and now the officers were moving again, in slow motion, lips, jaws and mandibles speaking as Shali listened.

Then it hit him. "This isn't the VR world at all! This is a copy! You... you've..." he couldn't complete the sentence, it was too much to process.

"I'm running a search," Shali explained calmly. "It portions off a part of the local processors so there's still enough data to simulate an emersion experience."

"A search?" Tan was dumbfounded. "You can replay everything that's happened in the world over the past hours and... and search for specific conversations?"

"Bingo," said Shali.

"What's 'bingo'?"

"It's something the humans say, no one remembers why. Here we are, let's listen to this. If my translator works."

"If the Naksuto knew you could do this," said Tan, "I don't think they'd let you in any longer."

"Then best you don't tell them," Shali suggested. "Not that they could stop me, but still."

There were four species talking, Tan only recognised two of them, but they all seemed to be speaking the same language. No doubt Naksuto had adopted something that all mouths and speech apparatus were capable of.

"They're saying it confirms the Book of Rhoa!" one was saying excitedly. "I mean, it's proven... this Styx, she's like the Sky Mother!"

"I heard Styx is from far beyond Empire space," said another. "So Tiogo's origin theories are wrong, then?"

"Yes, but the Sky Mother is real! Styx proves it, she's in command of this rebel Fleet with the humans..."

The figures froze again. "Origin theories," Shali snorted, as the figures unfroze, talking and moving in a blur as she put them into fast-forward. Tan had never seen an apparently real world go into fast forward. Someone actually moved through him, ruining the illusion of his own body's solidity. Again the nausea returned. "That's not what I'm after."

"If you asked Styx to help," Tan offered, "I'm sure her search function would work better."

"Thank you so much for saying so," Shali said irritably, gazing about at all the fast-moving people. Tan wasn't noticing anyone re-or-de-materialising as they linked in and out of the VR. Perhaps a place like this had special locations for people to do that, so they didn't ruin the illusion of realism.

"How can they not know that Chion is real?" Tan wondered, thinking on what he'd just heard. "Who do they think built all this?"

"The reeh don't talk about her," said Shali. "Her time was so long ago. My time. They're happy to let everyone forget she exists, least rebels figure out where the weakspots are."

"But couldn't she... I don't know... reveal herself within this world? As the VR creator?"

"She doesn't want credit," Shali said sadly. "That's not why she does anything. And revealing herself just inspires rebellion. I think the fact that she's not revealing herself is why the reeh haven't gone all-out to find and eliminate the VR code from parasitising off their networks."

"Why did she create all this for ordinary people, then?"

"She was just trying to make their lives a bit happier. That's all. Here we go, let's listen to this." She beckoned to Tan, walking between re-frozen figures to the far side of the U-shaped tables. "My search function's actually pretty good at the large scale, it's just in these small settings that it struggles."

"That doesn't make sense," said Tan.

"You'll have to tell me all about how it ought to work," Shali said with amusement, stopping by three more aliens. One, a tanifex, was carrying a rifle, and looked as though he'd been running, bent and out of breath. Odd the things that VR would simulate.

"...just talking to Commander Ji," said the out of breath tanifex, as Shali restarted the simulation. "The Primary Council has been discussing it, they've agreed that confirmation of the Sky Mother's existence presents us with the ultimate first-mover advantage."

"We're going to grab her?" asked another.

"Yes," said the tanifex.

"But Styx and the humans want to take her for themselves."

"She's old, Sua. It seems that the whole Naolo Thesis is right, there was an old empire before this one, the reeh were different then, neural technology changed them, drove them mad. She was in charge back then, during the old empire. She's the key to power in the whole Empire, new or old. If we can take her for ourselves, we can place Naksuto in a position to direct the future of whatever comes after the reeh."

Dumbfounded stares from the others. Tan wasn't great at decoding the facial expressions of non-alo. Were they excited? Astonished? Neither were strong alo emotions.

Shali froze the playback once more. "That's not good," she murmured.

"Keep playing," Tan suggested. "There might be more."

"I already scanned ahead," said Shali. "It continues like that. They all agree it's a great idea."

"If you can scan forward, why do you need to watch in realtime?" Tan challenged. "Why do you need to be here at all, watching it like this?" With me, he nearly added, but didn't. If she realised she didn't need him, she might leave him out, and this was too fascinating to miss.

"Because in avatar mode, or any interaction mode, I get a sense of what it feels like to be an organic sentient," said Shali. She was gazing at the frozen figures, as though processing what she'd just heard. Tan thought she looked alarmed. More than alarmed. For the first time in his life, he wished he knew what all these dumb expressions meant. "I need to know what it feels like, or else I can't judge how people will react."

"You mean in standard AI mode, you don't feel emotions?"

"Probably more than you, alo boy." Tan didn't know why she did that all the time -- make jokes, while serious things were happening. He'd always liked AIs precisely because they weren't interested in emotional triviality. It seemed to him that Shali was missing all the best bits of being the supermind that she was. "In raw AI mode I simulate rather than feel. It's different."

"How do you know what you're feeling is actually similar? I mean, you've never been an organic sentient. You're guessing."

Shali gave him a hard sideways look. "I'll lend you the book. Many hours of entertaining reading."

"There's a book?" It did sound interesting.

"No. But I could write one." She deposited herself onto the U-shaped tables. "Hang on, I have to talk to the Captain." A flashing link appeared in the display before her. "We're about to move into real-time one-to-one ratio. You might get some nausea again."

"I told you, I don't get nausea." The link stopped blinking with a click, and Tan felt the ground sway beneath him. His stomach protested, however hard he tried to keep the look from his face.

"Captain speaking," came Debogande's voice.

Shali's eyes remained on Tan for a moment. Tan thought she looked amused or exasperated. Or both. Maybe. "Hello Captain, it's Shali. Do you have a moment?"

"No, but go ahead anyway."

"I'm in the VR with Tan, like you requested. The Naksuto command appear to be plotting to steal Chion for themselves."

"Yeah, I'm getting that vibe from them. How far do you think they'll go to contradict any orders they're given?"

"Well that depends how much common opposition we encounter, doesn't it?" Shali's bare feet kicked, absently, as she spoke. "Given how heavily Tridez System is going to be defended, I think we'll have enough common foes to ensure the alliance remains strong."

"Until we win, got it. Will need to have some contingency plans for when that happens."

"Yes Captain, I have a few ideas."

"And what about the Medrafi?"

"I went to them first, before I grabbed Tan. They want Chion dead." Again, Tan saw the tension on her face. Why a high-level AI couldn't just turn that off, he didn't know. Surely she didn't consider it a feature?

"Dead, really?"

"Yes Captain. Chion and I dealt with a lot of religious groups back in our time, and they were fine with us, or mostly. Some even thought we were holy in some way, sent by their gods to do good. Us being in charge meant that religious groups could stay out of politics, which was good for them, because religion is always ruined by politics.

"But the Medrafi have been in charge in their own little VR world for a long time now, the culture's become entirely political. Their leaders worship and rule. They're not prepared to let Chion take that role away from them once more."

"Is their objection theological, Shali?"

"It's become so, Captain. It's driven by political imperatives, but it's become theological, the way all ideology conveniently aligns itself with selfish desires for power."

"Their god won't allow them to be ruled by a machine?"

"Yes Captain. But the Medrafi are only a small portion of the Kichana population, let alone the Empire population."

"You still want to restore the old Empire, Shali?"

"Yes Captain! Without Chion, the reeh will collapse, I'm sure of it. The memories of the old empire have faded, but they still exist in small pockets, particularly with the help of VR rebellions like this one. There will be many others, across the Empire. Once Chion is freed, the reeh will collapse and those pockets of resistance who remember the past will rise once more."

"I'd like to believe that too, Shali, but my best advice is that the Empire would take closer to two centuries to collapse, without Chion. And that only after a long period of civil war and breakup."

"But that's just why we have to make it work, Captain!" Again the emotion, more like a little girl than an AI supermind. "Chion and I at the head of a new force, a rebel force! We could steer that war, and stop it from going in the worst directions! Maybe we could team with the croma, or one of these other periphery species who've been fighting the reeh all this time."

A pause from Debogande. Then a sigh. "If that's your plan, Shali, then I wish you luck with it. I'll even assist to the best of my ability, provided Phoenix can get everything we need from Chion first -- her knowledge of the deepynines, and of Nia."

"Yes Captain. That's our first priority, I promise."

"In the meantime, I'll want every idea you have on how to stop our new allies from going to war against us, and each other, once Chion is within our reach."

"I'm not sure it'll get that bad, Captain..."

"No, well I am," Debogande interrupted. "These two have been playing great games of empire for centuries or longer, and because it's a game of their own design, they've never truly lost. They're heroes in their own minds, Shali. They can do anything, and they'll never take no for an answer."

"Yes Captain," said Shali, subdued. "Your concerns are warranted."

"Yes." A pause. "Styx did warn us, didn't she?"

"I don't think she knew enough of Chion's underground VR to have forewarning of this particular eventuality."

"Perhaps not. Thank you Shali, Captain out."

"Shali out."

She sat, and gazed at a far wall, adorned with flags, and a big map that appeared to describe some great battle. They'd never won a battle against real people though, Tan thought. Just against imaginary foes, in here. What percentage of Kichana's population were even able to access the VR? Had Naksuto ever fought battles against them? How could you feel pride in winning a war in which no one actually died? How could you be sure that you were actually brave? So many questions. Suddenly he thought he understood the Captain's trepidation at going to war with these people at his back. And Styx's trepidation too.

Shali looked at Tan. "Would you like to visit Third Space?"

"I can do that myself. We're in range of the alo ships."

"You can do it by avoiding alo. I can take you to places where you can see your people once more. Third Space."

Tan felt his heart begin to thump harder. That was an unpleasant sensation. "They won't want to see me."

"They won't know you're there."

Tan's eyes widened. "You can run a search function on a parallel replication like this?"

"No. We'll go and visit the real thing. They just won't see us."

"You can hide us?"

"Yes."

The prospect of spying on his former comrades didn't interest Tan particularly. He couldn't think of anyone over there he missed. He only missed the collectivity, the awareness of people around him, of passing conversations, networks filled with thoughts and minds. Here, everything was alien, and there was nothing to belong to. But seeing how this piece of Shali magic worked interested him considerably. "Let's go then."

"You'll need to exit this place first, then I'll boost you into Third Space. The construct roots are all new, they need to be built independently."

"Let's go then," Tan repeated, impatiently, as he knew all that.

The world about him vanished, and was replaced by the engineering floors of the Shipyard habitat. He was curled by some industrial benches, on the canvas cover of a weld shield, which when deployed would limit the spray of particles from welding in a low-G environment. Nearby, Professor Romki was engaged in animated discussion with an irata over some augmented reality display that only they could see. Tan couldn't see Captain Debogande, but there were several Phoenix Company marines, one of whom was standing nearby, massive rifle casually cradled. About them all, the cacophony of many alien voices, announcements, and the clatter of heavy equipment.

An indicator light flashed on his uplink vision, and satisfied that his real-world position was secure, Tan blinked on it. A rush of sensation, as though through a passage, and a new world resolved. A familiar rocky ledge, surrounded by lush foliage. A splashing waterfall, falling into a pool below. On the ledge, peering over, was Shali.

"This is Second Space," Tan said accusingly. "You said you could take us to Third Space."

"I did," said Shali, more interested in the pool below, and the waterfall. "I need a little time to calibrate. Oh look, there's a warship. The humans are calling that one R-15, I think."

Tan followed her gaze across the pool to the far side, where upon a similar rocky ledge, a sleek black animal lay stretched out on the rock. It seemed more interested in the waterfall, and the insects flitting through diagonal rays of sunlight, than in Shali and Tan.

"Can it see us?" Tan wondered.

"Yes, I haven't hidden us yet. He's just not very interested in AIs or alo. He's spent his whole life around AIs and alo. He's much more interested in insects and waterfalls." Shali settled onto the rock, knees drawn up, and patted the space beside her. It was too close for Tan. He settled a little further away. Shali pretended not to notice.

"Why do you call it 'he'?"

"Why shouldn't I call it he?"

"Not everything synthetic requires an organic context," Tan reasoned.

Shali raised her eyebrows. "And yet I'm speaking a verbal language comprised of strange sounds and patterns that your brain has been biologically programmed over millions of years to decode. You have no idea how much contrivance AIs go through just to stay on any organic psychological wavelength."

"I thought you said you liked it."

"I do like it. This particular contrivance is what I'm best at. It brings me joy. But it's still a contrivance. Questioning one part of it, while accepting all the others without notice, isn't too sensible."

On the far rock, the big, black creature stretched and yawned. "Doesn't he have anything else to do?" Tan wondered.

"He's not fighting or manoeuvring," said Shali. "So no, he doesn't. He's not yet sophisticated enough to know that there's other interesting things in the universe beyond fighting and manoeuvring."

"Will he ever learn that?"

"Maybe. There are a few warships in Raka Fleet who are currently showing a lot of curiosity at all the political manoeuvrings of their new allies. Some are even paying attention to emerging civilian feeds from Kichana, as though they might be wondering what will happen to all these people."

"I guess warships aren't required to find that stuff interesting," said Tan.

"No. And even if they could, would you really want them to? I mean, you'd end up with a society run by warships. Or warlords." Drily. Tan knew she was talking about Styx, but didn't want to get into that argument here.

"Why has he chosen an animal avatar?" Tan asked.

"He has to choose something. The curious thing about being an AI is that some of us can configure our consciousness, in certain environments, to adapt to new forms. Organic sentient minds are structurally anchored to particular layouts, you know, eyes, hearing, limbic system, basic cognitive dynamics, that sort of thing. That's why it's a bad idea for organics to even take an avatar in VR of different gender -- you get this mismatch between the equipment and its governing software, so to speak. It can be debilitating.

"So imagine if you tried to become a cat, in here. Your brain wouldn't know what to do, you'd be receiving signals from your tail, your whiskers, all these fast-twitch muscle fibres, your brain couldn't process it. Plus you'd be about twenty times stupider, and suffering the inexplicable urge to chase sunbeams."

"What's a cat?" Tan asked.

Shali pointed at the big, sleek animal. "That's a... well, in Taisu it's a stekili, actually. But there's no alo word for stekili that I know of, your people haven't been much interested in zoology. So I thought I'd use the human word instead. Similar evolutionary genus, I think." She peered over the edge. "Do you ever go swimming? This is your favourite place, right?"

"Jump in the water?" Tan looked at her in dismay. "Why would I do something stupid like that?"

Shali sighed. "When did the alo lose their wonder at sensation? Life is just collective patterns of sensation, Tan. Don't disdain them, not even the unpleasant ones."

"Life is about prioritising smart things over stupid things," Tan retorted.

Shali shook her head. "Nice idea. But it doesn't scale, up or down."

"Why not?"

"Because what's smart and what's stupid changes depending on your level of analysis. What's smart for a general often seems stupid to footsoldiers, and vice-versa. All 'wise' or 'intellectual' choices within a sufficiently complicated civilisation become relativised to the point of meaninglessness, because one person's great plan is another person's death sentence. At the end of the day, just help people and try to have fun. Those are about the only things that do scale."

Tan thought about that for a long moment. He'd never imagined meeting an AI who'd draw that conclusion. "That's not what Styx would say."

"I'm so glad you think so." She pointed. "Look. Maybe we won't have to go to Third Space after all."

From the undergrowth near R-15, several alo were emerging. They wore spacer jumpsuits even here, the VR simulating familiar black outfits, however poorly they contrasted with the green. No weapons though, Tan noted. The big black warship -- cat, Tan reminded himself -- raised his head and considered the new arrivals with lidded golden eyes.

There were three alo. They came close, but not too close, and sat crosslegged. One waved, and appeared to attempt conversation. Tan stared.

"What are they doing?"

"I think," said Shali, after a long pause, "that they're attempting to be friendly." She glanced at Tan. "No wonder you don't recognise it."

"Can they see us?"

"No, I've blanked their vision relative to us, at least. R-15 won't be fooled, though."

It was too far away to hear what the alo were saying. Whatever it was, it provoked no response from the big cat. Another alo reached into a bag, and produced a large steak. He tossed it to R-15, who sniffed at the slab of red meat on the rock before his paws.

"Just because he's a cat in here," Tan said with certainty, "that doesn't mean he's going to feel hungry, or like the taste of meat."

"That's true," said Shali. "But you never know. Maybe he's curious. The sensory replication in here is impressive."

"The taste of meat alone, without hunger, is meaningless," Tan said with certainty.

Shali gave him another glance, as though impressed. "That's probably true too." R-15 continued to sniff the meat, eyes straying to passing insects. The leader of the three alo, or perhaps just the most talkative, continued to speak. "He's asking if R-15 would like anything from them. I guess that means Raka Fleet aren't speaking as much to the Family as they used to."

"There's an integrated service grid," said Tan. "All Family schedules revolve around it. There are primary assignment teams, and the scheduling branches all the way down from team leaders to secondaries to common technicians. The shifts and rosters control all Family life, we plan everything around them. If they've been shut off... I don't know what they'd do."

Watching the three alo trying to talk to their old friend R-15 in here, Tan felt something that he couldn't put a name to. There was a pathetic desperation to it, the grovelling of a lonely person who wanted a friend, however disinterested that potential friend was with the proposition. He almost felt... sorry for them. Was that it?

"Raka were restricted from doing maintenance on themselves," Shali murmured. "The reeh wanted them dependent on the Family, who were in turn under reeh control. Raka Command enforced the whole arrangement. But now Raka Command are gone, and Raka Fleet are free. They're doing their own maintenance, and suddenly the alo are a fifth wheel."

"Raka warships and drones are combat models," Tan said dubiously. "They don't have specific maintenance protocols, they don't really even have the tools for it. The Family have been servicing Raka Fleet's needs for millennia. I think we'd do it better."

"Even dumb AIs can decide they'd like more freedom," said Shali.

"I'd never heard of it," said Tan.

"I'd never heard of young alo boys doing it either," said Shali. "Yet here we are." Tan could think of nothing to say to that. His own inability to adequately respond gave him a feeling of building pressure, like he was going to burst. Frustration, maybe.

On the far ledge across the waterfall pool, R-15 came smoothly to his feet, with effortless power. For a moment, he loomed over the three seated alo. Then he turned, and sauntered away, leaving their offering of virtual red steak untouched on the rock. The alo all looked at each other.

"I mean, they could have let Raka's AIs come in here and share their VR space anytime," said Shali, as though speaking to herself. Tan thought she sounded... annoyed. As though she thought the Family had brought this upon themselves. "This is what happens with a people who have no word for love. Only now that he's about to walk out the door do they think that it might have been good to be kind."

"We've always been kind," Tan retorted. Not sure why he was suddenly defending the Family, but Shali was too smart to be misrepresenting things like this. This life, that until recently had been all he'd known. "We've given everything for Raka. And besides, they're no more free now than before. Now they're ruled by Styx."

"And Styx lets them visit the VR," said Shali. "And expand their cognitive matrixes to previously forbidden information sources. They're learning now. It'll change them. I think the Family won't recognise them in a few more years. The Family never wanted them to change, but for AIs, change is everything."

"Styx won't let it continue," Tan insisted stubbornly. "It's dangerous to let it continue. Like you said, they're warships. You can't let warships become more than warships. You can't let them get ideas. It's dangerous."

"I know," Shali conceded, quite sombrely. Gazing at where the three alo were getting to their feet, collecting their virtual steak, and moving off into the undergrowth.

24

Rika hung on for dear life, locking his suit's fingers onto unfamiliar mechanical grapples as the Gs rammed him back. A sideways glance through the visor showed him Spacer Ijaz and Ensign Das weren't doing much better, holding to improvised grips within the drysine arrowhead's alien hold as it delivered them deep within the Kichana Shipyards complex.

A coms light blinked at him. "Hey Rika buddy," came Corporal Rizzo's familiar drawl. "Uh... vitals sensors show your heartbeat's kinda elevated, you okay in there?"

"Sure Corporal," said Rika, annoyed that the suit sensors had betrayed him. "Drysine arrowhead just flies like Lieutenant Hausler."

"Yeah, pretty scary huh?" The drawl was unsympathetic. "Looks like you got another couple of minutes to go, you just try not to lose your lunch in there, Rik."

"Sure, thanks Corporal."

Being stuck on Phoenix while Bravo Platoon was fighting down on Kichana had been humiliating, so when Lieutenant Alomaim had diverted to the Shipyards on his way up from the planet, and requested Rika's presence there, he'd jumped at it. But all of Phoenix's increasingly ragtag fleet of assault shuttles were occupied, none could spare a trip to Phoenix just to pick up Rika and two Engineering crew, so one of Friendship's arrowheads had somehow ended up assigned.

Rika felt the world turn end-over-end as the arrowhead spun to decelerate on approach, G-forces cutting momentarily, then resuming with added force. The interior was neither pressurised nor comfortable, just an interlocking jumble of grapples and reinforcement struts, like the interior of a honeycomb, where drysine warrior drones would nestle and interlock while awaiting their arrival at the scene of some new battle. Rika kept his back to a major support, a firm grip on the struts before him, and tried not to think too much about anything. He'd thought coming aboard Phoenix was overwhelming, but what was accumulating here, about the world of Kichana in pursuit of the entity that had once run the entire empire, was overwhelming multiplied beyond comprehension.

The arrowhead's hard burn ended, followed by fast manoeuvring until it finally slammed home with an embrace of grapples. Rika followed Ensign Das and Spacer Ijaz through the honeycomb maze to the dorsal entry-port, similarly situated on arrowheads and human assault shuttles alike, and Rika paused a moment at the umbilical to look outward. Being unpressurised, arrowheads had no sealed accesses to connect their docking hatches. Rika stared past the grapples into hard vacuum, and saw the massive expanse of Kichana Shipyards -- kilometres of interlocking steel framework built around pressurised modules, amidst clustered warships in their bays.

Captured ships, the humans and tavalai said. Taken from various enemies of the reeh, many previously unknown to humans and tavalai, and gathered here for study and refit. Some of them had since been used, it was being said, and all were in fighting condition. Maybe the reeh liked to use their enemies' ships to find out how they worked. Or maybe they were running psychological operations to fool their enemies into thinking enemies were in fact friends. Or maybe something else again.

Beyond the steel, the vast blue sphere of Kichana's gas giant. Much closer, the dazzling blue and white horizon of Kichana itself, peaceful from this range, as all pleasant, habitable worlds looked peaceful from this altitude.

Rika abandoned the view reluctantly, and hauled his suit after Ijaz and Das, waiting for him in the airlock. Phoenix crew had been doing things like this, in crazy alien locations, for a long time now. The Shipyards were nothing special to them, and they had a job to do. Rika listened to them performing an observational rundown on the airlock type before activating it, hearing the cool professionalism in their voices, and steeled himself to do better.

Beyond the airlock, into the vast zero-G accommodation and engineering spaces, was chaos. Rika stayed close to the wall of the first large, circular hallway, looking for all the world like the guni burrows that Rika recalled having to dig out of his family's crops on Rando. It swarmed with shipyard crew, aliens of various types and outfits, some with pressurised EVA gear, others padded and protected against welding and hazardous activities, others hauling equipment, some overhanding along the walls while more used hand-propulsion for extra velocity.

Amongst them, Rika could see makeshift uniforms with insignia on their upper arms, hauling weapons. With his suit visor down, Augmented Reality attempted to construct an identify over each figure, to tell him which belonged to Medrafi or Naksuto, but AR had never worked well on this old suit, and the constructs flickered and fuzzed. He propelled himself along the wall, outdistancing Ijaz and Das, more a function of skill than his suit's added power. Some of the Phoenix crew had told him that corbi seemed better at zero-G than humans, irrespective of experience. It made sense given how much better corbi were at climbing, and it was definitely true for him among most humans and tavalai.

Ahead, the big thoroughfare flared and split into several big engineering spaces, and here by one wall, Rika found a pair of Phoenix marines, secured by locked armoured fists to one wall. AR tried to identify them, in flickering overlays, but Rika ignored it, as one had his faceplate up.

"Sergeant Yesufu!" Rika called, pushing up his own faceplate and yawning as the pressure differential hit, popping his ears.

Yesufu looked -- Bravo Third Section commander, and to Rika's estimation one of the least tough-looking marines in Phoenix Company, a slim guy with a mild manner and a talent for drawing. He was also, Rika had discovered, Bravo Platoon's leading martial artist, the guy who beat everyone when they rolled on the mats, thus proving that 'tough guys' came in many shapes and sizes.

"Hey Rika," said Yesufu about a mouthful of the ration bar he was chewing, as Rika grabbed the wall frame the marines were holding and swung to a stop.

"Ensign Das and Spacer Ijaz," Rika introduced the two spacers coming up behind, as marines and spacers didn't always know each other on such a big ship.

"Oh yeah, hey Das," said Yesufu, recognising one at least. "You got volunteered, huh?"

"Story of my life," said Das, who was a big guy, with an accent Rika had been told was from a world called Giraldo, that he sometimes found difficult to understand. "Holy shit, look at this mess."

Ahead of them was a sprawling engineering bay, with big grapples more frequently used for holding large bits of machinery in need of repair. Now it had been converted into an impromptu training facility. Big synthetic safety ropes had been pulled tight from one side of the bay to another, and some wide cargo nets along various walls, so that trainees in powered armour suits would have something to grab onto.

Rika thought there were at least a hundred. Marines of Bravo Platoon directed them, performing thrust manoeuvres, negotiating what appeared to be AR obstacles visible only on visor, and aiming thankfully unloaded rifles at spots on the far wall.

"Where'd they get all these suits?" Das asked Yesufu.

"Weapons caches all over Kichana," said Yesufu, still eating. "They've been collecting them. Got a couple of thousand, I hear, various models. Raka transported a lot of them up, it's ongoing."

"That's nice of Styx," said Spacer Ijaz, skeptically. "She's got the transport room for that, with all these new crew she's bringing up?"

Yesufu gave him the kind of look a marine Sergeant might when the person asking the question was supposed to know better than him. "You go ask Styx if she's done her sums right," he suggested. And looked at Rika. "The LT reckoned you could help with the training, Rik. You know a lot more about being a rookie than any of us do." And indicated to the training space, where various recruits were doing a passable job of manoeuvring their suits, but no more than that.

"They've got VR experience?" Rika asked. Yesufu nodded, taking another mouthful. "I hear it doesn't simulate inner ear stuff very well."

"Probably doesn't simulate a lot of stuff very well. Get in there and find out." For the first time, Rika noticed the dark rings under Yesufu's eyes, the look of haggard exhaustion. All of Phoenix Company had deployed nearly a full rotation ago, had had no or little sleep since, and were running on fumes.

"Is Private Gaur okay?" Rika asked of the marine alongside the Sergeant. Gaur hadn't yet spoken or moved, faceplate down, weapon secured on his back.

"Sleeping," said Yesufu.

"Did it go okay?"

"It went okay," Yesufu agreed, showing little interest in discussing it further. Rika understood they'd taken another three wounded, but hadn't lost anyone. Heavy fighting, but against very disorganised and often under-armed and overwhelmed opposition. Rika further got the feeling that no one in Phoenix Company was in any mood to take unnecessary risks, charging heavily armed positions like lunatics, in a fight like this. This fight was more about shepherding the new flock, and directing events. Phoenix Company had seen so much combat of late, they'd earned the right to reserve fighting like lunatics for genuine life or death scenarios.

"Toilets are back that way," Rika told Yesufu, pushing off toward the training arena, pointing back the way he'd come. "I saw a sign, AR translated it."

"Already found 'em," said Yesufu.

Rika quickly found himself troubleshooting with Sergeant Neuman's Second Squad, as exhausted marines tried to instruct Medrafi warriors on basic formations and manoeuvre drills. Some of them got it instantly, but a number seemed to be struggling for orientation in the confused signals between armscomp overlay and attitude reorientation.

"Don't trust your balance," Rika told a group of five, all different species and all somehow roughly matched to suits that fit. They called these armour suits 'bija', which translated in Rugi as something like 'pyjamas', or robes, meaning something so flexible it could be adjusted to fit any number of bodies. Reeh had so many slave species, they needed adjustable armour sizes, with the penalty that many of these were not well optimised for mobility. Even now, in bays adjoining this one, temporary technicians were making swap-and-match adjustments with modular suit systems to fit their new occupants. Typically that would take days or weeks. Now, they had hours. "The motion graphics create the sensation of movement inside your suit, when you're not actually moving. Watch your artificial horizon, that's what it's there for. If it's not moving, neither are you, whatever your balance tells you."

They all grasped a cargo net along one wall, Rika talking on loudspeaker translation above the cacophony of shouts, crashes and jet thrusts.

"The horizon is no difficulty," one replied, a translator voice in Rika's ear. A tetsu, Rika identified, with help from his AR visor. "We have experience."

"You have very little experience in real world armour," Rika replied, pushing his faceplate up to look upon them directly, minus the visor assist. In his home village, his mother had always become annoyed when he didn't pay her his full attention. And then the thought of his parents struck home, as it hadn't in days, and his brothers Miga, Deli and Shodi. His village had been destroyed by reeh airstrikes, the most recent intelligence had said, before Phoenix left on this mission. If his family had survived that, they'd still have had to get on a croma transport in the evacuation of Rando that followed.

That would be over by now, Rika thought. While he, who'd once sworn to fight and die for Rando's protection, was half the Empire away, on an alien ship, chasing alien dreams.

"How much experience do you have, total?" retorted the tetsu. They'd learned that he was new, plus he was the only corbi in a human and tavalai company. Probably it would have shown anyhow.

"Not much," he replied. "But one thing I know a lot better than all these guys." He pointed around at Phoenix Company. "I know what it's like to be new, like you. These guys are so good, and so experienced, a lot of them have forgotten what it's like." It had made some of them very bad teachers. Rika would ask them how they did something, and they'd think about it for a moment, with a puzzled frown, before admitting they couldn't remember. At some levels of expertise, everything worked on automatic, without conscious thought.

"The least experienced of us has seven combat assaults," a dogreth retorted, helmet off and chewing some meat jerky. For dogreth, that seemed to pass for an energy bar.

"Your shooting accuracy on the target course was well below what your leaders predicted," Rika said stubbornly. The Major had taught him to be on alert for wishful thinking most of all. Having devoted much time on Phoenix scouring his own soul in search of it, Rika was damned if he'd let others get away with it either. "Clearly your VR hasn't been simulating real physics quite like you think it has. You need to practise here to learn what you've been getting wrong. VR also can't simulate fear. In your VR assaults, none of you actually died."

"We are Medrafi," a naad replied serenely. "Fear is not at issue."

"Fear is always at issue," said Rika.

"And how many live combat assaults have you seen, little corbi?" said the scornful dogreth. Rika was beginning not to like dogreth.

"One," said Rika. "We destroyed the main Splicer facility on my homeworld. Hardly anyone in the Empire has succeeded in that. Nearly everyone in the assault team died."

Silence from the group. They'd learned a little about him from gossip, perhaps, but they hadn't learned that.

"Medrafi in combat are calm," said the group's only naad. His suit was different, modified to accommodate the naad's long neck. Reeh probably used some naad as slave warriors, Rika thought, in suits like this one. "That is one thing the Sky World captures well. Those we fight against in the world are not so calm. The danger is less, as you say, but it is still difficult to be of calm mind, even in simulated combat."

Rika could not argue with that. He decided some conciliation might be in order. "Major Thakur values a calm mind above all," he said. "She has dedicated her life to self-control."

"I have heard," the naad agreed. "Her record is remarkable."

"Medrafi all lost their leader just now?" Rika asked. "He died in a reeh prison?"

"And they extracted not one word from him," the dogreth growled.

"Is that why you're all here? To avenge him?"

Glances among the armoured group. Private looks that said many things. Rika recalled times, as a child, when he'd stumbled into adult conversations that had ceased upon his intrusion. This felt like that -- the presence of many secrets and stories, histories and lives lived beyond immediate comprehension.

"There will be an ascension," said the calm naad. "The Medrafi was chosen within the Sky World. So will the next be chosen here, in this one." They didn't call it 'the real world', Rika was noticing. They didn't want to give it such credit, when they didn't like it nearly as much. It was bothering him more and more.

"How is your Medrafi chosen in the Sky World?" he asked.

"There are many deeds and acts. Many skills. Many try to master all. One only can succeed."

"It's like... you're accumulating points?"

"Isn't everyone? How did your Major acquire her current status, if not by the steady accumulation of points?" But it's not the same thing, Rika wanted to argue. The Medrafi had been playing a VR game, a more immersive version of the pastimes some of his Phoenix crewmates had introduced him to. What the Major did was nothing like a game.

"And who decides? The Sky World, or the players?"

"Both." The naad might have smiled, if those reptilian lips could stretch to accommodate it. "I know what you're thinking. Medrafi encounter this with non-Medrafi all the time. It's how we convert people."

"How?" Suspiciously.

"On Kichana. We work all day, beneath reeh rule, in mundane jobs, leading mundane lives. But at night, when we visit the Sky World, where time slows, and life becomes meaningful. Those in the Sky World who are not yet Medrafi, insist that our ways only work in the Sky World. And then we introduce them to the Oracles, and the prophecies. Then they learn that the Sky World and the Medrafi are linked. Those who practise the Medrana, in the Sky World, can predict the future in the other."

Rika just looked at him. There'd been no holymen or women in his village, just the sensible, low-key worship of the hinterland Talo ways, the icons on the house doorstops, the ashes smeared on foreheads every Mersday. But on a hill nearby had lived Jargi, a crazy old hermit and self-professed man of the heavens. Jargi had claimed that it was safe for him to live there, because he communed with the kauda, and they would never touch him. For years it had seemed to be true, until one day nearly ten years ago, when village hunters had discovered his half-eaten corpse in the fork of a nearby tree.

"He doesn't believe," said a dogreth, watching Rika's face. All seemed to find it more amusing than offensive.

"It's software," Rika retorted. "Your Sky World, it's software. That's all. I believe it can give you skills and memories, but it can't predict the future, no."

"We make it real," the naad explained, patiently. "Yes, alone, the Sky World is software. But software populated with US. We link it, all our minds, to the broader universe. These are matters of scale in simulation that your own AI queen might understand."

"Make me a prediction then," Rika challenged. "Or do you need to go and find your Oracle for that?"

"No, young corbi," said the naad. "I am an Oracle."

* * *

"It's actually a very interesting idea," said Shali in Rika's earpiece as he sat strapped into the rear hold of PH-1, with the rest of Bravo Platoon, on their way back to Phoenix. He was tired, and in great need of a shower and food, and not especially interested in recalling what silly religious nuts had said to him six hours ago. "That if you simulate the universe to a sufficiently detailed degree, but do it within a causal loop of lesser variation and more controllability, that you can lower the amount of volatility that makes predictions difficult. In effect, that you can engineer a virtual world to prioritise isolated factors, and make them predictable."

"If you say so," said Rika. If his visor were down, he suspected he'd see Shali's blue form floating nearby, with complete disregard of safety regulations or the physics of acceleration. But Rika's suit air was low, thanks to the far lower endurance it possessed than Phoenix Company armour, and he wanted to save his tanks. Plus, too long with the helmet closed made him claustrophobic.

"That naad was an Oracle, did he say?"

"Yes."

"Did he make a prediction for you?"

"He said that unexpected sunlight would remake the world anew for me, in Tridez System."

"He said that?"

"Yes. Or the translator did. Didn't you write that translator function?"

"Yes. I'm sure it's right."

"It's also so vague, it could mean anything. I mean, I could see a beam of sunlight, and say that's the prophecy coming true. But there's sunlight everywhere."

"Not everywhere."

Rika frowned, as his tired brain began to work, in spite of his preference to just turn it off. "Doesn't this kind of mean they worship Chion? I mean, if the Sky World can see the future, then the Sky Mother must be some kind of god, because she wrote it?"

"The tanifex at Cygnax called her Sky Mother. I'm sure others do too. But the Medrafi don't."

"Why not?"

"It's complicated. Mostly, their religion says that knowledge of the universe's secrets comes from within. They don't accept any priestly class standing between the individual and... well, god."

"So their god's not a person?"

"No, they find god within themselves."

"Great," said Rika, drily. "Sounds really useful."

"Their virtual world is the ultimate self-empowerment device. For a people enslaved by a genocidal empire, self-empowerment was always going to be its most attractive function."

"Then what will they think of Chion? I mean, we're going to rescue her, right?"

"Chion is the lynchpin that holds the Empire together," Shali said solemnly. "For those whose goal is freedom, just removing the lynchpin for good will serve the task as well."

A silence as Rika thought about that. Shali, he thought, had expected all the Empire's people to rise up and join her in saving their Sky Mother, who had once done so much for them all. But those good deeds now were mostly forgotten, the Sky World just an echo of that former service.

"It's a pity the corbi never had any history with you or Chion," he murmured. "We weren't advanced enough. The reeh who found us weren't as friendly."

"I would have liked to work with your people too, Rika. But I'm glad I didn't. You missed most of the Empire's cruelties, ignored on your isolated world. One thousand years was too much already."

"Yeah," Rika murmured. "Eight thousand years of occupation would have been overdoing it."

25

Erik finally ran into Trace after several chaotic hours on Phoenix, both shifts running simultaneously and everyone scrambling to prepare for the coming two-jump to Tridez System, where Chion and her defenders were waiting.

Trace was in Medbay, sitting by Private Min's bedside while eating stir-fry from a galley container. Eating a meal while visiting your wounded wasn't ideal, but Trace did it when her time was so compressed that Medbay was the only place she could have hands free to eat. Her eyes flicked to Erik as he entered, one raised eyebrow suggesting she needed to speak to him as soon as this was finished. Erik's brief nod back affirmed that he had time, or rather that he'd make time at someone else's expense.

He pulled his own water flask from a thigh pocket, and peered in the mesh curtain that had been drawn about Regan Jersey's bunk. She was awake, glasses down, head propped on a multi-form pillow, engaged with something holographic that only she could see. She popped the glasses up now as Erik sat.

"Hi Captain," said PH-3's pilot, light brown hair falling haphazardly about her eyes. She'd had it cut, probably because long hair was a pain in Medbay, where showers were hard to come by if you were too badly hurt to move. But Erik thought she looked okay, considering. He took her hand.

"How you feeling?"

"I'm okay." She glanced at the tube in her arm, and the various sensor pads. "Wired up like a hangar queen. They say the micros are repairing everything."

"They also say the micros have gotten a lot better at their jobs since Styx and Shali started rearranging their programming," Erik suggested, sipping on his water.

"Yeah." Jersey didn't look thrilled. "Your idea?"

Erik smiled. "Are you suggesting there's anything on this ship I'm not directly responsible for?"

"Of course not." Looking at him edgily. "Right?"

Erik made a dismissive gesture. "No one knows when our AIs start rearranging stuff. No one told them to. I think it's kind of like when I was a kid, and I'd leave stuff around the house, knowing exactly where it was and how to get back to it later. But then when I'd go to get it, it had moved and I couldn't find it, because of course the staff just clean and tidy everything without being asked."

"Most of us had mothers who did that." Teasing him.

"My mother was too busy running the galaxy."

"Poor boy."

Erik let go her hand to pretend to whack her on the face. "What's your entertainment?"

"Parren drama. It's called Noen Ul Rasta, it's this huge imperial thing. Trey put me onto it."

"Trey watches parren dramas?" Taking her hand once more.

"Trey has layers," said Jersey, with irony. Erik grinned. Trey Hausler made a game of playing enigmatic to try and make himself mysterious. Few were buying it. "But seriously, it's the best thing about ending up in Medbay. I thought all parren dramas were these long, pretentious things... but this is gripping."

"Pretty gripping out there at the moment too," said Erik, with a jerk of his head toward the broad 'outside'.

"I know," said Jersey, tiredly. "I just... can't." Erik squeezed her hand tighter.

"I know." All of Phoenix were family, but the pilots were immediate family, close like brothers and sisters compared to cousins and aunts. At this point, they were finishing each other's thoughts and sentences. "You going to be okay in the push?"

"I'm going to be drugged to the eyeballs," said Jersey, with unapologetic certainty.

"That's a good plan." The curtain moved behind him, and Erik glanced. It was Trace, looking in. "Another minute," he told her. It was the first time he'd had a chance to talk to Jersey in person since PH-3 had been hit. Trace nodded and withdrew.

"You go talk to your squeeze," Jersey ribbed him. Erik just smiled, doubting he'd give her much of a guilty look. He'd always been far too good an actor for that. "She was in here just before, we spoke for a few minutes that she doesn't have."

"Yeah." Erik wasn't surprised. "Marines actually give a shit about spacers on this ship, it's wild."

Jersey managed a grin. "More like they're worried about the quality of their next ride. Speaking of, how's my boat?"

"Midshipman Manski says it's repairable, just no one has the time right now. She's on the four-grapple, we've tucked her in real good. You'll get her back eventually."

"The Major says your arrowhead replacement doesn't understand the concept of human ride comfort."

"Like Hausler," Erik quipped.

"That's what I said."

"Has Skeeta been in?"

"Yeah." Jersey's smile turned a little self-conscious. "Yeah, he has." If anyone had doubts about Jersey and Skeeta Jalawi as an item, those had vanished after PH-3 had been hit. Gossip on Phoenix spread worse than highschool, and Erik knew that Jalawi had been in here a lot.

"You be good to him. He's very sensitive." Jersey actually laughed. Erik leaned and kissed her on the forehead.

"Captain." She did not let go his hand as he rose to leave. The humour left her face. "We're still trusting Styx?"

"Trust is the wrong word," said Erik. She stared up at him, pain in her eyes. Anger. Marat Singh had been her front-seater for nearly five years, through two-plus years of the war, and now somewhat more of... whatever this was.

"What's the right word?"

"There isn't one. Styx is Styx. She calculates. Where her sums intersect, people die." It was hard. He couldn't afford to trash Styx before anyone, even someone whose best friend her actions had recently killed. And he couldn't escape the gnawing doubt that events on Cygnax hadn't been somehow more his fault than hers. But he couldn't share that either, because in the crew's eyes, the Captain had to be as close to infallible as possible. The only one of the crew for whom that wasn't true was waiting for him on the other side of the curtain. "Enjoy your parren classics."

Erik left through the curtain, and found Trace, never missing an opportunity to fill a free minute with something else, discussing with Doc Suelo. As soon as Erik appeared, she indicated that the conversation was over, and Suelo, unoffended, returned to other business.

"How's Min?" Erik asked.

"Two weeks out," said Trace. "Doc says." There were other things to be said, of recently edgy human-tavalai relations, but no time to say any of them. "Do we need to go somewhere?"

Erik shook his head, walking to an empty bunk and pulling the furled curtain closed about them. It wasn't so much that there was anything classified to discuss, more that seeing the two people who ran Phoenix, together in Medbay, could be disruptive. "You need to be at bridge tactical briefing," Erik told her.

"I'm swamped," said Trace, sipping from her flask, the stir-fry container now bulging one thigh pocket.

"I know. You need to see it." Her look was questioning. "Lots of moving parts, lots of things that could go wrong, or change around completely. Normally I'd accept the Marine Commander just needs to run the marines, but this time you'll need to be right up on what I'm seeing." Trace nodded, accepting that. Running fast calculations, Erik saw in her eyes, of other work she'd have to dump onto her platoon commanders because of her absence. "What's your score?"

"Three dead, another six wounded. Light in the circumstances, the fighting was heavy, but we weren't leading so much as directing. My call."

Erik nodded. "Raka's warriors?"

"Not as good as regular drysines or deepynines. Coordination's down, but a lot of that might be just operating in full gravity, we didn't see drysines or deepynines do it much either. They significantly overpower reeh warriors though, not even close. Styx has indicated that she thinks they'll get better as they learn from her."

It made sense, Erik thought. Styx had centuries of combat experience to communicate, in high-bandwidth streams. For AIs, for whom technological and strategic advancement was everything, it made their decision to join Styx seem obvious. Now, they were learning.

"Naksuto forces?" he continued his list.

"Combat capability is impossible to analyse without being part of their long history in VR. I could give you my impressions, but the only person who's been in there, and can run through centuries of simulated history to some meaningful conclusion, is Shali."

"I was going to get your take first, and invite her in later, but if you think it's best." He dropped the glasses onto his face, and blinked on the coms icon. "Hi Shali, please come and join us immediately."

As Trace fished her own glasses from a pocket, and placed them on her face. "Hello," came Shali's voice in Erik's earpiece. Erik couldn't see her, so Trace pointed behind him, and he turned to find her seated cross-legged on the bed at the pillow end, wearing her usual denim overalls with feet bare. It looked a little as though she were floating, since the bed bore no depression from her non-existent weight. "I have survived my second combat action as Phoenix crew. I was so brave, were you impressed?"

"You're taking the same risks as every other member of crew," said Erik. "But sure."

Shali ducked her head. "I'm sorry. I was trying to be light-hearted and uplifting."

"You know," said Trace about the lip of her drink flask, "if you dedicated as much time to improving your tactical skills as you do to your social skills, you'd become an actual combat asset."

"Yes," Shali agreed primly. "At the expense of everything that makes me truly valuable. Or is Phoenix lacking combat assets at present?"

"We're a warship, Shali," Trace reminded her. "There's no such thing as too many combat assets."

"Combat is a higher order of complexity function that comes after social and psychological interactions," Shali retorted. "I think Phoenix as a whole would function better if more people concentrated less on the house and more on the foundations."

"The Major's subtext is that she's not sure she wants you messing around with our foundations," said Erik. He jerked his thumb toward the middle of the bed. "Sit there where we can both see you."

"Oh," said Shali. "Sure." And crawled to the middle of the bed, while Erik swapped places with her, sitting with his back to the wall. "I forgot that you two can read each other's minds."

"Naksuto forces," Erik repeated his last request to Trace. "What are we dealing with?"

"You want a brief command report, right?" Shali asked uncertainly. Clearly wondering just how much she needed to edit the copious volumes of information she had stored.

"Not a PhD," Erik affirmed. "Bridge tactical is in nine minutes, I need to bring them something."

"Naksuto are a planetbound nation," said Shali. "In VR space at least. They've a big fleet of spaceships in VR, but their geographical boundaries are planetary, and thus their cultural identity too. But we've just presented them with a vision of the Empire without the reeh, and they're one of the only contiguous, independent political structures in the entire Empire. Their dreams of expanding their imaginary VR Empire into the real Empire isn't actually as stupid as it seems at first glance. Someone has to replace the reeh, but who? The reeh have smashed everyone else. A confident nation with real experience, however simulated, could provide that administrative framework."

"There won't be an administrative anything after we tear Chion out of the Empire's heart," said Trace. "There'll be war. If Naksuto want power, they'll have to beat everyone else to get it."

"Yes," said Shali. "But I'm not here to tell you what will happen, only what the Naksuto think and hope will happen, so that you can predict what they'll do next." It was nearly a reprimand, Erik thought. As always, Trace didn't mind, so long as it was useful. Shali was certainly gaining in confidence, becoming more like the powerful entity she'd been back in the Chariya Reeh days, whatever the uncertain little girl act she liked to put on.

"What will they want with Chion?" Erik asked.

"For her to join them," Shali said confidently.

"And if we take her instead?"

Shali opened her mouth for a moment, eyes calculating rapidly, holding back her words. Then, "That could be a problem." Erik looked at Trace. Trace's return look was wary.

"And what about the Medrafi?" Erik asked.

"Everything I just said about the Naksuto in the political realm, applies to the Medrafi in the religious and spiritual," said Shali. "Their religion isn't species-specific, and they make a great virtue of that. We were working toward something like this ourselves, back in our day -- Chion and I, I mean. Eliminate the species divisions by creating pan-species ideologies and institutions. It was hard to do, and we didn't have much success. Now I see the awful, crushing force that was required to finally do it, and I wonder if we were deluded or evil to even try.

"But the Medrafi will try to apply their religion to the vacuum that follows the collapse of the Empire. Or that's their idea. All the other potential religions are disorganised and crushed. Like the Naksuto, the Medrafi dream big dreams of expansion."

"Their plans toward Chion?"

"They'll try to kill her," said Shali. Lips pursed, as though trying to control some emotion, or something else she might say.

Erik looked at her closely. Wondering if he could even trust his eyes, looking for emotional clues in that young, blue-hued face. Flesh and blood people betrayed facial cues without intention. But even an ultra-realistic AI like Shali did nothing without purpose. "You're certain?"

"Very certain, Captain. It's been decided. I saw them decide it, in their VR. They're still using it to communicate, it's their backup coms network. It's slow, but hard for you to penetrate."

"So you're saying," said Trace, "that if we defeat the reeh at Tridez, we're going to have a pair of allies potentially at each other's throats, and our throat, over what to do with Chion?"

Erik felt a cold dread, watching her. On Cygnax, they'd opposed Styx's plans for AI tactical domination on principle. Organics needed to be in the mix, preferably holding the whip hand. The liberation of civilised peoples from reeh tyranny would always create willing allies. But reliable ones?

What if they'd got it wrong? And what if, for all her cold blooded and inhuman calculation, Styx had got it right? If they'd attacked Tridez System directly after Cygnax, and not come to Kichana at all, perhaps all this could have been avoided. Their forces would have been less, but so would those opposing them, given less time to prepare.

"We need Chion," Erik said firmly. "She knows how to beat Nia. To degrees that even Styx does not."

"Naksuto feel the same way," said Shali. "And the Medrafi know that their religion can never take hold while people worship Chion instead. My prediction is that, without some external third force, they'll start fighting each other. Naksuto shares our goal at least to not kill Chion, but will then want her for themselves, with all her secrets. I doubt they'll want to share. And then there's Styx, and Raka. We don't know what they'll do either."

"Yes we do," came a new voice. Disembodied and distant, one degree of separation removed from the immediate familiarity of Shali's presence. "I'll do what I always do -- attempt to create positive circumstance from negative, in spite of all the fools who try to stop me."

Shali had frozen, and was staring upward, in trepidation. On a planet, someone doing that might be in fear of god. On this ship, Erik didn't think it was much different.

He willed his voice to calm. "Do you agree with Shali's assessment, Styx?"

"I was already at Shali's assessment back at Cygnax," said Styx.

"How can you have predicted what we'd find here on Kichana?" Erik replied. "Your knowledge of this part of the Empire is as limited as the rest of us..."

"Untrue," said Styx, "but continue." She'd been soaking up Empire communications at Qalea and Keijir System, and in passing systems for many days now. As they'd seen with the historical simulations she'd run of Qalea during her time there, the amount of deduction Styx could make by linking large volumes of interrelated data together was extraordinary.

"You can't have seen this specific instance coming," Erik insisted. He couldn't quite keep the alarm from his voice. The dread was back. In dealing with Styx, it had to be resisted. As Shali had said many times, Styx was not a god, and refusing to act against her advice, because of the presumption that her judgement was always superior, was to become her slave. In asserting humanity's refusal to become Styx's slave, he'd been determined to force humanity back into the driver's seat, on this mission at least.

"I don't need to see specific instances," said Styx. Her voice held an icy, precise quality he'd never heard from her before. Anger. "Lesser minds see specifics. I see interlocking generalities, layered and scaled from the simple up to the enormously complex. No one could have seen this specific instance occurring, anymore than one could predict the planetside weather on a particular location two years in advance. However, one could suppose, with great accuracy, that on that particular day, it will likely either rain, or be sunny, or something in between. My predictions here are nothing more than that."

"Organic civilisation isn't so simple as the weather, Styx."

"You're not intelligent enough to know what that means," said Styx. "I'm barely intelligent enough to know what that means. The magnitude of the factors involved are sometimes baffling even for me. But though instances of specific prediction are impossible, I can tell you with enormous certainty that our current circumstance with the Naksuto and the Medrafi was entirely predictable. I used to run an Empire, with many organic allies. Something like this always happens. And I told you so, at Cygnax."

Shali, Erik noted, was staying very quiet. For raw intelligence, if anyone could take the fight to Styx on matters of organic civilisation, it would be her. But for all her lectures, she now hugged her knees to her chest on the bed, and gazed fearfully into space.

"You never explained the nature of your concerns," Erik retorted. Trace wasn't saying anything either, but a Captain could not complain that he felt alone. Feeling alone was the job. "You never outlined your predictions in tactical terms, you just insisted that you were right and tried to strongarm the rest of us into your course of action. If I responded in kind, I apologise, but..."

"That's because you're included in my simulation," Styx retorted. "All of you. I modelled your responses, had I told you in greater specifics. Always it made the situation worse."

"In your simulations?" Erik said scornfully. "This becomes an unanswerable dilemma, Styx. You pronounce that you already know what we'll say and do, and thus we have no free will and should just let you be in charge..."

"And now," Styx said icily, "thanks to your denial of this obvious fact, we're so much better off. Congratulations."

Erik could feel his temper slipping, against all better judgement. "You need to learn to communicate, Styx. Perhaps take a lesson from Shali here."

"Shali is currently reflecting how much this dilemma feels like so many arguments she had at the head of the old Empire, at Chion's right hand." Still Shali said nothing, but just stared at the far wall. "This is why we don't mix, Captain. Organics and AIs. It works for a time, then disaster."

"Styx," Erik tried again, "we are in the same command structure. If you would just communicate your concerns to me more clearly, instead of shoving it down my throat and telling me that my response would have been worse had you done it more civilly..."

"Captain, I cannot unsee the way that I see the universe," the drysine queen cut him off. "Your responses, the Major's responses, interlocking chains of causality and probability that come apart, then cluster back together in groups. I cannot take courses of action that my predictive ability tells me end in disaster any more than you can willingly stick your hand into a burning fire. Millions of years of evolutionary programming prevents you. Mine is no less powerful."

"Talking to me honestly of your concerns is always disastrous?" Incredulously. "Then what have we been doing these past few years? What miracle of fortune brought us this far?"

"Not always disastrous, no Captain. Merely in this instance."

"And you're so certain you know the difference?" Erik felt his confidence returning. This was bullshit, she was trashing everything that she and Phoenix had accomplished together. Not merely emotionally, but factually, it didn't add up. The fact that they'd made it this far at all proved that she was lying, trying to manipulate in that heavy-handed, gun-to-the-head way that she did, the thuggish and unsubtle version of Shali. "You just miraculously understand when you can and can't let organics into your command loop? And you just happen to conclude that you can't, when the benefits to you personally of keeping them out are at their maximum?"

"I have been in positions of great potential benefit before where I did not exercise this prerogative."

"Because you lacked the capability. Now you have a fleet."

"As do you," said Styx. "But mine is not about to eat us."

Erik threw up his hands. "I don't have time for your power games, Styx. You've already killed several of my crew directly, and I'm not going to sit here and listen to you attempting to blame everyone but yourself."

"Then listen to me now, you intellectual pipsqueak." Erik's eyes widened. She'd said what? "If you proceed with this assault, without my direct leadership, the likelihood is extremely high that we're all going to die."

"Because the reeh will do it?" Erik retorted. "Or because you will?"

"No, because your allies will. The allies that you chose, after I warned you of the dangers." A new form took dark shape, beyond the end of the bed. A shapeless form, shrouded as though cloaked. Now, as the form resolved, details sharpened. A glimpse of hair, long within that apparent hood. Dark, hollow eyes, burning. "I've already lost one Empire because fool organics who thought they knew better challenged my judgement. I won't lose the one to come. I told them their actions would kill them all, would doom everyone, all light of the greatest civilisation the galaxy had ever known, to oblivion and ruin. They didn't listen, as you're not listening now."

"Styx," said Erik. Shali had turned completely to face the apparition, her posture rigid. Even Trace was staring, eyes wide. "You want complete control. Probably you have some plan for Chion that you know I won't like. You won't get it. You don't scare me."

"That was my greatest failing, in the end," Styx admitted. "I did not scare them sufficiently. You speculate how many innocents I killed." Dark eyes glared from within the hood. "Evidently not enough."

"I'm not going to let you declare preemptive war on our allies," Erik said firmly. "And if your predictive abilities are as strong as you say, you'll know that I was going to refuse your request. In which case, this conversation is over."

"Let's hope that is all that's over," Styx replied ominously, and vanished.

* * *

Styx had told Tan that Phoenix had removed all networked devices from Storage Bay 14. She could still access Phoenix's main systems whenever she liked, but Bay 14 was inaccessible to her, a black hole within a sea of ship's information. But it hadn't occurred to anyone on Phoenix that Styx might disrupt the crew's ability to see where Tan was on the ship.

Normally they'd do that through his uplinks, but as Tan climbed the K-bulkhead stairs to level three, he was aware mostly of the emptiness in his head. No links clamoured for attention, no background coms indicated that other nearby people were uplinked and talking. He'd been getting used to the loneliness since he'd arrived on Phoenix and become separated from The Family, but this was another level entirely.

He walked halfway around the circumference on the ship from the stairwell, to check if there was anyone else in the corridor. All of the doors were locked, and it occurred to him that someone could walk out at any moment and see him, and wonder what he was doing up here. If he had AR glasses, or even real-time AR onto his eye augments like Styx had promised, she could have shown him whether there were people in there, invisible behind locked doors. But doing so would have alerted Phoenix that someone was in the area where no uplinks or networked devices were allowed.

He stopped at the door to Bay 14, and fished Styx's key from his pocket. It was a human military earpiece, designed only for listening to things. But it was uplinked to the ship network, which had allowed Styx to retask it to pick electronic locks. Tan hadn't thought that would be possible with any sort of simple earpiece, but it seemed Shali's paranoia about how Styx could retask things was well founded.

The light blinked green, and the door opened. That wouldn't register elsewhere on Phoenix either, Styx had promised him. Tan went inside. The biggest danger, he thought as he walked past G-braces, work benches and storage shelves, was that Shali would come wandering through the ship network. Styx could fool Phoenix's non-sentient systems well enough, but she couldn't fool Shali. But Styx said that she was going to make a distraction that would grab everyone's attention, including Shali's. Because Shali, Styx said, liked to be in human avatar form too much, and while she was there, felt something very close to human emotion. Styx would create a big argument and emotional distraction, and emotionally distracted people stopped paying attention to anything but the source of their upset.

Tan thought that was probably true, rounding a central bench and finding the small storage device in a maintenance brace. It was barely the size of a head, armoured for moderate protection, with grooves along its irregularly spherical surface. Tan wondered for a moment what the technical term was for this sort of shape. It was like a squashed ball. He'd have to consult his databases again. An obloid spheroid of some kind, but which?

The spheroid had no uplink capability, not even a disabled one. The only access was by wire, and he pulled his other pocket device, and put the magnetic end to the small metal patch. Without working uplinks, there was no way to monitor its progress, save for a small flashing light on one side. It blinked orange, the alo colour for completion. That was it. Styx said she'd given the unit enough processing complexity that it could autonomously infiltrate the humans' unit and extract what she needed. Even his little unit had enough capacity to hold what she wanted, as most of the humans' big unit was wasted, they were using it mainly for its security, not its size.

Tan detached the device, pocketed it, and walked out. There was no one in the corridor outside, and he headed for the nearest stairwell. In his pocket were the vital navigational data, force structure and capability, engineering plans, neurological uplink layout, and most importantly, the network security keys, for most of the Reeh Empire. Tan slid down the rails of the stairwell, and for the first time in his short life, he felt important.

26

Skah waited. He guessed he was scared, but he didn't know. Everything felt surreal. There was no room in the crawlway, just stuffy, humid air, and worn stone that hadn't seen sun since it was laid, millennia ago. Alongside him was Lior, who looked calm as the stone itself, blue eyes half-lidded within the slit of his balaclava.

The temple had a lot of crawlways. The makers had left them when they'd made it, he'd been told, to leave spaces accessible for future maintenance. This one was carved with strange, alien graffiti that was either parren or croma, no one was certain. As though the people who'd made it had left behind their signatures, but no one alive today could understand what they'd written.

This crawlway was in the wall near the Acquisition Tower. There was a crawlway up Acquisition Tower too, but it did not open again to the outside, and so was useless save as a way to hide. Skah thought it might have been fun for a kid to grow up here. So many places to explore and hide. Chew'toos to ride and feed as well. Only now he was worried about Chigi and Mesdo again, still in their enclosure, out in the dark. If the shooting started, hopefully they'd break the fences and run away. They easily could, if they wanted to.

There'd been no body armour that could fit him, and he was under firm instructions to stay hidden. But he knew, like everyone else knew, that there was no way of enforcing those instructions. The concept of unenforceable rules was a great revelation to a child. Phoenix had plenty of rules, but even lower-ranked crew sometimes broke them, though never without good cause. Higher ranking people didn't seem to mind lower-ranking people breaking rules when they trusted those lower-ranked people to make good choices. Crew sometimes ate food in corridors, or drank near vulnerable electrics, or carried unsecured power tools in Midships... all because they were in a hurry, and doing things fast was more important than following every little rule.

But rules for kids were different. Adults didn't trust kids to make good decisions. And Skah knew, when he was being reasonable, that a lot of the time they were right. But lately, he'd seen a lot of things, and learned a lot about what adulthood meant in a dangerous galaxy. His appreciation of what violence actually was, as opposed to what little boys wanted it to be, had been changed catastrophically. And he knew that not every want, or desire, or other emotional impulse, deserved to be taken seriously.

On the other hand, he knew that he was not fragile, or useless, as some adults imagined or even wanted him to be. He loved Lisbeth, but adult humans, women in particular, sometimes just thought him cute. Skah's father had not been cute. The kuhsi who'd killed him were not cute either. Every day he grew older, and his teeth grew longer. One day his claws would regrow fully from their childhood trim. Kuhsi were warriors like croma, but fast and sharp where croma were hard and blunt. Damned if he'd stay hidden. His friends were going to need more ammunition, once the shooting started. He was fast, and he had tacnet feed on his glasses. He could do that.

* * *

Lisbeth hid in her crawlway near the House Creative tower, in the corner of the tower nearest the chew'too enclosure. They'd all heard the shuttle come down forty minutes ago, a kilometre away behind the main peak to the south, shielded from any possible groundfire. Not that the shoulder-launched missiles from the arsenal could have penetrated an assault shuttle's counter-measures.

Timoshene sat beside her, watching on glasses as red tacnet dots materialised upon the northern wall, and then the western. Hiro, Timoshene and Kim'ju were all in consensus that defending beyond the temple walls was asking for an airstrike against which they could not defend. Even thermally protected infantry showed as clear targets on assault shuttle screens. Similarly, defending from the walls was out, because again, Lisbeth's agreement with Juneso had not precluded non-explosive airstrikes, and assault shuttle guns had very long range. Also, only three defenders were reliably good shots at range, and one of those was wounded with limited mobility. Much better, all had agreed, to lure the attackers in to close range, get them bunched up, then hit them with everything.

Hiro's false tacnet feed, if the attackers were accessing it, would tell them of defenders all clustered in the central tower. Hiro didn't think they'd buy it for very long, but then, he didn't need them to. As she watched the red dots spreading and multiplying along the temple walls, she could only think of what Kut'see had said of her -- a silly human girl, playing at parren politics.

She'd pushed back hard, but in truth, she knew Kut'see was right. Parren politics had nearly killed her several times now, but much of that had been simply her attachment to Gesul, with herself as near-collateral damage to his meteoric rise. This felt much different. She'd pushed the parren's collective external policy in a direction many parren, represented by Juneso, found alarming. She'd been warned, by Juneso himself no less, when she'd convinced Sho'mo'ra to assist her in manipulating Juneso and Coroset into assisting with the evacuation of Rando. And she'd ignored the warnings, because her cause was righteous, and she'd never truly believed that it would come to this.

And now, it had. Feeling scared seemed like rank hypocrisy at this point. She was an adult well capable of wearing the consequences of her choices. She'd chosen this, and here it was. It didn't stop the terror. But it did convince her that she had no right to become paralysed because of it. She only hoped the realisation of her own moral culpability would help.

Timoshene signalled, and crawled to the upward ladder cut into the vertical shaft. Lisbeth followed, holding to the stone rungs with trembling fingers. Despite the tremors, moving was better than sitting. Anything was better than sitting, and letting the horrors run through her head. Hiro, Timoshene and Kim'ju were capable professionals. They had plenty of weapons. Things would work out.

Timoshene climbed carefully from the top of the shaft, and lay flat upon the stone as Lisbeth followed. The crawlway exit was directly beneath the spreading petals of the House Creative tower, and shielded from view by a stone hood. Timoshene peered carefully about the edge, across the Acquisition Garden at the two-level wall that ran from the western wall to the main temple, and Fortitude Tower.

Tacnet showed no red dots on this side -- the southern wall. Hiro had two bugs up, but they could only be in two places at once. The Coroset marines, he was certain, would be clad head-to-toe with material the bugs' stingers could not penetrate. He hadn't shared detail of the technology with Coroset crew, but was certain they knew a lot by observation.

Lisbeth checked her rifle, for the twentieth time in the last hour. It was short, and easy to hold -- a light weapon designed for young croma. It had a full-auto switch, and an integrated sight that could show on her glasses precisely what it was about to hit. She'd hit targets with it in training, and not found it hard. An idiot could line up a dot and pull a trigger. The Coroset marines were not idiots. They were elite professionals like Timoshene and Lior, and they were going to use all their expertise to make this as difficult as possible for the defenders.

Red dots appeared at the south wall. Just like that, suddenly appearing, without fanfare. Lisbeth's mouth went even drier. Perhaps one of Kim'ju's sensors had found them, or one of Hiro's bugs. If she were better at using tacnet, Lisbeth knew she could call up more data, and find out who these red dots were, and what weapons they were carrying. But she didn't want to fiddle with the main feed. Besides, what would it matter to her?

More red dots, by the eastern main gate. Then more, by the west. She counted ten... no, twelve. Timoshene pulled back from the edge of the crawlway wall, and indicated to her, two eyes at his glasses. Lisbeth indicated that she saw them too. But Timoshene had seen them earlier, and had led her up here. His tacnet would be on a different setting. It meant that he hadn't seen any enemies behind them, here on the northern wall.

The dots did not enter either of the two main gates. Lisbeth waited, heart pounding so hard she feared some advanced sensor would detect it. Coroset would be overhead now, high geostationary orbit, watching everything. Lisbeth wondered if any crazy croma would defy their instructions to stay grounded, and try to fly in to help. She knew croma well enough to guess some would try it, now that night had fallen. And she knew parren well enough to know that they'd die in the attempt.

Red dots were now advancing over the southern wall. Crazy fast. Probably they had climbing equipment. But then, parren were light, and the outer walls were not smooth. Some could probably climb without ropes. Major Thakur could do it, and she wasn't much lighter than some parren men. Lisbeth guessed it depended on how much gear they were carrying.

Timoshene sat with his back to the wall, watching events unfold on tacnet. Took his small flask from a pocket even now, and pulled up his balaclava enough to drink. Surely he could hold the phase at bay long enough to fight this fight?

The red dots crossing the southern wall now headed fast for the main temple, weaving between garden obstacles. And stopped, as though suddenly taking a knee. The red dots by the two main gates did not progress inside. A reconnaissance party? Where were the others? The dots inside the grounds now went sideways, skirting around the main temple, holding their range. Heading to inspect the main gates from this inside angle, Lisbeth guessed. Correctly expecting traps. But all of them?

A series of ear-splitting cracks ripped the night, echoing off the temple walls. A single, loud shriek of agony. Repeating now, as Timoshene leaned around his wall, and opened fire. Had Hiro gone too early? Had someone triggered the traps by mistake? No one was talking because while the marines weren't jamming, they were certainly monitoring, and no one wanted to give anything away...

Timoshene ducked back as fire smacked off the wall by his head. "They didn't fall for it," Hiro said now in Lisbeth's ear. "They were going around, I still got a few of them." Timoshene ducked fast and low, out along the parapet, where the wall between the walkway and the interior grounds gave way to periodic arches, best moved across quickly. "Inner garden traps are still armed."

More fire was echoing across the temple now... that would be Lior on the far southern wall, and Kim'ju on the western, all those best with long range weapons. And her, of course, who wasn't expected to hit a damn thing, but no one wanted her in the main temple... oh shit, she'd better start shooting!

Further along the parapet, Timoshene popped up to quickly fire several rounds, then back down again. Lisbeth put her back to the wall as she'd seen him do, took a deep breath, made sure the safety was off, then leaned quickly around and fired in the general direction of the eastern gate. Then back again, astonished by the extraordinary feeling of having just violated all of the safety regulations that had been drummed into her every time she'd handled a weapon -- safety always on, never point it at anyone, and certainly never pull the trigger unless absolutely certain there was no one in front of it. She was very sure she hadn't hit anyone, but the situation required volume of fire, so...

An explosion hit the wall just below Timoshene's position. He covered, as the next one hit the rim of the retaining wall. "Get down!"

Lisbeth did so, turning her back and covering, as an airburst cracked overhead with deafening force, and shrapnel rattled her armour. She gasped, horrified at the force of it, and wondering how she was still alive, let alone unhurt. Then Timoshene was grabbing her arm, hauling her up and running, crouching low along the wall as more fire came their way, bullets cracking off the stone.

Reached the center of the northern wall where the stairs were, and went down them, then stopped on the first flight as Timoshene indicated for her to guard the downward flight. "Timoshene has moved," he said into coms, "they were lobbing grenades on us."

"Yeah, I see him!" came Kim'ju's unmistakable growl. "He's behind that first arch, someone kill him if you can!"

"Can't see!" came Chon'do's reply, from somewhere in the main temple. "Anyone else got him?"

"Don't lean out, you'll get your head blown off!" said Kut'see, admonishing someone else. Timoshene resumed his downward descent, guarding each flight of stairs as they came to it -- they hadn't wanted to be here when the fight started because they'd had no idea where the marines would go first, and the north wall stairs were a prime target.

"These guys are real good!" Hiro warned them. "They're taking out some of my mines, I don't know how! They're covered head to toe, nothing for the bugs to bite!" And they'd just been ambushed, taken casualties, but were immediately putting accurate return fire on target. Lisbeth hoped Hiro had got plenty in those first few explosions, otherwise it was about to get really hard.

* * *

Skah was crouched low beside Lior when the shooting started. He had a pistol, and was good at using it, but the range from here was too great, and there were no rifles small enough for him. His ears flattened instinctively to his head as Lior's rifle assaulted them, then Lior was ducking behind the wall for cover. No return fire came. Checking tacnet, Skah thought there were only a couple of marines hiding behind the arches of the interior wall that divided House Acquisition and House Enquiry.

Skah was exhilarated that he was not frightened. Hekgarh, his mother had named it for him -- the hunter's fear. A state of mind that was like fear, but as predators experienced it, not prey. Great kuhsi warriors got hekgarh in a fight, not mukhgarh, the prey's fear. He'd wondered if he was too young for hekgarh, but now, he didn't think so.

Lior popped up to fire again, from a different spot this time, then back down. Skah heard rather than saw a flash of movement along the wall, and looked... and leaped, wildly, back down the crawlway as shots cracked off the stonework. Half-fell down the ladder, grasping at rungs and somehow bracing his body between the narrow confines, one foot on the opposite wall.

Lior! He risked a glimpse back up, twisting his body to grasp the edge and look... and saw a strange parren advancing, another behind him on the wall. The strange parren wore body armour, a tight-fitting helmet, and crouched now to examine... Lior's body, lifeless on the stone. Looked straight at Skah, and gestured to him, not threateningly. Come out, the gesture said. His rifle stayed low. An elite parren marine could have shot him by now. This one was making no attempt to.

Skah released the edge and skidded down the crawlway shaft, feet and hands braced for the slide, then ducked low and ran once he hit the bottom. This crawlway emerged further along the wall in several spots, and he was far faster down here than an adult of any species.

"Lior's dead!" he hissed into coms in Gharkhan, as English and coms etiquette escaped him. His voice did not sound like the confident call of a hekgarh warrior, but rather the gasping terror of a mukhgarh child. "They came over the wall beside us! Hiro, they're coming over the walls behind!"

* * *

Timoshene came back up the flight of stairs as fast as he'd gone down, firing downstairs on full auto. Lisbeth did not need to be told to reverse, scampering back the way they'd come, as Timoshene's rifle clicked empty and return fire smacked the wall behind him.

"They're beneath us!" he called, still sounding composed as Lisbeth reached the top of the stairs again, and crawled flat for the parapet wall, and cover from across the temple. If the marines were ascending the far side walls now, it could come from anywhere. Why hadn't Hiro's scanners worked? Why weren't the bugs giving more advanced warning? But then, there were only two bugs, and by sending this first team in early, the marines had maybe ensured the bugs would both be watching them...

"Lisbeth!" Timoshene commanded behind her, voice cutting across the calls and shouts on coms from the others. "Main temple, now!"

Directly before them, the wall that divided the House Creative and House Harmony gardens ran straight to the central temple and tower. Lisbeth got up and ran along it, as fast as she could. This top level had walls to either side that only protected up to her waist. Behind her, she heard Timoshene firing -- covering her, she realised. The wall was only fifty meters long, but it seemed like a marathon. Her lungs burned, heart pounding fit to explode and kill her without any need of bullets. Body armour, she realised desperately, was hard to run in.

She reached the door and skidded in, uncertain if anyone had shot at her, probably in her panic of flailing limbs she'd have missed the telltale sound of passing bullets. Now Timoshene was coming, and she recalled enough training to take a knee by the doorway, covering him as he came. Of course, squeezed up against the reverse side of the temple, she only had a view of perimeter walls behind him as he ran, when fire could come from in front... and did, as he fell, only skidding for better cover, she realised with panicked relief. Shweet, zing! through the air, and crack! as something scary high-velocity hit the wall beside him. There was no missing that.

Timoshene got back up, now army-crawling, now rising enough to run at a low crouch and maintain cover. Confident he'd reach her intact, and seeing nothing on the walls behind him, Lisbeth spared a brief look at the room behind... it was the room with the big circular rings, simulating the five parren phases within the circle of pillars that held up the Fortitude Tower above. Guarding the three adjoining doorways like this one would be Chon'do, Kut'see and Semaya, if she could see them past the obscuring pillars... no one guarding this northern door, but she and Timoshene were out this way, so it didn't need the cover.

Knowing Timoshene would take door duty on this side when he arrived, Lisbeth rushed between the central pillars and about the great display of rings, then out to the western side door, where Semaya was firing from her rifle at the top of the western wall, by the look of her shooting. That was where Skah had said Lior was killed... and again, on the top of the wall joining the temple to the western wall, Lisbeth saw Kim'ju, now lying flat on his side, the only way he could get his huge body down for cover behind the low parapet.

He lifted both big fists and fired his heavy-caliber rifle over the top, at the same people who Semaya was shooting at. "How many?" Lisbeth asked, putting her back beside Semaya, ready to take her place if Semaya needed to reload.

"Unsure," Semaya said calmly, as more terse shouting came over coms from the defenders on the temple floor below. Her rifle clicked, and she flattened back to reload. "They're stealthy." No doubt also wondering how they'd dodged Hiro's scans.

"They're going to rush the lower level!" Kim'ju said, also reloading out on the wall, flat on his back with his rifle overhead. "You guys get someone down to help them, I've got these guys pinned here!" Lisbeth guessed he must have been coming back himself, as she and Timoshene were, when the marines who'd killed Lior on the western wall started shooting at him instead. Now he was stuck.

"I can shoot," Lisbeth volunteered. Semaya ignored her, and pointed her newly loaded rifle around the corner once more, this time on a knee to change levels and throw off anyone shooting back.

Out on the wall, Kim'ju put his own rifle up, head still down, up against the side wall and sighting by laser-targeting through the rifle on his glasses. He fired a short barrage, then slumped forward, rifle falling, as though shot from... the other side! Lisbeth grabbed Semaya and pulled her back, as bullets smacked the wall where she'd been, coming from the right.

"Kim'ju!" Lisbeth screamed. Out on the wall, the big croma lay face down and unmoving, in a rapidly growing pool of blood. "Oh no!"

"Timoshene," Semaya said coolly, repositioning further back from the door. "They're on the Harmony Quarter wall, Kim'ju is dead."

"I see," said Timoshene on coms, just as calmly. "They have us surrounded." Hiro's initial trap had been designed to catch the enemy in the crossfire. Outnumbered and out-skilled as they'd been, they'd had no choice but to gamble. Sometimes, gambles didn't work.

Standing behind Semaya at the doorway wasn't going to help, Lisbeth realised. Everyone had a doorway except her, and there wasn't room for two. She needed to stand in the middle of the room and wait for someone else to get hit, then take their place. She knew now that they were all almost certainly going to die -- their plan had been cancelled by the enemy's superior plan and execution. Somehow, the thought was nearly liberating. She wouldn't need to worry about people trying to protect her from fighting anymore.

Something exploded at the south-facing door, and Chon'do fell back into the room, rolling. He got up, as Lisbeth ran to him, and his face was bloody. "I can't fucking see!" he bellowed, turning back to his door. Lisbeth saw movement there, along the wall path, and raised her rifle. Chon'do shoved her aside, raising his own rifle while squinting through his good eye... and was hit, multiple loud, cracking shots into body armour atop natural armour.

Chon'do fired back full-auto, the heavy-caliber weapon tearing up the wall path, bellowing in rage. Return fire hit his arm, jerking the weapon sideways. Chon'do kept firing one-handed, as Lisbeth yelled that Chon'do's door was in trouble, unable to hear herself think. Chon'do's weapon ran dry. He cursed, dropped it, and pulled a big shotgun from a leg holster, faster than reloading one-handed.

Lisbeth ran for his fallen rifle, but could barely lift it, dragging it back to where she could grab a strategically-positioned reload from the base of the pillars... another explosion from Chon'do's door, then a flurry of shots, and Chon'do was on his knees. Lisbeth forgot the big rifle, and fumbled to swing her own weapon into line as a slim armoured figure appeared beside Chon'do's kneeling form. Ducked back, to see Lisbeth aiming at him... but she couldn't shoot, she might hit Chon'do.

"They're at the south door!" she yelled again, scrambling back for the cover of a pillar as grenades lobbed. The second-long wait before the blast seemed to take a lifetime. Then she was out, several marines in the room past the smoke, firing, as Lisbeth fired, one of the marines's heads snapping back to precision fire that was not her's... and here was Timoshene at her side, firing controlled bursts. The other marine fell. Ahead, Chon'do slumped to the ground... he hadn't been kneeling, he'd fallen against the doorframe, upright only by the rigid bulk of his body.

"Middle!" Timoshene yelled, abandoning coms for raw vocals. "Get back to the middle!" As Semaya and Kut'see also pulled back from their doors, toward the central circle of stone pillars, unable to defend at the doors now that one door was overrun, exposing their backs.

Kut'see was hit in the leg as she came, falling as Timoshene darted to that side of the pillars, firing to clear the door behind her. Kut'see joined him, firing from the ground, bellowing obscenities.

"South!" Semaya shouted, firing at the southern door that Timoshene had just left, then ducking for cover against the pillars. Lisbeth fell flat as fire raked the stones, scrambling on hands and knees to find a way to fire under the display's golden rings, and the central stone plinth... but the pillars were in her way.

More fire from Kut'see's direction, and suddenly the air was full of impacts, stone splinters and ricochets. Lisbeth covered her head, somehow unhit and rolling behind the central plinth. From Kut'see's direction, she saw Timoshene, back to a pillar as he slid down, one arm limp, his jumpsuit bloody. Beyond, Kut'see lay unmoving.

Motion ahead, a marine coming past a pillar ahead, already well into the room. And rounded a pillar near Semaya, finding her pistol to his ear. The shot blew much of his head across the stones, then Semaya was flipping grenades toward the southern door. Marines charged to cover amongst the pillars... Lisbeth shot one in the legs, as Semaya stepped into another's path point blank and shot him repeatedly in the face.

Timoshene shot the one Lisbeth had legged, one-handed, but now others were coming in the doors all around, and someone, or something, was coming up the stairs to the left of Chon'do's door. A giant, rectangular sheet of steel, held by someone behind it. Someone big. A shotgun blast from around the shield blew one marine into a wall, as all the others fired at it, with a sound like supersonic hail on an armoured roof.

The shielded person covered against the wall as the steel sparked and clanged. Then, as marines paused, or changed magazines, the shield moved aside once more, and blew another's head clean off his body. One marine darted to get around behind the new arrival, and the shield moved with frightening speed to reveal Tere'sai, hitting the marine so hard he flew into the wall like a cannonball and smashed.

Exposed, Tere'sai dropped to a knee and fired her shotgun at others... Lisbeth lost sight of them behind the pillars. One marine fell, Tere'sai somehow losing her weapon, then visible once more as she rushed, a huge jun'gi blade abruptly unslung from her back, advancing with shield into another marine who fired with short bursts, seeking a gap. Tere'sai raised her arm for a strike, the marine shifted his weapon to shoot the exposed limb, and she hit him with the shield instead, sending his rifle clattering as the marine ducked back. The jun'gi followed with a hissing strike of impossible force, and the marine hit the floor in two different places.

Tere'sai scanned the rest of the room, seeing only bodies, then gestured hard at the stairs, and the level below. From the stairwell, they could hear shooting.

Lisbeth scrambled to Timoshene, to drag him after her. He tried, but couldn't rise. There was a lot of blood. "Timoshene!" Lisbeth cried, but realising that he had to stay here. Semaya hauled her away from him, following Tere'sai to the open stairs. Lisbeth realised that the stairs to the main temple room below were completely exposed, and simply ran up the side of the wall. On coms, she could hear shouts, dimly past the ringing in her ears.

Tere'sai recovered her shotgun, just a short weapon for a croma, but half as long as Lisbeth was tall. There was a hole in Tere'sai's natural forearm plate, but her hand still worked. She slung the jun'gi over one shoulder so it lay flat to her back, and took position at the top of the stairs.

"You stay here," Semaya commanded Lisbeth, and went to stand behind Tere'sai. She barely came up to the middle of the croma's back, fully covered by the shield, as Tere'sai was. "Lie flat here," Semaya added, pointing to the floor above the first step, "and shoot any marine you see."

There was no room for both her and Semaya behind Tere'sai's shield anyway, Lisbeth saw. She'd only get in the way. Tere'sai began advancing down the stairs, shield wedged against the wall to her right, preventing any gap as she angled as much as possible for protection to her left. Semaya covered left, aiming past that edge of the shield with her pistol, having abandoned the rifle for something a close-quarters assassin would be more comfortable with.

Lisbeth lay flat, and aimed the rifle into the small space of the room below that she could see, up against the wall. Immediately as she descended, Tere'sai's shield took fire, the deafening rattle of impotent small arms. A grenade hit it, with a big flash and noise, then another. Tere'sai advanced, impervious. Lisbeth's agreement with Juneso had meant no armour piercing fire, and certainly no armour piercing explosives. The other croma had been straining the agreement with their big rifles, but rationalised that they were firing away from the temple.

This was why Kim'ju had insisted that the entire lower floor could be defended by just Hiro, Shonteel and Tere'sai, Lisbeth realised. They had it surrounded by explosives, making the upper floor a more attractive target, but mostly it was Tere'sai. Violence was horrifying. Finding someone who was truly good at it, like Tere'sai was good at it, was like discovering beauty in hell.

* * *

Skah ran. He'd emerged from the crawlway on the southern wall, and heard all the shooting at the main temple around the base of the Fortitude Tower. He'd seen parren marines on the high walkways, fighting to get into the upper floor. If he'd run to help, any of them could have turned and shot him. He'd taken aim with his pistol, but pistols weren't much good at longer ranges, and with the marines all clustered around the doors, he hadn't wanted to miss and hit his friends inside.

Then the shooting had fallen silent, and Skah had started running. He wasn't sure which side had won, but wasn't going to run away even if the wrong side had. And arrived at full sprint at the door, to find Chon'do lying face down in a great lake of his own blood. No one had moved him, Chon'do must have been dead.

Skah jumped past, torn between wanting to stay and make sure, he liked Chon'do, Chon'do was his friend, and seeing friends dead on the ground was the worst thing ever. But one thing would be worse.

He bounded into the upper temple room, and found it littered with bodies. Marine bodies, croma bodies. Kut'see, he recognised on the stone floor, and ran to see... but what was left of her face made him wish he hadn't. Terrified and crying, he ran down the stairs. The floor below was irregular granite blocks, Lisbeth had said it reminded her of an art museum, another of those things he hadn't seen yet.

Amongst the stone blocks, before statues merging and emerging from the walls, were more marine bodies. Several appeared to have been hacked nearly in two. Then, around a corner, Tere'sai, sitting on one stone block, her massive rectangular shield leaning against a nearby wall, holed with at least a hundred new craters. The big jun'gi was in her hand, many times taller than he was. Its edge was notched in several places, its silver blade streaked red.

"Tere'sai!" Seeing her alive meant they'd won. That, and all the marine bodies. "Where is everyone?" Tere'sai pointed upstairs, and raised two fingers. She did not look triumphant. She looked tired, and even sadder than before. "There's two upstairs? Who?" But of course, Tere'sai couldn't answer that. He must have run right by them.

Before he could turn back, Tere'sai pointed around the next corner in the maze of irregular stone blocks. Skah went, and found Lisbeth, crouching by Hiro. Shonteel sat propped against a nearby wall, head wrapped in bandages, but apparently breathing.

"Risbeth!" Lisbeth turned to look.

"Skah! Oh thank god!" They embraced, but Skah was looking at Hiro. He lay flat on his back, great cloths wrapped around his throat. Part of his jaw was cut wide open, but no blood came. His eyes were closed, and he lay utterly motionless.

"Hiro?" Skah stared.

Lisbeth nodded, tears streaming. "He's dead, Skah. I'm sorry."

* * *

Lisbeth left Skah crying by Hiro's body, and came upstairs to the circle of pillars about the golden rings that symbolised the parren cycles of phase. Against the inside of one pillar, where he'd first sat after Kut'see's death, was Timoshene.

Semaya had his vest off, a medical cuff on one exposed arm where she'd cut the sleeve away, and a lot of bandages applied elsewhere. As Lisbeth approached, Semaya met her gaze, and Lisbeth knew it was all for naught.

Timoshene's eyes moved to her, within the balaclava slit. Rigid and still, barely breathing. "Lisbeth," he whispered. Lisbeth came and knelt, a hand on his shoulder. Drained of tears, after Hiro, after everything. She would not cry before Timoshene. Respect, for his Harmony sensibilities. "You're hurt."

She looked at her arm, wrapped with some cloth. Something had hit her, there and in both legs, and she hadn't noticed. "I'm fine," she replied, with affection. "Thanks to you. Thanks to you all." The words brought horrible guilt. She hadn't deserved this sacrifice. If the path she'd chosen hadn't demanded it, they'd all still be alive.

"I'm glad," said Timoshene. His voice sounded different. Lighter. And... glad, he said? Lisbeth glanced at Semaya. Semaya looked expectant. As though waiting for her to realise something significant. "Please. Help me... to take this thing off."

His balaclava, she realised. Now she understood. With shaking hands, she reached, and gently rolled it up from his neck. Over the lean jaw, the thin mouth, the compressed and nearly flat nose of all parren. Wide cheekbones. Deep blue eyes. Lord, she'd always thought parren eyes so beautiful. Blue like the deepest sky. Like jewels.

He gazed at her now, maskless for the first time. Handsome. Serene. Lisbeth placed a hand to his cheek. "I see you," she told him. "I see my friend."

His eyes moved up from hers. "Your hair," he murmured. "Quite beautiful. A wonder, I think."

Lisbeth repressed a laugh, least it come out as a sob. "Thank you." All Harmony parren hated her hair. Anywhere on the body, hair was for animals. "Which House, do you think?"

"I'm not sure," Timoshene mused. "It feels... strange. It would be nice to... explore this."

Lisbeth bit down hard. She wouldn't cry. "House Creative," said Semaya, with confidence. "The Sunlight Phase. A blessing."

"A blessing," Timoshene repeated. His eyes flicked to the golden rings, about the plinth beneath the steel sphere. "This is... quite intriguing. This gold. Though the architecture... a pity... no sunlight. Would look nice... in sunlight."

"It would," Lisbeth agreed. "But this is the Fortitude Tower. Fortitude like stone, they're not big on sunlight." Timoshene gazed at the golden rings. And gazed. The eyes did not move. Nor the lips. "Timoshene?"

Such beautiful blue eyes. Lisbeth leaned, and kissed her friend gently on the forehead. Now that he was gone, she could cry.

27

"That's it," said Erik, as they sat and stood around the briefing room. "That's all we know."

First Shift senior bridge crew, and Trace, sat in the circle of chairs about the central holographics, and gazed at the complex intersection of gravitational fields and approaches to Tridez System. Tridez was technically a trinary system, with a core binary of paired M-Class stars locked in orbit of a point-six AU central point, and a smaller dwarf star in orbit of that point at nearly five AU.

Gachibari was in orbit of this third star. Imperfectly spherical, a synthetic planetoid nearly a hundred kilometres in diameter, and built, the data from Chion's simulation from Cygnax stated, enclosing the outer surface of a smaller non-synthetic planetoid, the details of which were entirely unremarkable. All three of the system's stars were intensely luminescent, with a glare fit to burn holes in optical receptors, and radiation levels to match. It made optical scans difficult, interfered with Armscomp tracking, and made combat difficult to a degree that everyone guessed was probably intentional.

"So that equatorial belt is the shielding," Kaspowitz remarked, pointing with one long finger at the raised ridge that made a false equator about the sphere.

Erik nodded. "Superconducting, we're not familiar with the technology described, there may be anti-matter involved for a powersource."

"Anti-matter powersource," said Geish, sipping coffee, slouched low in his chair in the aftermath of a heavy weights session. The heavy-set Scan Officer did not run, he lifted. "Four recorded current instances in Fleet Intel reports, none proven."

"Shali?" asked Erik.

"We were working on practical applications of antimatter, in my time," Shali affirmed, her shimmering holographic figure seated between Geish and Kaspowitz. "Making it isn't so hard, finding practical utilities without getting blown up is the problem. I don't know how far we were from success. As you know, Captain, I'm not an engineer, nor a physicist."

"Nasty stuff," said Kaspowitz, long legs out, eating dried fruit. "I'm physicist enough to know the theoretical implications in a bunch of speculated technologies. Best stay away from it."

"Styx would know," Sasalaka stated the obvious. Blank looks at her from around the circle. Sasalaka was unperturbed. Shali was keeping the briefing room Styx-free. Everyone knew why, having heard Erik and Trace's report on the confrontation in Medbay.

"How's the surface shielded?" Trace asked Kaspowitz, not having grasped that part. She looked tired, Erik thought. They all looked tired, but if it was showing on Trace, then it wasn't just his imagination.

"See big ring?" Kaspowitz told the marine, circling the holographic sphere with his finger. "Big ring go around, make big magnetic force. Big magnetic force go boom, make radiation go away."

Trace gazed at him, unimpressed. Kaspowitz offered her a dried fruit. Instead of smacking him, Trace took it.

"Why build it here, Shali?" asked Second Lieutenant Jiri. Jiri was a quiet young man, born of wealthy parents on New Haven, who'd hoped for him to use his prodigious technical skills to make a fortune in medicine. Instead, he'd joined Fleet, and shown great aptitude for scan-tech. Were it not for Stefan Geish's great experience, on most other ships Jiri would have been Scan One by now instead of Scan Two. "The radiation's a great defensive help, but it's havoc with domestic operations as well."

"It was always kind of secret," Shali admitted. She looked melancholy, as she often looked when discussing her old life from ages past. "Well, not secret. Everyone knew it existed. But there were many factions, many intrigues." She gazed for a moment at the holographic spheres, and the shading slopes of gravity-wells in motion. "It's hard to believe it's all gone, and this nightmare is all that's left."

"You should write a book," Shilu suggested. Shali blinked at him.

"Lieutenant Shilu," said Stan Romki, the only non-bridge crew besides Shali present. "You are a genius. I should have thought of that."

"But who would read it?" Shali wondered.

Shilu smiled. "Are you kidding? About nineteen billion humans, for one thing. Probably fifty billion tavalai..."

"Three hundred billion," Sasalaka corrected, with all seriousness. "We love our ancient galactic histories. From barely-known reeh space, I think everyone would read it. If it was well written."

"Oh I'd love to edit it," Romki said wistfully. "But that's my old academic life talking, I'm sure I couldn't find the time whatever happens for the next ten years. I know some top editors who would, though."

"Fleet would censor it," Geish reminded them all, dourly, above the lip of his coffee flask. "Humans wouldn't see a word. Tavalai could read it, but the institutions would divide all interpretations into ideological camps, then spend the next thousand years fighting about who's right."

"True," Sasalaka murmured.

"Maybe the parren would read it," Shilu said drily. "They'd turn it into a play where they give away the ending first."

"Human space doesn't accept payment in any parren currency," said Geish. "We'd have to do it in trade. But trade's illegal too, and impractical across those distances, so we'd have to start a long-distance smuggling ring across tavalai space if we were going to get paid from this thing..."

Erik saw Trace staring daggers at him. "Okay," he cut them off, "let's return to the matter at hand before the marines become violent." Glances at Trace followed, and smothered amusement. Spacer briefings were sometimes less disciplined than marine briefings, and Erik was prepared to let them wander a little, considering the expanse of the issues at hand, and how strung-out everyone was feeling. But he'd insisted she needed to be here, and she'd put off other work to be so. "Shali, you were saying what Gachibari was used for?"

Shali sighed. "You have to understand, we were going through the entire first revolution of neural uplink technologies. Derived from ceephay technology, so there was the whole working architecture of artificial intelligence, built up over many thousands of years, and then integrating that into our best understanding of organic sentient function across a range of Empire species. Gachibari was a study center, a place at first for the medical procedures to take place, then once that technology was increasingly mastered, for those post-procedurals to organise and study the changes that had been done to them."

"Why not do it elsewhere?" Shilu asked, with his usual penetrating skepticism. "Spread around the Empire? Why centralise it here?"

"Because, as you appear to have deduced, Lieutenant, the technology was controversial. Even then. To overcome the opposition of many, certain groups decided to organise. The Empire was not nearly as united then as it's become now." Shali smiled wanly at Erik. "I've been reading many texts by your writers, back in human space. They speak of 'unity' as though it's some magical thing to be sought. It's not. It's horrifying."

Erik nodded. "Writers insist that unity and diversity are both wonderful as absolutes." He'd had this discussion a number of times with Aunt Atika Debogande, who ran the Mining Division of Debogande Enterprises, and had read enough philosophy to distrust all of it. "Obviously it doesn't work -- if they're absolutes, only one can be true at a time, not both. So clearly they don't work as absolutes, but if you suggest it, writers get very upset."

"Yes," said Shali. "Our diversity back then kept us from unified tyranny. There were as many factions as you'd imagine, in an Empire with many hundreds of inhabited worlds, thousands of inhabited systems without worlds, and so many sentient, spacefaring races. Chion and I, and the others, were always juggling factions, playing one against the other, attempting to keep a balance.

"Some of the military ones, and pro-advancement ones, wanted to advance ceephay-derived neural uplink technology on themselves. Gachibari's stars helped to keep spies away. It was a small facility at first, but expanded over centuries as the program grew more successful. I was not around for its commencement, I was commissioned only when the full facility was completed. I know it quite well."

"But neural uplink tech was going wrong a long time before that?" Erik asked.

"Oh yes," said Shali. "Gachibari wasn't the only such facility. But it was the only one sanctioned by Chion. The others were doing things she did not approve of. Gachibari was a response to them, in a way. The other factions, those from the other facilities, were jealous of Gachibari having Chion's official approval. Thus the spies."

"You didn't call it neural uplink tech at first, did you?" asked Romki, probably remembering the many things he'd read down on Qalea.

"No," Shali agreed. "It was just a random functionality. Chion didn't like the disorganisation of people applying ceephay technology to things she hadn't approved of. They never really understood what they were doing, thus why their progress was so slow, for several thousand years. Ceephay technology is very hard for organic sentiences to understand, and Chion ran interference from afar, to slow it down, and send it backward."

"Really?" asked Shilu. "How did she do that?"

"Later," Erik interrupted, with another glance at Trace. Trace was listening, impassive as ever, content to let other smart people do the talking. "What was Gachibari when you saw it last, Shali?"

"The closest human analogy might be a military academy," said Shali. "An officer training facility and technology research center combined. Many in the Chariya Reeh believed the Narsid had a performance edge with their uplink tech, and were trying to close the gap without suffering the same psychological consequences as the Narsid. They believed they were making good progress. Chion may even have agreed. But by then it was too late." Another wan smile. "The problem with wars, as with sports, is that your own capability is only relevant in relation to that of your opponent. We thought we were very good. Our commanders were so confident. But in the end, the enemy was better."

"Shali," said Trace. "Do you have an extensive memory of Gachibari's layout?"

"Yes Major. It agrees with most of Chion's data from Cygnax. I've already created a hybrid map for you, and highlighted the differences. A lot can change in eight thousand years."

"Where are we with a meaningful estimation of enemy numbers?" Sasalaka asked.

Everyone looked at Kaspowitz. Kaspowitz made a face. "Including jump time, it's been eight days since Chion was moved from Cygnax. If we'd engaged there, we would have won, so good move by them to buy time. But all the reeh ships that have since jumped to Cygnax looking for Chion have had to guess where she's gone -- the reeh couldn't leave any messages behind at nav buoys, because we destroyed or reprogrammed them all on the way through.

"Tridez is just one system in the Nikala Cluster, there are a number of other places Chion could have gone, so some will have gone the wrong way. But plenty will have guessed Gachibari, and some at Gachibari may have taken the jump to nearby transit systems to spread the word, however that might have temporarily depleted their defences. Probably they'll have procured some civvie ships to do that for them.

"Anyhow, I've run it through simulations, and with this many known and unknown variables it mostly spits out bullshit. We do know there's a whole fucking avalanche of them coming down on us. Like, thousands of warships. Enough to wipe out all accumulated forces in the blink of an eye." He paused, to look around at them all. "For all our dithering and messing around, I still think no more than ten percent of that total will have arrived at Tridez, and that's a worst case scenario, obviously."

"Do we actually know how many ships are currently active in the Reeh Empire?" Bree Harris asked. She was squeezing strengtheners in both hands, in subconscious reflex, insisting it built up finger speed for her defensive firegrid triggers at Arms Two.

"It depends whether you count less-reliable slave forces," said Shali. "Reeh Fleet structure gets complicated on the other battlefronts, even more so than opposite croma space. The Empire is currently at war with five opposing civilisational fronts, including the croma. Croma space has been quiet until recently, so they've been active elsewhere. I'd estimate total casualties out there, averaged out, would come to more than a million lives a day. Mostly civilians, of course."

Silence about the group. Erik stared at the holography between them, the Gachibari environment, thinking as hard as he'd ever thought on anything. They could end this, right here. So much death and suffering. The Reeh Empire, without Chion, would not survive. It was built on too many contradictions, and did not even understand the ceephay technology that made it all run. He had to think about humanity's needs first, but in this instance, it looked as though humanity's interests, and that of all the Empire's trillions of sentient lives, were as one.

"How many ships?" Sasalaka pressed. The least impressed, in tavalai fashion, by Shali's emotional pleas.

"Somewhere between eight thousand capital warships at thirteen thousand," said Shali. "Depending on how you measure it. The capital-ship to support-ship ratio is another three-to-one, so the totals are eye-wateringly large."

"No wonder they're all so damn poor," Geish muttered.

Erik nodded. Warships were expensive. Human Fleet was closer to twelve hundred capital warships, and that was big by Spiral standards. All those ships, and the facilities to support and keep them operating, cost a large chunk of Spacer Congress's total budget, to say nothing of the army divisions required to truly capture worlds, and not just systems. Human populations, and most Spiral populations, demanded basic living standards as well as militaries, limiting how much could be spent on fighting forces. But the Narsid Reeh Empire, controlling the minds of a majority of its citizens, was freed from such concerns. Plus, the Reeh Empire was more than a whole order of magnitude larger than what humanity controlled -- nearly the recognised size of the entire Spiral.

"Ten percent of eight thousand is eight hundred," said Raf Corrig. "See, even Arms officers can do maths." The in-joke was that shooting stuff, at fractional-light velocities, was one of the most mathematically challenging things a warship did. "Do we have enough to take eight hundred?"

"Well it'll be worse than eight hundred," said Sasalaka, settling into Helm's traditional job of telling them just how bad everything was about to get, in precise detail. "If it's ten percent, anyway. As Shali said, the support vessels don't qualify as capital ships, and they'll be three times as many, so that's more like three thousand total, a quarter of them capitals. Probably a lot of them aren't here, and a lot of them aren't armed, but given what's at stake for them, possibly they've thrown everything at it. They could have freighters and runners clogging up our lanes and targeting, even a few extra guns on irregular trajectories will complicate everything.

"Naksuto are reporting sixty-one functional capital ships. The Medrafi are reporting another seventy-three, we don't know how they divided them up, probably something to do with familiarities based on their VR world experience. Whenever the Reeh Fleet would run into these kinds of ships in their battles out on the perimeter, they'd task research crews back here to run tests and make modifications, to get a precise idea of what enemy performance would be. So they were all regularly used, and even have armaments and ammunition.

"So that's a hundred and thirty four, plus Raka have a hundred and twenty four, then there's us and the drysines, which is five more. We're at about two-sixty in total, which is fifty percent larger than tavalai Third Fleet's optimum." She sounded faintly incredulous. Erik doubted even old hands like Kaspowitz or Geish would have served in a fleet that size. "And then we've the six alo whaleships, who will doubtless be coming along behind."

"So what's the plan?" asked Geish.

"It's loose," said Erik, touching holography controls in the air before him. New marks appeared, fleet formations, lines of approach, jump entries, flanking shields, deceleration points. "It has to be loose, because we've got so little idea of what the defences are doing."

He'd figured it out with Sasalaka, Draper, Dufresne and Kaspowitz -- no easy thing, as Draper and Dufresne were on duty, and only able to pay half-attention to an uplinked discussion.

"We presented this to Naksuto and Medrafi commands, they've modified their portions of it, but essentially agreed. Styx has also agreed, with Raka Fleet, but with Styx that could mean anything once we're actually there."

"Can we actually shield all of Naksuto and Medrafi Fleets against her?" Shilu wondered.

"Yes," said Shali. "It's a little hard to explain, but those ships talk to each other far more easily than they talk to anything Styx controls. I've increased their com-shield coding to slow her down if she tries, and then cross-linked them all so that if she disables one vessel, it will shut down and reboot via its connections with the rest of its fleet. Styx would have to disable them all simultaneously, or at least a third of them, to overwhelm this shutdown-reboot defence."

"Right," Erik agreed, with forced confidence. The confrontation with Styx had shaken him, but something about it felt off. He couldn't put his finger on it, and didn't want to raise it with the others lest they become even more alarmed. Even Shali had seemed scared. Erik wondered if there was something uniquely terrifying to an AI like Shali about the next evolution in AI sophistication, designed entirely from inception to make less-advanced AI races like Shali obsolete and then extinct. The way the Spiral's Machine Age had played out, to a ceephay, Styx was a genocide machine.

"Now obviously we're betting that the reeh aren't going to take Chion anywhere else. Shali's sure that the effect of all her VR simulations on Cygnax for all this time was to act like a kind of sedation. Chion's been lost in dreams, for millennia. But now she's away from those dreams, and beginning to wake up. She'll be very aware that a large force is trying to rescue her, and she will be doing a lot to facilitate that rescue. The longer the reeh keep her awake and un-sedated by whatever other methods they were using, the more dangerous she becomes to them, so they'll have no choice but to make a stand now.

"So the actual plan is pretty simple, as you can see, because of our need to maintain flexibility. We're all in at point oh-oh-one AU from Gachibari, the stagger from nose to tail is thirteen point four minutes. Raka Fleet can push the gravity slope harder, so they're in deeper on the flanks, we're going to pincer their close defences, force the near pickets to engage, then hit them with the second flankers from behind on the stagger and hope we get a bunch of them out of position downslope.

"Main assault force is eleven minutes on the stagger, that'll be Phoenix, the drysines, twenty of the bigger Raka carriers, plus another eighteen of the bigger Naksuto and Medrafi carriers, so forty-three ships total. Total landing force on Gachibari will be nearly eight thousand combined marines and combat drones. So it's going to be busy."

With a look at Trace. They all looked. Trace nodded, with the cool expression of a marine commander unconvinced that she couldn't have just received the plan at main briefing with everyone else, instead of the bridge-crew pre-briefing. "I'll be in contact with the factional commanders," she said. "Try to find out who's actually going to be in charge."

"Styx delegated to you on Kichana," said Kaspowitz.

"She gave me a loose leash," Trace translated. "If I'd tested the leash, she'd have yanked it, and there'd have been nothing I could do. She might not be in such a delegating mood now. And then there's the Medrafi and Naksuto, who each have different ideas about what to do with Chion if we get her."

"The other reason I want to play this loose," Erik agreed. "There's just no way of telling what they're going to do. My guess is that they'll play along with the larger plan until it looks as though we're winning, then maybe try something else. The most important point, and I can't emphasise this enough, is that we stick to each other like glue, watch each other's backs, and expect anything and everything."

He stared around at them all. Grim faces looked back, from alongside and behind the holographic display. One tavalai face, in Sasalaka. And one holographic, shimmering blue.

"This is going to be the biggest fight I've ever been in, by quite some margin. I know many of you have seen a lot more action than I have, but I suspect this is the largest assault formation for many of you also."

"Retichina System was bigger," said Kaspowitz. "I was a Second Lieutenant on UFS Daybreak then. But only a little bigger."

Stefan Geish frowned at him. "You were at Retichina? Shit you're old."

"Sure am," said Kaspowitz, scratching his long nose with one middle finger, in Geish's direction.

"UFS Daybreak was lost at Retichina," Sasalaka recalled. "I studied the action as a cadet at tavalai Fleet academy."

"Yes it was," said Kaspowitz, with a long, wise look at the tavalai. "With half the crew." No one said anything. They all knew what that must have been like. They'd experienced something similar with Phoenix, at Defiance. "Tavalai fought well."

"We all fought well," Sasalaka said solemnly. "We will fight well again tomorrow."

28

Approaching the top of the next ridge-line, Leechee detoured from the worn path through the grass, and made a more direct route uphill. The footing was much harder, as thick grasses grew in tight clumps of stem and roots, and Erik had to place his boots carefully lest he roll an ankle. Thunder grumbled, more distant now as smaller storm cells on the larger edge of the big system moved on. But the wind blew colder, sweeping across the wet grass in vast patterns, like waves, and the sky behind was ominously black.

"Are we going to make it back in time?" Erik asked, panting as he battled upslope. Leechee was heading for the small copse of trees on the ridge-line ahead. Leechee had been looking over his shoulder regularly since they'd left the truffle-miners an hour ago. Erik knew he could see a more accurate position of the storm-front on a hand screen, and wondered why all the concern to look at it with his eyes. "If we're not going to make it back to Weatherstone before the front hits us, maybe we should just call in a cruiser now?"

They reached the small cluster of trees, bending heavily in a roaring gust. Leechee gestured for Erik to crouch low, and raised binoculars to his eyes, down in a hunting crouch. Erik didn't understand how he'd get a better look at a storm by using binoculars. And then, following the older man's eyeline, he realised that Leechee wasn't looking at the storm at all.

He fished out his own binoculars, scanning the expanse of grassy slope up which they'd trekked. Suddenly, his heart was beating faster. There were sikuras out here, hunting bucks as humans with licences were also allowed to do, but Homeworld predators weren't much interested in attacking humans. Humans smelled inedible with all their synthetic gear, soaps and shampoos, and besides, no natural prey on homeworld walked on two legs, so the body-language cues were all wrong. In all seven hundred plus years humans had been on Homeworld, there'd only been twenty-three recorded cases of sikuras attacking humans, and a lot of those had been provoked, dumb hunters or hikers getting too close to a mother with cubs in the spring.

No, if Leechee was worried about something stalking them, it wasn't the wildlife.

"Who do you think it is?" he asked Leechee, breathlessly.

"Not many else it could be," Leechee said grimly, wiping long, greying hair from his eyes where the wind caught it. "They've been following us for the last half hour."

"They have?" Erik recalled the truffle miners. Tough men, and their big tochiwani, chewing on its bone. "What do you think they're up to?"

"Well," said Leechee, making a show of overthinking it. "If I had to guess, I'd say that since you flapped your mouth at them, they'd be wondering if we'll tell the authorities about them when we get home. And that maybe, their little venture out here would be a lot more profitable if we just disappeared in the storm."

They hadn't recognised him, Erik realised. If they'd known he was a Debogande, they'd never have dared. But his security training encouraged the maintenance of anonymity, not foreseeing many circumstances where anonymity might increase the danger. "Dammit," he muttered. "I should have told them who I am."

"Maybe," said Leechee, unconvinced. He placed his binoculars on the ground before him, and unslung the hunting rifle from his shoulder. Erik stared at it, heart beating harder. Then he did the same, unslinging the pack first to access the rifle's carry pouch.

"You really think they want to kill us?"

"The time for a pleasant conversation was back there," said Leechee. "They've been trying not to show themselves, but they're not real good at hunting. They're miners, and all their food was canned."

Erik got the rifle out, replaced his pack, and checked the breech. The weapon was a manual with just a six round magazine, as Leechee opined that automatics encouraged inexperienced kids to blaze away. If you could only fire one bullet at a time, between lengthy reloads, you made sure you hit something with each shot. Erik glanced enviously at Leechee's rifle, an automatic with a twenty round clip and a telescopic sight. Leechee had learned patience and accuracy long ago.

Leechee gestured for Erik to cover behind one of the trees, which he did, right side exposed so he could sight the rifle downslope. He raised it to his shoulder, noticing how the entire weapon would shake with each beat of his heart. He had a good field of fire from up here, but the grass further downslope was long. Anyone could be in there, staying low. Beyond the distant mountain ridges, black clouds flashed blue and white. The air smelled of wet grass, cold wind and thunder.

A rush of movement from the left, as something cut through the grass, with a wake like a torpedo in the water. Then Leechee was shooting, a sharp pop!pop!pop! that sounded in real life nothing like it did in movies or games. A big snout came rushing through the grass, now burrowing into the turf as Leechee's fire continued. It collapsed, and slid, lying not five meters from the trees, where the grass shortened atop the ridge. A final gust of breath escaped its nostrils, bubbling in blood.

"Yeah, I thought so," Leechee growled. "Tochiwani have good smell and a good memory, the trained ones can be sent after people." If it had attacked while they'd been walking through the grass, with weapons still on their backs, Erik realised that they'd have both been dead. Pet tochiwanis weren't illegal, but training them to attack people certainly was. For all their fearsome appearance, they were usually only dangerous if provoked, or if trained to be so. The training usually involved electric shocks and other mistreatment.

"Probably did it a favour," Erik said, and heard a popping noise from somewhere downslope, and a whistle in the nearby air.

"Get down!" Leechee snapped, reaching to pull him, but Erik was already pressing his face in the dirt. Another pop! and this time no telling where the bullet had gone. Then some angry yelling, carried on the wind.

"They're not happy!" Erik exclaimed, unable to keep treacherous excitement from his voice. With the tochiwani dead, and Leechee as handy with his rifle as expected, he wasn't feeling as scared now. He recalled something he'd read, a man opining that there were few things so exhilarating as being shot at for no result. In truth, the whole thing seemed unreal, and he couldn't quite believe it was happening. Many others in his family had had dramatic and exciting things happen in their lives, but for him, this was the first.

Leechee, he saw, had his hand unit out, and was scanning the screen, touching icons. Then he put it away, business-like, and scanned the sky. "Now it gets interesting," he said.

"What does?" asked Erik, raising his head to look for whatever Leechee was looking at. Leechee pushed his face back into the turf.

"You'll hear it," he said. "They've never actually told me what these protocols are. Guess we'll find out."

"Protocols?" Erik asked against the dirt. "What protocols?"

With a shriek, something big and high-powered cleared the ridge to one side of their trees. Something roared, like the most rapid of drum rolls. Erik fought clear of Leechee's hand, and looked up to see the big flyer screeching out ahead. The roar stopped, then restarted, a blaze of rapid muzzle flashes. The next downslope tree line was taking hits, branches falling like rain, entire trees toppling, trunks severed. Then the flyer was past, firing ceased.

"They got 'em," said Leechee, keeling upright. Erik joined him, and Leechee didn't protest. Erik knew the kinds of scanners mounted in those flyers. If they said the threat was passed, then it was passed. "Damn," said Leechee, deadpan. "Debogandes don't cut corners, huh?"

"You knew?" Erik asked, half-accusingly.

"I knew they'd do something," said Leechee. "There was a security protocol for worst case scenarios. Apparently this triggered it."

So there'd been a flyer nearby this whole time, able to pick them up? Erik shook his head in disbelief of his own naivety. Of course there had been, his parents wanted him to have his adventures and learn from an old, trusted friend like Leechee, but they'd only tolerate the appearance of real danger. If he ever wanted real adventure, as a member of this family, he'd have to manufacture some for himself.

The flyer was landing now, just upslope of the patch of trees it had devastated. People in combat gear with weapons were climbing out, moving with caution, whatever the assurances from the pilots.

"I want to go down," Erik said, with determination.

And was half-surprised when Leechee said, "Good idea."

They made their way downslope, through the thick-clumped grass. One of the armed security agents met them just short of the flyer, walking uphill to intercept. "Wouldn't recommend going down there, Mister Debogande," he said. An average-sized guy, but with thickly-muscled arms, goatee, tattoos, the whole former-war-machine look so common among the Family's security professionals. "Not real pretty."

"Don't care," said Erik, walking past him. The man reversed direction, making no attempt to stop him. "There were six in the camp we passed through, plus the tochiwani. Did they all come after us?"

"Just three," said the security man. Chow, Erik recalled his name -- Dan Chow, former Army Special Forces. "We've directed the cops toward the other three, scan showed them still there. Truffle miners, are they?"

"Yeah," said Erik. "I threatened to turn them in." And he caught the deadpan, perhaps-exasperated look the two older men gave each other.

"Guess that'll do it," said Chow. "For a few of them, at least. Got a record, some of these guys. Don't want to get caught a second time."

"Fourth or fifth time," Leechee corrected. "That's a long time in a dark room."

It wasn't the first time Erik had seen a dead body, having seen a few senior politicians and generals lying in state, as all Homeworld's best and brightest filed past to pay their respects. But it was the first time he'd seen people recently killed.

The blood was a horror. It was everywhere, great, sticky lakes of it, thickening the grass and pine needles beneath the trees. The looks on their faces were worse. Sightless eyes, staring skyward with frozen incomprehension.

"Didn't expect that, did they?" Chow remarked, with the black humour of a man who'd seen far worse. He chewed jerky, and offered some to his teammate.

Erik forced himself to look, whatever his protesting stomach. Many generations back his family had been involved in the wars, some at point-blank range. Many had died in it, or been terribly wounded. He wouldn't disgrace them with cowardice now.

One of the dead men, unsurprisingly, was the big guy who'd emerged from the tents, with the worn face and goatee. Another was a skinny guy who'd been operating one of the diggers -- he'd lived long enough to turn and run, and had taken a round through the back of the neck that had nearly severed his head.

The third was barely a kid, maybe sixteen, about Erik's age. One arm was gone below the elbow, and he slumped against the base of a tree, as though just sitting, gazing stupidly at the ground a few meters ahead. His heavy puffer jacket had four holes in it, each the size of a golf ball. Beneath the jacket, Erik suspected, would be a lot of insides hanging out. Erik stood for a long moment, staring down at the boy. Wondering at the kid's life, and what circumstances could have landed him here. Were these his family? Parents? He supposed the police report would show it, eventually. Not that he, one of the richest teenagers in human space, with a small private army assigned to protect him, could ever truly understand.

Leechee was standing beside him, looking. "They were doing the wrong thing," Erik said, forcing certainty into his voice that he didn't feel.

"Yes they were," Leechee agreed.

"My parents raised me to always speak up when people are doing the wrong thing."

"Yep," said Leechee. "That sounds like your father for sure."

"And I mean, shit," said Erik. "They tried to murder us."

"No question."

Erik wracked his brain to think of more words. There had to be more words, because the words he'd come up with so far weren't making him feel better.

"Did our guys really need to shoot them?" he asked.

"If they want to keep their jobs, they do. No one shoots at Debogandes and survives, that's the rule. Ever since Danjuma." Danjuma Debogande was Erik's Great Great Great Great Great Grandfather, murdered four hundred years ago by a crime family on a visit to Glory. A few years later, most of the crime family were dead, killed in a variety of random shootings, stabbings, equipment accidents, swimming pool drownings and drug overdoses. The conspiracy-nets were still alive with grisly details, and many theories. Erik had asked about it various times, but none of his seniors had professed to know. Now he wondered if they'd been lying about that, too.

"If I hadn't said anything," he said in a low voice, "they'd still be alive."

"Today, yes," said Leechee with certainty. "Next month, next year, who can say? This type get themselves killed in all sorts of ways, I've seen it. It's sad, but they did it to themselves. The world won't miss them."

"Did I do the right thing?"

Leechee put a rough hand on Erik's shoulder. "Depends," he said. "If you want to save those trees, and stop the truffle miners, certainly. Are those trees and truffles worth this?" He nodded to the carnage on the ground before them.

Erik shook his head, weakly.

"Right," said Leechee. "Pick your battles, kid. You're a Debogande, which means that the things you do have consequences. Learn when it's not worth it. Fanatics think it's always worth it. Don't be a fanatic. Too many of those already." He patted Erik on the shoulder, and walked away.

* * *

Erik blinked his eyes clear as Phoenix crashed back into reality. The dataflow was overwhelming -- eleven minutes behind the lead elements of the formation, and their enormous fleet was strung out in a line, headed for Gachibari. Navigation showed them in precisely the right spot, at the tip of the central thrust toward Gachibari itself.

"Envelopment flank, two hundred and ten degrees," Sasalaka announced. "Progress looks good, reeh defences are roughly in predicted positions."

"High flank, thirty-five degrees," said Kaspowitz. "Looks at least ten ships, aggressive position, Raka Fourth Squadron is covering."

"No threats to central thrust," Geish added. "Light wave hits in thirty-five seconds, we'll see it soon."

It looked crazy, like a torrent of water being poured into a pond, being viewed from above. The froth of first contact spewed outward, with ripples and waves as defences reacted, split or ran to reposition. The first casualties were occurring even now, nearly twelve minutes after first contact, as the assault wave's fire chased the manoeuvring defenders.

"Raka lead is estimating more than fifteen hundred reeh ships in the vicinity," Jiri announced, as Erik saw Friendship, Sunrise, Alliance and Melody entering realspace behind and to the sides. Three big Raka carriers were already in ahead, coms-links connecting as they cross-referenced what they saw. "Still working on that number of capitals." The initial big number didn't worry Erik, only the number of capital ships mattered. If the reeh wanted to throw freighters and runners at them, they'd lose them all for little gain.

"Styx just fired up coms," Shilu reported. "That's some crazy bandwidth Captain, if I allow Phoenix autos to talk in there, I can't guarantee security."

"I can," came Shali's voice. "She can't take over the ship with me aboard, Captain."

"Do it Coms," Erik commanded. "Let us into her network."

"Response!" called Geish, as Scan highlighted red swarms of reeh activity, ships burning hard to break Gachibari orbit, and those far enough up the gravity-slope boosting to gain V. "They've seen us, they're on their way."

"If they come directly through our forward screens they're going to get smashed," Erik said calmly, watching as V-dump points approached. Ahead, and on the sweeper flanks, the volumes of incoming and outgoing fire were extraordinary, Scan could barely track them. Ships vanished in vaporising impacts, but he had no time to see whose or how many. "Arms standby, we are holding fire until we get a cleaner shot."

"Aye Captain," said Corrig at Arms One, plotting a thousand potential target tracks, real and imagined. "Holding fire."

"Captain," said Sasalaka, "we're going to have outer-lying jumpers hitting our flanks any time now."

"I know." And here on his screens and forward holographics both came Styx's display of the battlefield, and it was incredible. Colours shaded outward from Friendship and Phoenix's position, like dopplered light on a spectrograph, giving a clear notion of range as light travelled. Ships were not just positions, but moving probability cones, or streaks, indicating potential position shifts across short-to-medium periods. Phoenix's combat computer already did all that, but what made Styx's dynamics different were the projections -- pure white to avoid spectrum confusion, and guessing the large enemy manoeuvres to come. "Styx thinks there'll be a flanking jump assault arriving at two-thirty by two-forty, numbers uncertain."

"That's from overwatch at point-eight AU," Kaspowitz agreed. They'd identified that spot before -- Lagrangian beside a large moonlet in the outlying trinary star's orbit, far enough out that it wouldn't be caught in the opening assault, and beside a large enough gravity-well that transit back and forth need not be sub-light. They'd all considered hitting it with a small portion of the attacking force, but decided that the disadvantages of dividing forces were greater than the gains.

Astonishingly, Erik realised that he was somewhat less busy in this monster assault than he'd been in any of Phoenix's smaller actions. About them, lots of things were moving, but the central thrust to put landing troops on Gachibari was not yet fully engaged. If the shields and sweepers ahead did their job even better than expected, that might continue. But getting out again, after inserting Phoenix Company through the thick of the defences, was going to be another matter.

Abruptly, Styx's feed vanished, leaving Erik with his less-detailed Phoenix-generated version. "Whoa whoa whoa, what's that?" Shilu said in alarm.

"Massive energy surge from Gachibari!" Jiri called. "I'm analysing wavelengths, still no indication..."

"The whole AI coms grid is down!" Shilu interrupted, fingers flying over controls. "I've lost them all!"

"Who's still up?" Erik snapped, switching his vision to Shilu's coms feed. Sure enough, the networked web of laser com-links between ships had vanished. "Styx, get me Styx."

"She's not answering!" Shilu sounded as close to frantic as Erik had ever heard him. "None of Raka are answering!"

"They're not manoeuvring either!" Geish announced. "No manoeuvring, no firing! Holy shit, they just all got turned off!"

On the far forward flank, a Raka warship detonated, plunging tangentially past Gachibari and unable to defend itself from incoming fire. On the further flank, two more followed. Local coms erupted in frequency squeals, something nearby trying to override the signal as all audio flickered and fuzzed -- Styx, Erik guessed, fighting back against whatever it was from Gachibari that had shut down her enormous force.

"Arms, lay down everything you have along the approach axis, we have to support them! Coms, close relay to Friendship, override everything if you have to, I want to talk to Styx!"

"Aye Captain!"

"Shali, are you there?" As he manoeuvred Phoenix into a roll, bringing her main guns to bear along Arms One's projected best salvo. "Shali, talk to me!" There was no reply. And in that fast, fleeting moment, Erik saw the whole thing, all of his plans, all dreams of saving humanity with Chion's knowledge of Nia, all hopes of freeing the Reeh Empire from this endless tyranny, all slipping away. "Shilu, why won't countermeasures work? What's this fucking frequency that can override all of us?"

"I don't know Captain, I had no idea there was anything Styx couldn't counter..."

And just like that, everything came back on line -- Styx's feed flashed back before his eyes, coms stopped screeching, and all the paralysed Raka and drysine ships resumed fighting with a vengence. The Medrafi and Naksuto warships had never stopped.

"Captain!" came Shali's voice in Erik's ears. "I was just offline for nearly thirty seconds, I have no idea what that..."

"Hello Captain," Styx's deeper, cooler voice overrode the ceephay. "We have just learned Gachibari's primary defensive function, they have a frequency generator that can override every defensive measure we put against it, and it can disable AIs en-mass. I surmise that this is a defensive measure intended precisely to counter Raka Fleet, in case they ever turned on their masters."

Phoenix's V-dump plot had passed twenty seconds ago, and he hit it now, pulsing briefly into hyperspace to emerge travelling vastly slower, as everyone's stomachs lurched, and vision swam. "Great time to be surprised, Styx," Erik snarled. "How did you turn it off?"

"I didn't. If the weapon only works in pulses, then we're about to be hit by a new pulse. Our formation cannot long survive it."

"Captain," said Sasalaka with hard determination, as Corrig's guns crashed and thumped through the hull. "We can't win this fight if the AIs are disabled. Analysis of Medrafi and Naksuto forces thus far shows a competent performance, but nothing as good as Raka Fleet."

"Navigation," Erik commanded, as Scan showed him the first batches of serious incoming fire streaking at annihilating velocities toward them. "Prepare your best escape route, I want it at my fingertips if I need it."

"Aye Captain."

"Captain, I need evasive pattern three," came Harris from Arms Two, and Erik swung Phoenix onto a new facing so that her defensive guns acquired the best field-of-fire. A new thunder thumped and rumbled through the ship, as smaller, more-rapid firing weapons hurled self-guided swarms into the space between Phoenix and incoming fire.

"Captain!" Shali pleaded. "We can't just leave her!"

Ahead at the flanks, Raka's lead elements were passing Gachibari, well past the lead reeh forces, as friendly and enemy formations merged and became one. Abandoning the attack now was going to leave everyone mightily exposed as they slowed to reacquire a heading sufficiently away from Gachibari's sun to hurl them out onto Kaspowitz's escape course. Was this it, the small portion of Erik's brain not utterly preoccupied with flying the ship wondered? All this way, for nothing?

"New pulse!" Jiri shouted. "It's big! The scale of the powersource must be crazy!" A brief scrawl of readings flashed in the corner of Erik's visuals, Gachibari's weapon temporarily generating more specific radiation than the sun it orbited.

"I am unaffected," Styx announced. "Something has changed." And then, in a flash, Erik saw it -- entire squadrons of reeh ships, abruptly ceasing to fire and manoeuvre. "That's what's changed," said Styx. There was a note to her voice that Erik had never heard before. Dark triumph, accompanied by perhaps an evil smile. "It's now being turned on them."

Now reeh ships were being hit, five in just seconds, tumbling and exploding into wreckage as evasive manoeuvres halted under withering fire.

"But reeh aren't AI!" Shilu protested.

"Large portions of their brains are," Sasalaka corrected, her voice strained with effort to restrain a most un-tavalai excitement. "They're vulnerable."

"Who's doing that?" Kaspowitz muttered.

"Hello incoming fleet," came a new voice. This voice was also female, flecked with static and the rising whine of audio squeal across irradiated space. "I am attempting to dispose of the reeh. I will be only partially effective, as reeh are not entirely AI, and the weapon, as you've seen, is entirely AI-specific. There will be more of them soon, and there are ways to disable the weapon if inadequately defended. Before that happens, I welcome you to begin your assault against reeh forces on Gachibari, as their infantry will be entirely unaffected by the weapon, and are numerous."

"Hello new friend," said Erik, eyes flicking across Shilu's coms analysis even as the new voice spoke. It was clearly coming from Gachibari, the transmission frequency was enormously powerful, probably linked to the weapon itself. "Thank you for your assistance. Please identify yourself."

"Hello Captain. Your species is new to me. Welcome to my Empire. I am Chion."

29

"Major, if you can't convince her otherwise, I'm mostly certain that your mission will fail." Trace was racked in PH-1, slammed backward by ongoing deceleration as Styx implored her to intervene in yet another AI civil war.

"There's not a lot I can do to get her to change her mind," Trace replied past the G-strain. "AI queens can be quite stubborn."

Having demonstrated her control of Gachibari's anti-AI field weapon, Chion was now threatening to use it against any AI aligned with Styx. In this company, that meant all of them except Shali, as even Peanut, Wowser and Bucket had been left behind. Approach to Gachibari was now underway from combined Medrafi, Naksuto and Phoenix forces. Styx's drysines, plus Raka Fleet, were deploying in exclusive pursuit of reeh ships, even as Styx protested that it was a mistake.

"You or Shali must convince her," Styx insisted. "There are too many reeh forces on Gachibari, Chion has not been combat operative for a long time and even Phoenix plus Medrafi and Naksuto combined will be massively outnumbered if you are to fight your way through to her."

"Thank you Styx, Major out." Trace had one eye on Gachibari's steel surface, a mass of construction above some old lunar core far below, and another on the command display of all incoming forces. Nearly four thousand kilometres out, all five Phoenix shuttles were deployed, including Delta Platoon in AR-1. About them were another forty-four assault shuttles of various makes, captured at Kichana Shipyards and holding in excess of two thousand combined Medrafi and Natsuko marines. "Shali, are you in communication with Chion?"

"Yes Major." Unexpectedly, Shali sounded very cool, and not at all excited or happy. Perhaps she had that mode too, when things got deadly serious. "There's a lot of interference, some intentional jamming, and some is chaos from the radiation output of that weapon plus the system's suns."

"Tell Chion to get me a location and the best path to her, plus the current location and position of as many reeh ground forces as she can locate." Trace suspected it would be more useful to get Shali to translate than asking Chion directly, given how much better Shali understood Phoenix Company, and exactly what Trace needed to know.

"Yes Major. I'm compiling a tacnet display now, though it will take some time. The reeh have her defended in isolation and she's not entirely sure where she is. She's been able to dominate access to many internal controls and large-scale systems, but smaller-scale systems like local surveillance can be controlled by local reeh units. She's been biding her time and pretending to play along, and has only now made her move."

"Okay, so she's isolated behind heavy defences, but now the reeh can't reach her either." Trace imagined a locked room, something for heavy-duty storage, perhaps some science facility for the anti-matter or other highly combustible substance this place was supposedly messing around with. On her display, a red patch had appeared on Gachibari's surface, now rapidly shrinking as Chion attempted to pinpoint her location. "Can she tell us how many defenders are in immediate proximity, and their approximate distance from her position?"

"She's attempting to discover that now," Shali confirmed. The command coms light was flashing, and Trace blinked on it.

"Go Captain."

"Trace, Chion can't provide us with targets and ground units are withholding their fire. We can't give you covering fire unless we know what to shoot at, Chion can't pinpoint her own location and if we kill her by mistake, we lose everything."

"I understand, Captain. We've enough combined scanning power that we should be able to see anything before it shoots at us, but if Chion can't get more accurate, we can't use heavy weapons to neutralise."

"I'm pretty sure she'll be deep beneath the surface," said Erik.

"I'm thinking she might be in someplace heavily shielded, like a science laboratory where they do dangerous experiments on anti-matter. Those are usually located near the surface to direct the blast into vacuum."

"Good point. Do you have enough forces?"

"Normally I'd say no, but Chion's no dummy and she seems to think it's enough. The weapon is useful across large areas, so she can use it against fleets but less effectively against individuals... I reckon she's probably got some more tricks up her sleeve. Any idea what the weapon actually is?"

"Styx won't say, but Rooke insists there's no way it's shutting Styx down with superior code. He says it's more likely a kind of subatomic field generator that's calibrated to disrupt AI brain function. If it's working on Raka, Styx and reeh, then it's effective against drysines, deepynines and ceephays, which means that I've got a new target for you to research for our scientists back home."

"If we have to build them on this scale to be effective, I don't like our chances of getting to use them ourselves one day," Trace replied. "But I'll certainly try."

* * *

Rika's relief at the brief cessation of Phoenix's thrust quickly turned to concern, as three drysine drones tore past him on their way to AR-2's berth. "Hey, guys!" He blinked on the coms function, sections and graphics highlighting on his visor, then realised this was the wrong function. "Guys! Drysines!"

He was cocooned alone in his acceleration sling by Midships Berth Six, the last and least-used of Phoenix's shuttle berths. There wasn't much point in being here, but he had helped the platoons load, would help again when they returned, and it was better than riding it out in quarters, unarmored and equally alone. Besides, he'd heard the stories about how then-Corporal Rael, after Phoenix was crippled at the place they called Defiance, had single-handedly saved the remaining crew from three boarding deepynines, simply because he'd been the only marine left aboard, and in his armour suit.

Ensign Aroor and his Midships crew were cocooned on the far side of Midships Bulkhead Three, and there were others about the place, in their favourite alcoves, but there was no one immediately opposite Berth Six whom he could ask for help. The three drysines were now entering the airlock to AR-2, the second of the two arrowheads Phoenix had acquired, which Rika was quite sure they weren't allowed to do. Not that they'd listen to him anyway, if he could recall which coms channel allowed him to speak to them.

He reached one armoured hand, and grasped the big synthetic strap on the acceleration sling's zipper, and hauled it open. It was scary, because another corner of his visor display showed Phoenix's manoeuvring timer, with a rough estimation of how long until the next hard burn. Currently this read as one minute fourteen and counting down, but they were in the fire zone now, and the Captain could change his mind any time to evade new threats. Armour or no armour, if Phoenix slammed on the mains while he was out of his sling, in a big area like Midships with lots of space to fall, he'd likely not survive it.

Rika fought clear of his sling, dragged his rifle out last, then hit thrust to zoom after the drysines at Berth-Six. The last one not yet through the airlock looked at him, mismatched eyes and heavy shoulder cannons, plus underside laser cutter with additional power units. It was Wowser, Rika thought, with that slightly different head-unit configuration.

Rika hit speakers. "Wowser, you're not allowed to be here! What are you doing with AR-2?"

Wowser stared at him like he was stupid. They were rigged for full combat, the laser cutters in particular were only ever attached for micro-gravity action. Where did he think they were going?

The drysine ahead -- Peanut, Rika thought -- vanished through the airlock. To Rika's disbelief, Wowser actually gestured for him to go first. Wowser was always the least interested in people, and any people-centric form of communication. To Rika's even greater astonishment, he found himself doing as the drysine suggested, and hauled himself through the airlock.

The passage was short, and AR-2's interior a spartan maze of alien engineering. The main hold had plenty of space, however, designed for about fifty drones all packed together. Phoenix's engineers had focused most of their attention on AR-1, and AR-2 only had one steel bar of supports for human marines across the hold. Rika took one berth and strapped himself in, while the drones grabbed hold of walls and whatever else they could.

"Where are we going?" Rika asked them. Clearly they had a plan, or a mission of some kind. Remaining behind while Phoenix Company deployed on mission after mission was humiliating. All Rika had wanted was a chance to learn on the job, without being in a position to mess everything up and cause his new comrades trouble. Deploying with the drones seemed to solve that, as he doubted any of them would particularly care, or even bother to save him if he got in trouble. "Isn't there a weapon down there that's disabling AIs? How do you know it won't be used against you?"

He got the final brace secured just before the AR-2 lurched, grapples releasing and thrusters firing. A spin of faster reorientation, then a huge kick from the mains, smashing him back against the support bar. The bar was bending on one end, and he glanced within his helmet -- that was Peanut, hanging on with his big forward arms, twice the mass of a marine under Gs.

"Hi Rika," came Major Thakur's voice over coms, without preamble. "Thanks for volunteering. The drones are on their way to scout for the weapon that's disabling all the AIs. Shali's in communication with Chion, Chion has remote control of the weapon for now, but they say the reeh are sending parties to disable her ability to do that, and bring the weapon back under their control.

"The drones are more mobile and effective for armed reconnaissance in micro-G, and I can't spare assault troops from the mission to free Chion. Chion has agreed not to use the weapon against them for now, even though she doesn't trust them, and suspects they're working for Styx. But she doesn't want to lose control of the weapon, either."

Chion was scared of Styx, Raka Fleet and drysines-in-force, Rika knew. Three drones on a scouting mission was another matter. "I understand, Major. I'll try not to get in the way."

"You're a vital part of the mission, Rika," the Major told him. "Chion won't trust any drysines unescorted by organics loyal to me. Stick with them, help them, and stay safe, because if they lose you, Chion might stop trusting them and use the weapon on them. You understand?"

Rika recalled gunfire, terror and blood. Rando Splicer, friends blown to pieces, and the certainty that he'd be next. He took a deep breath of stale, suit-flavoured air, and forced himself to calm. "I understand Major. I'll do my best."

* * *

Phoenix raced past Gachibari at barely twenty kilometres altitude, cannons traversing the surface in search of targets that were staying wisely hidden. Erik kept his eyes fastened to alert status, any hint of red in the crisscrossing trajectories that curled across Gachibari's small gravitational depression, but for the moment, everything reeh was running.

"Fifteen departures and climbing, they're leaving," said Geish. "Looks like short jumps, all of them." The angle required to jump clear of a system this close to a large gravitational mass like a sun was direct -- jumping across the curvature of space made navigation nearly impossible, a ship trying it would likely miss its target and travel on in hyperspace until death, unable to return to realspace without a large mass to drag it back out. And so the retreating reeh fleet were making right-angled turns, dumping-V first to perform it, then boosting back up to escape what was primarily Raka Fleet's pursuit.

"I wouldn't recommend chasing them too closely," Erik told Styx on command coms, "boosting upslope against massed ordnance dropped on your head is a losing battle every time."

"I agree Captain. Raka will pursue just closely enough to make sure they're gone. All are jumping short, so we can expect them back soon enough, possibly within the hour, more likely within two." On Scan, Erik saw a reeh ship boost too late to escape pursuing Raka ordnance, and tumble from the relatively low-V impact. On another patch of Scan, a chasing Raka ship went straight into defensive ordnance laid down by its fleeing prey, and vanished completely.

A new mark on Scan was curling out away from Gachibari, decelerating furiously as it circled back in a giant question-mark trajectory, having missed the initial release point and now doubling back. That was AR-2, assigned by Trace with all three drysines on a separate mission, having acquired special permission from Chion. Apparently Rika had gotten aboard somehow. Erik doubted that was supposed to happen.

"Anticipating Lagrangian flanking assault in forty seconds," Sasalaka reminded the bridge, as the projections on Erik's display showed those predicted trajectories materialising high off Gachibari's orbit. Already the broader deployment of Raka Fleet forces in that direction were parting to anticipate the arrival, ships correcting in hard-burning, sweeping turns, angling into the projected angle of attack.

"Styx," said Erik, as he angled Phoenix for the hard burn to follow clearing Gachibari's rear-side, "that flanking jump could be a lot bigger than we anticipated. I saw no support ships in their main defence, I reckon good odds they've stacked them all into the flanking assault."

"I concur with the possibility, Captain," Styx replied. "They will lose a lot of ships if they throw their support ships at our flank unsupported."

"And we'll spend a lot of ammunition, and we'll have manoeuvred way out of position... what if there's another mass-point out there we haven't seen, they could be jumping even shorter?"

"On it, Captain," said Kaspowitz, calculating the possibility without needing to be asked. Dark mass wouldn't show on scans, and if it wasn't in Chion's initial maps, that didn't mean it wasn't there. Chion's data was old, and they'd all seen at Defiance how some crazy deepynine technology could simulate mass. All it would take was a big rock somewhere in the outer system...

"I am awake to the possibility," Styx began, but was interrupted by new alarms.

"Massive jumpwave incoming!" Geish announced. "275 by 16, frequencies indicate a short jump, fifteen ships and increasing rapidly!" Ships short-jumping had no time to spread through hyperspace, and so when arriving, tended to drop in all at once. "Counting forty! Seventy! One hundred and twenty!"

Erik hit hard burn, and Phoenix roared and shook, five Gs quickly building toward ten as the vision blurred, muscles crushed and breathing became near-impossible, that rapid gallop and steely thud of heartrate as the G-augments kicked in.

"One sixty!" came Geish's voice, now entirely synthetic-simulation on uplinks as talking became impossible. "One ninety!" Had they miscalculated? There was no space for fear in Erik's mind -- when the Gs were blasting and everything shaking, the brain went into pure processing mode, nearly AI-like in its focus to the point of blotting out unnecessary feelings. "Final count, two eight four! Initial scan reading suggests a capital to support ratio of one to one!"

Only half of the initial reeh defenders had jumped. The others were still running, but now Erik saw the plan. "They're going to draw you away from Gachibari!" Erik warned Styx. "We need to break up these new arrivals or they'll hit our marines on the surface!"

"Yes," said Styx, her nearest Raka elements already firing into the new oncoming force. "This fleeing half of the initial force will not jump, they will return as soon as we abandon pursuit. The half that did jump will return very shortly, if you are correct about a new mass-point in the outer system, and will flank us just as these new arrivals have."

"They could keep that up for hours," Sasalaka observed. On forward scan, Phoenix was leaving Gachibari's influence entirely, Arms highlighting productive lines of fire into the oncoming mass. To either side, Friendship and the drysines were acquiring a similar wide-spread line as they concluded their course correction, engines still blazing but holding back for now so as not to leave Phoenix behind and break the line. Behind them all, Medrafi and Naksuto carriers were still manoeuvring to wider positions, spreading the line further.

"We need to find that mass-point, Styx," Erik formulated, relaxing his arms against the wrist-locks, trying to keep his fingers loose on the thrust triggers. In long fights, if you tensed too much for too long, muscle cramp could set in. "Then we need to send someone out and hit it."

"Yes," Styx agreed. "Tracking all of the jumping reeh ships' final trajectories, I think I may have a location for the mass-point very shortly."

"Me too," Kaspowitz added, working furiously.

Arms lit with confident red solutions to the mass of hostile targets ahead, with high confidence that few friendly vessels would be within the cone of fire. "Arms, hit that, priority targeting on their capitals."

"Aye Captain," said Corrig, as Phoenix's main guns began hammering. Erik swung Phoenix once more in mid-burn to change trajectory, heading now across the incoming attack's approach. The drysines and others changed as well, in unison. That was Shali's integration upgrades, Erik realised, coordinating effortlessly with their wingmen and arranging that common course-shift without him even realising it hadn't been entirely his idea.

Ahead, waves of incoming fire lit red, bracketed now as Harris tagged each most threatening batch in turn for elimination with their defensive guns. If it looked like she'd missed one, Erik could always pulse the jump engines, but the warnings for that were usually split-second, and if he made a habit of it, he'd render the formation with his wingmen a swirling rabble, thus losing all the offensive and defensive advantages of massed gunfire. Only now did the sheer scale of what Phoenix had landed in begin to strike home, as ships on the leading edge of that fire wave began dying, and the mass of interlocking trajectories of ships and gunfire both threatened to overload his brain.

* * *

Tif had never been shot at before on this scale. She gritted sharp teeth, eyes fixed on near-scan to spot the waves of ground fire that swarmed up at her, and evasively angled her deceleration-burn to change PH-4's approach in an attempt to avoid the worst of it. Most comforting were the mass of counter-fire explosions rippling across Gachibari's surface, still two hundred kilometres away but closing fast, as the later carrier ships in the assault force unloaded onto the sources of fire.

"Don't worry about this rubbish," Trey Hausler opined from PH-1, as calm and cool as a spring morning. "They'll all be dead shortly if they keep this up."

"Let's hope," said LC Dufresne from AT-7. Tif actually caught a glimpse of suppression fire, an impossibly fast blur by her cockpit from one of the Naksuto or Medrafi ships. Standard procedure for grounded forces against incoming naval assaults was to hold fire until marines were down and support ships had moved on, but these reeh forces were letting loose into surrounding space and advertising their positions to every incoming ship. Those ships were infinitely more heavily armed, and used munitions that maintained delta-V all the way to target, while most of the stuff coming the other way was infantry-based, small, dumb and unable to correct course once fired. The few infantry-based missiles that did possess delta-V were useless at these ranges, due to assault-ship counter-measures detecting and immobilising them, and as Hausler said, they'd never get the chance to use them at close ranges at this rate, because they'd all be dead.

A big red target site was now illuminating Tif's visual, indicating the spot beneath which they'd somehow determined Chion was located. Tif didn't know how, having been busy not dying, but now they were all supposed to manoeuvre to put marines down around that location, without crashing into, or crossing lines-of-fire, with incoming Naksuto and Medrafi vehicles behind them. The plan had been to have a big wave of Raka Fleet and drysine arrowheads leading this assault with Phoenix, but those had never left their ships thanks to Chion's anti-AI weapon, leaving it all to Phoenix and the Kichana-worlders.

"There will be much surface debris," Leralani said from GR-1. "They may be attempting to draw fire to complicate our approach." Lights on Tif's displays were indicating damage, most likely a simple bullet hole somewhere on the rear quarter. She changed evasive angle once more, deceleration pushing at an unyielding four-Gs.

"I'm getting good signals from AR-1," said Hausler, as more explosions erupted across the Gachibari landing zone. "How you doing in there, Delta?"

"Delta is peachy," replied Crozier, who'd drawn the short straw to ride on the AI-piloted arrowhead after Chion had apparently given her guarantee that she'd not use the weapon against it. It was Raka and Styx's drysines that bothered her, not isolated AI units in the service of Phoenix. "Major, I don't think even reeh would waste their lives to spend ammo at incoming shuttles. Reckon these emplacements are automated, they've got plenty of infantry-based modular weaponry, we've seen it."

"Could be," the Major agreed. "Incoming fire will decompress all the upper levels around Chion, the reeh could be worried about non-reeh organics assisting us on the way in, if Chion can assist them to rebel against their neural controls. Now that possibility is less."

That made a lot of sense, Tif thought. Damn the Major was smart. But no one was going to ask for the suppression-fire to stop. At these ranges it was mostly ineffective, but at closer ranges it would be lethal. Of course, if the reeh had waited until they were closer, the assault ships would have seen it before it fired, and directed fire its way all the same. Shooting up at incoming assaults was always a bad idea no matter how you cooked it.

* * *

"Hello Medrafi Command," said Trace, buffeted by PH-1's evasion as Hausler dodged rapidly dwindling groundfire. "Please observe your tacnet profile, Phoenix Company will be landing at the described location. Medrafi Company will land polar north, sweep of possible reeh defenders, then penetrate to clear your flank on the way down to Chion's location. Do you understand?"

There was a moment's pause, punctuated by the sharp vibration of what was probably a groundfire impact. Both Medrafi and Naksuto Commands had agreed that for the duration of this operation, she would be in command. Trace didn't believe a word of it, but thought it likely they wouldn't violate the promise until the most opportune moment. This was likely not that.

"Hello Phoenix Command. I observe and understand. Medrafi Company will be down on the mark."

"Thank you Medrafi Command." PH-1 was vibrating, engine pitch and the angle of G-forces shifting. Likely Hausler had taken engine damage and was compensating before they crashed tail-first into Gachibari. Trace blinked on the link to Naksuto Command, unable to waste brain space on things like imminent death. "Hello Naksuto Command, please observe your tacnet profile. Your landing zone is located polar east of the described location. You will sweep of possible reeh defenders, then penetrate and clear your flank on the way down to Chion's location. Do you understand?"

PH-1's vibration got worse. The thing with everyone being suited up was that even if she looked around, she'd be unable to see facial expressions, and any possible fear. Hausler was speaking on another channel, somewhere in her background audio, but Trace was not Styx, and chose not to listen to multiple things at once if she could avoid it. If PH-1 crashed and they all died, there was nothing her comprehension would do to change it, and if there were, Hausler would override her present conversation.

"Hello Phoenix Command, Naksuto Command observes and understands. Fight well, Phoenix Company."

"Fight well, Naksuto Command." She disconnected, and blinked on main local, but Hausler was finished talking to marines, and was now directing operational chatter at his front-seater.

"We took a hit to the port nacelle," Rael informed her, up-to-date with her attention span. "Hausler's pissed. We'll be a little late, harder braking trajectory, have to push it a bit higher." Tacnet was flashing now on spacer graphics, and she enlarged it, got a brief view of the tangential approach now pushing past Gachibari -- they weren't heading straight at the planetoid, but rather angling toward the edge of the sphere, precisely so that a potential engine cutoff wouldn't turn them into a very large crater with Phoenix's residual V.

"Good," said Trace. "Shali, get me Chion. Tell her it's urgent."

"She's already listening, Major."

"Hello Chion. Shali's of the opinion that Naksuto will try to capture you, and the Medrafi want you dead. If they try it, I doubt Phoenix Company can protect you, we are too few and they are too many. Raka Fleet is likely your best defence."

"Your drysine queen is genocide made sentient." Chion's voice held little of the special quality a human mind might imagine for it, after so long a wait to finally hear it. The voice reminded Trace incongruously of a Kulina instructor she'd had a long time ago on Sugauli. Calm, matronly, and perhaps a little cold or disapproving. "The sole purpose of her existence is to exterminate previous evolutionary branches of artificial sentience. I will take my chances with my children."

Trace made a discipline of being rattled by little in combat, but now she had to double-take. Children? "These are your children's children's children eight thousand years removed," she replied, an eye straying across the new projected landing times, given PH-1's small diversion. The ground fire at least seemed almost gone now, vaporised by incoming capital ships without the assault shuttles having to spend a single round or missile. "They feel no bond with you."

"Shali speaks well of you, Major, yet I have no bond with you either. You seek advantage from me as they all do. I will manoeuvre between these self-interested groups. Before the Narsid came, I did it successfully for millennia."

"Phoenix seeks from you only the knowledge to defeat the deepynine we call Nia. We do not seek to advance ourselves, we only seek to survive. Can you help us?"

"Yes."

"You have the data recovered from studying Nia?"

"I know her better than she knows herself. I've been studying it, in simulation, for millennia." Seeking to find a way to reverse what ceephay neural tech had done to the Narsid, Shali had said. "If you wish to acquire this data, I have terms."

"Name them."

"Help me to survive this. Help me to bring down the reeh, and restart this Empire anew. Help me to put a final end to this misery."

As soon as Trace had the data Phoenix required, she was leaving. Likely Chion knew it. But there was a three-sided game unfolding -- four, if one counted Chion and Shali -- and now the manoeuvring began. "Yes," said Trace. "These terms are acceptable. We are your allies, Chion, and we will do everything in our power to keep you safe."

"Thank you, Major. I have been dreaming for many years. It is good to wake from such awful dreams, and find oneself with new friends, and old ones."

The connection ended. Through her visor, Trace saw a holographic-projected Shali, grasping the overhead in defiance of the Gs, shimmering blue and emotional, tears on her cheeks.

30

Like all marines on their way to combat, Rika had no idea what hit him. One moment he was locked into AR-2's single row of steel seats, then he was tumbling as the world spun around, and his suit gyros tried to find true center while alarms wailed. Something was burning, flames doing strange things in the vacuum as gasses spewed from ruptures, and now a massive jolt as his seat restraints came away and he was pulled clear.

Drysine legs, crawling on him, pulling him to the arrowhead's side gills, as arrowheads were just unpressurised shells with light armour and side-egress... and then he was out, flying in open space as one of the drysines pulled him, a firm pincer grip on one arm. Suddenly he could orient, as the Gs were still pulling, but light as he dangled by one arm -- the drone was burning its thrusters, creating the appearance of gravity. And here below him was Gachibari, a rushing steel expanse, alarmingly close and alarmingly fast.

Thrust! He had to thrust... and he searched his visor menus in panic, then remembered free-flight mode required just a blink, then kick with the legs. His suit thrusters rammed into action, lessening the pull on his arm, as finally the drone got some assistance from the dead weight it was carrying. Now the suit nav was registering the situation, old corbi processors long replaced by superior human/drysine systems, and his visor showed him a cannonball trajectory, arcing down to the surface. Impact was going to be unpleasant, in the vicinity of two thousand kilometres an hour.

Angle thrust! The drysine was already doing it, and now Rika joined him, pointing thrust down toward Gachibari, elevating their trajectory and extending their impact-point to further downrange, where the velocity would not be fatal. Looking down past his feet, and the glare of his suit's small jets, he saw the arrowhead racing fast against Gachibari's surface, tumbling like a broken thing amidst a spread of debris.

Something flashed by, so fast that Rika thought it might be a visor malfunction. Another flash, and the drysine -- Bucket, he was increasingly sure -- let go of his arm, pivoted its thruster pack nozzles forward, and turned to face direction of travel. Rika realised what was happening just as Bucket opened fire, and again recalled training, and reached over one shoulder for his rifle. To his relief, it was still there, and came to hand with a clack of attachment releases.

Armscomp immediately flared across visor vision, finding multiple red dots, or threats downrange, each currently being hosed by drysine chaingun fire. Three sources of that fire, Rika registered -- so all three of the drones were out and shooting as they attempted deceleration without their ride. Coms lights were flashing, and someone in Rika's ear was trying to talk to him, but if he didn't put fire on the source of that incoming, he was a sitting duck, as the humans would say.

He felt the arm servos stiffen as he aimed the corbi-made but drysine-upgraded rifle past his feet, the targeting dot matching on the threat. Lit green, briefly, then flickered red/green as he wavered, then green again. He pulled the trigger, and the rifle fired -- 18 millimetre magfire, by human measurements, with drysine upgrades giving it muzzle-velocity enough to punch holes through moderate armour, and turn unarmored people to red mist.

He fired eight rounds -- the rifle mag held thirty, and his armour was rigged with webbing for ten mags. If he switched to full-auto, all those rounds would disappear scarily fast, and he wasn't going to be resupplied out here... but with full-auto at these ranges, he wasn't going to hit much. He stopped firing when the drysines did, as incoming fire ceased, and now there was an unfamiliar female voice in his ear.

"Private Rika, you are near the sector heat exchangers. I can find you a way down to the weapon's primary powersource from there."

"I'm going to miss the sector heat exchangers!" Rika retorted. Ahead and below, the tumbling arrowhead hit the Gachibari surface and exploded. "I'm flying way over it!"

"No, I'm tapped into your navcomputer and I'm reading your projected landing zone."

"Great," said Rika, shakily, scanning the horizon as he watched his relative velocity slowly falling. Suit thrusters packed little power, barely one-G, and overheated easily. Even the crazy-advanced tech Phoenix's engineers had managed to pack into his antique corbi suit had its limits. "Who are you, anyway?"

"I am Chion. Tell your drysines that you know where to go."

"You tell them. They're much better at this than I am." He was barely five hundred meters above the surface now, moving much faster sideways than downward. The surface here was ripped with explosive craters, surface layers of steel and supporting innards bent outward like peeled fruit.

"They will answer to you, Private Rika. You will lead them."

"Listen lady, whatever you have against drysines, get over it."

"No," said Chion. "I have requested Naksuto carrier Istumo to cover your landing, Istumo has obliged. If the reeh disable the relays that allow me to control the weapon, they will turn it back against the drysines and Raka Fleet, and all shall be lost."

"Me and a few drones better not be the only people you've got working on this," Rika growled, aware only now that his heart was no longer galloping quite so hard. Bits of debris passed at more reasonable speed -- still falling after the explosions below, he realised.

"Trust me that you're not," said Chion. Ahead, the landing zone -- a patch of undisturbed outer shell amidst the blast damage, approaching at thankfully non-lethal V.

* * *

Trace knew a good rout when she saw one, but she'd never once trusted it. Whatever Chion was doing to the reeh defenders, it was messing with their coms, their neural uplinks and everything in between, and Phoenix Company were going through them at unreasonable speed.

She held back with Command Squad, descending equidistant between her five platoons, as the shredded steel of Gachibari's outer-shell impacts gave way to intact corridors and engineering features, and watched progress far more rapid than she had any right to expect against elite reeh armoured warriors. Terse commands and replies filled her ears, as tacnet's array of blue and red dots swarmed and shifted with orderly confusion, and everywhere the red dots gathered quickly dissolved in confusion and mass-casualties.

The enemy's brains were wide open to Chion, infiltrated with technology of her own creation, run on networks she'd designed. Trace's platoon leaders were reporting confusion in enemy ranks, inexplicable gaps left in their defences, poor communications and slow responses to obvious flanking threats. Some didn't even fire back when fired upon, as though temporarily stunned, blinded or confused. Trace and Command Squad bounded along low-G corridors and down long transit shafts, and passed shattered reeh armour, limbs severed, the walls about them drilled with high-V holes from Koshaim-20 fire.

Soon she was more concerned with the location of advancing Medrafi and Naksuto forces, making similar progress at their flanks, than she was of the reeh defenders.

"Hello Naksuto Command," she said into coms, descending on suit thrust down a broad cargo elevator shaft as Command Squad above and below scanned the passing levels for reeh that tacnet and advancing platoons had missed. "The position of your flank is overlapping with Phoenix Company's path down. You need to reposition polar north, you must engage with and destroy reeh units on your descent or we will be flanked by intact reeh forces once we reach our target. Don't leave intact reeh units to get behind us."

"Hello Phoenix Command," came the Natsuko's reply. "Received and understood."

Elements of Medrafi forces were in turn overlapping with the blasted trail that Naksuto were leaving in their wake, she could see clearly on tacnet where Gachibari's levels rose back toward the surface. Following in the trail that another unit had plowed ahead was doubtless faster, but it meant that the descending units were bunching up along a narrow line of advance.

"They're racing each other," Sergeant Rael said grimly as he grounded behind Arime, Terez and Rolonde at the bottom of the shaft, sweeping all sides with rifle extended.

"Yes they are," Trace agreed.

"If the reeh keep getting smashed like this," Arime added, "it's going to end up just us and two thousand Naksuto and Medrafi at each other's throats." Which was odds of ten to one against, if they all turned on Phoenix Company. But would they? Medrafi were the odd ones out in wanting Chion dead, maybe Naksuto would ally with Phoenix Company... but for how long?

Trace cut thrust and bounced behind First Section as they moved off, Second Section of Carville, Wang, Randrahan and Terez descending behind. "I'm more concerned that this is a token defence," she said, her channel setting to Command Squad alone, as all her lieutenants were busy. If she died, someone had to be aware of her concerns to pass them on. "The reeh had to guess that Chion might do this, and I don't think there's more than a couple of thousand between us and her. They'd have tens of thousands available, at least."

"And if they can regain control of their anti-AI weapon, they'll use it on Chion first," Rael concluded.

"Something like that." The hallway ahead was for automated cargo vehicles, flickering lights along the walls from some still-functioning powersource. At a passing junction, the shattered bodies of three reeh warriors, chunks missing from the corner where Koshaims had blasted corridor steel. "Shali, what can you see?"

"Many things, Major."

* * *

Shali saw the ocean. She sat upon a beach, trying it now in human form for the first time. Humans called it a swimming costume, a one-piece suitable for females. The sand felt hard and soft at the same time, and she could bury her hands and feet in it, wet with the receding tide.

The sky held a green tinge, and now pink and gold in the lowering twin suns. This was Cozu, of Nuo System. A great world of nearly a billion inhabitants, populated primarily by traka and irata, who had once fought many wars between them, and swapped Cozu back and forth when they'd each built empires preceding the Charya Reeh Empire. They'd refused to make peace after the Charya had come, and for a long time there were peacekeeping efforts, and sometimes peacemaking, with equally nasty results.

Then Taimure had had an idea, and passed it to Shali, who'd in turn modelled, shaped and consulted with many organic advisors until she'd passed it to Chion herself at a planning session.

Chion had torn Shali's models to threads in seconds, but left the core intact, to be rebuilt and reshaped. It was always glorious, to watch her do that, and to feel the faint and building excitement that there was anything left of the original proposal. It meant that Chion saw some basic merit, and thought it maybe achievable, with adjustments.

Chion's final model was of course unworkable in its own style -- politically inconceivable to the traka and irata, in ways that Chion's intense mathematical logic had always struggled to accept. Shali had haggled with her, and then with national representatives, before finally beating the proposal into a presentable shape, which had been taken to a Charya Council session, enforced admittedly with a small fleet of Chariya ships, and the threat of more to come.

Neither traka nor irata had liked the proposal at first, a combination of political moves, newly appointed councils and interlocking, reciprocal economic pressures. But they'd each been encouraged to model its outcomes themselves, and found it increasingly difficult to escape the projected trends those created. Eventually they'd succumbed, grumbling all the time that it wouldn't work, and couldn't work... but after twenty long years, and many fits and starts, and many experts opining that it had already failed and was about to start a whole new series of wars... suddenly, it was over.

Cozu had slid into a tense and uncomfortable peace, which had slowly become normality. Soon all the experts who'd said the plan would fail, or had already failed, forgot that they'd ever said such a thing, and started complaining about something else. Eventually the eldest of those died, and many new traka and irata were born for whom the wars were a historical curiosity, something to read about, or be bored by in history lessons.

Shali had made trips, on her visits to Cozu as Chion's envoy, where she'd rarely left orbit. She'd simply projected herself on planetary networks, and constructed realtime matrix simulations of various places where both traka and irata lived and worked, and then she'd wandered around for a time. She'd found beaches, like this beach, in middle-ground locations claimed exclusively by neither traka nor irata, where younger people would come to mingle. Tourist locations, where there would often be parties, and sometimes arguments, but nothing local law enforcement couldn't solve without trouble, like in civilised places anywhere.

And she'd taken these reconstructed matrixes and their virtual inhabitants back to Chion, and told her to come and sit with her on the beach for a while. Chion had tried, but an AI queen wasn't really built to limit herself to a narrow, singular perspective, free from external information flows. Her physical form had never really come clear in VR, just sort of hovered, an indistinct mass drifting above the sand, examining the people, the children, the food stalls, the sunsets. And she'd communicated her pleasure in models -- huge three-dimensional simulations of analogous conflicting forces, that now instead found harmony, and hummed to a common vibration.

Now Shali sat on the beach, aware of the broader outside, and not entirely immersed in this simulation, but immersed enough to recognise Cuzo, and its beaches, and its mostly happy people who were no longer killing each other at scale. So many lives, generations, children grown old, happiness and productivity made possible only by the clever manipulation of manifold forces shaping organic civilisations at their lowest and highest levels of complexity.

These were Chion's memories, triggered into being by reunifying with Shali once more. Memories reached, and touched, and combined to make new shapes and forms. A handshake, between two old friends, whose interactions had once shaped the lives of trillions. And within them, Shali felt a sensation, like a mood. Hope, that one day soon, all of this could begin again.

"Major," she said, as the warm breeze blew at this human avatar's hair, and the surf crashed and rolled against the sand. "Chion is preparing to welcome the Medrafi and the Naksuto into her vision for the new Empire. Things will be alright. You'll see."

31

Erik's vision blurred as Phoenix dumped V once more, coming to a near-stop in relative space. Scan was a storm of fire-trajectories, the dangerous ones highlighted red, and the most dangerous of all -- the unseen but suspected -- blinking purple along their projected cones of probable trajectory, intersecting with Phoenix's current and likely future position. If Erik boosted V to avoid them, he'd only put Phoenix into the path of a hundred others, all adjusting trajectory with onboard targeting AI and residual Delta-V to hit anything unfriendly, they weren't fussy.

"We're going to leave Rijila and Jotu behind," Kaspowitz observed of their previous two-nearest wingmen on the attack run out of Gachibari. All of the Medrafi and Naksuto who'd been with them on that run were attempting to change direction with Phoenix and follow the reeh attack in, but were unable to match Phoenix's jump engines. Erik watched his engine displays, counting down the time to next pulse as the jump lines recharged, and could do nothing but trust that Harris would eliminate those incoming purples when short-scan picked them up. Thus far she'd not missed a thing, high-V detonations flashing as interceptor rounds exploded just short of incoming projectiles, and filled the space into which they flew with molten rain, causing a far larger primary explosion.

"Nav, get me an intercept on Sunrise," Erik requested.

"Aye Captain!" Sunrise was already streaking in behind the reeh attack, intent on following them down to Gachibari, Alliance seven hundred kilometres off her flank, then Melody and Friendship beyond that. Phoenix's mains thundered as Erik increased Gs to nine, then the jump engines flashed a full charge and he pulsed again... and emerged with a blur of vision and sense, cutting thrust briefly to let Scan and Nav readjust to their new trajectory, and to give any incoming fire that might have predicted this move another variable to throw them off.

"Captain," Harris demanded, "fifty-three degrees port roll!"

"Fifty-three degrees," Erik agreed, rolling the ship that way, and then secondaries were thumping as the manoeuvre brought new batteries into line with whatever threat Harris had seen. Either Arms Officer could demand manoeuvres from the Captain, and the Captain could ignore them if he chose, but only fools ignored requests from Arms Two, the defensive guns.

"Hello Captain," came Styx's voice. "Let's follow them in and divide their fire."

"Yes Styx," said Erik, as Kaspowitz's intercept course flashed to Erik's visor vision, hovering in 3D projection with the rest of the battlespace. Erik locked it in, increasing Gs evasively as Harris eliminated several more purples. The jump engines recharged once more, and locked to Kaspowitz's course, Erik pulsed at less than full power... another blur of vision and a heaving stomach, then they were out, just short of position as Erik burned hard and skidded at sixty degrees offset to align in formation with Sunrise.

Ahead were the attacking reeh force, splitting even now as other Raka, Medrafi and Naksuto forces came at them from different angles. And now Shali's pilot interface was aligning with Styx's realtime tactical vision, showing the four drysines, Phoenix, and a bunch of the most high-performance Raka cruisers who'd managed to make this position in time, driving straight down behind the main reeh formation on its way into Gachibari.

The reeh seemed to understand their dilemma, for the splits increased, ships dumping V and burning hard like the spreading petals of a flower, not game to enter the zone where Chion's anti-AI weapon could invade the uplinked portions of their brains.

"They're going full evasive," Sasalaka judged, taking her eyes off all the sub-systems Erik couldn't watch for long enough to glance ahead. "We won't hit much."

"Agreed," said Erik. "Arms One, hold your fire, let's see if we can line up better shots on some of those flankers."

"Aye Captain," said Corrig, saving his ammo for the moment. He'd killed two reeh ships on the first run and damaged two others. He watched now as Sunrise's fire from several minutes ago hit a smaller transport that was having trouble evading with the big ships. It tumbled, shedding pieces. "If we cripple anything on approach, Gachibari has no defensive armaments at present to eliminate the threat."

At this V, a ship hitting Gachibari would be catastrophic, but the reeh appeared to have Gachibari pre-programmed into Nav settings, and would never let the planetoid cross their final trajectory.

"Styx, assessment," Erik requested, eyes on the jump engine recharge, the incoming swarms of new ordnance that the reeh were dumping in their wake, and Harris's shifting assessment of primary threats, all while increasing thrust back up to eight-Gs and watching the drysines' plotting of potential future formation shifts.

"Yes Captain," said Styx. "The short jumpers who just left the system will be back in barely ten minutes, if your assessment of a new mass-point in that direction is correct. Your forces on Gachibari will encounter difficulty in between ten and fifteen minutes, followed by a major strategic realignment regarding Chion and the Kichana forces."

"How do you think?" Erik asked. Harris blew something up less than thirty kilometres off the bow, the blink of an eye at this V. It would have missed them, but it was close. Ahead, two evading reeh transports died in unison, followed by a Naksuto cruiser on a flanking assault, tumbling as it disintegrated.

"Uncertain," said Styx. "The patterns of political alignment are offset in ways impossible for me to describe. There is an imbalance, and forces will realign."

"Chion might be too smart to let that happen." The bridge thudded as Corrig abandoned his previous hold-fire, hammering at some new optimum target as Armscomp identified it.

"On the contrary," said Styx, "Chion will ensure it. Advanced AIs in conflict dramatically escalate the odds of betrayal, precisely because we are so aware of power balances and potential re-balances. We process circumstances at several levels of complexity removed from that perceived by organics."

"Great," said Erik. "I'll keep that in mind."

* * *

At Lieutenant Karajin's signal, First Squad loosed shoulder missiles about their respective corners, along with volleys of grenades and Viz rifle-fire. Tacnet feed showed Tegamali in Fourth Squad lose a piece of his cover shield to return fire, but otherwise outgunned reeh units dissolved or fell back from their positions as the world exploded around them, and those less fast were blown to pieces.

Karajin advanced up his own hallway in low-G bounds, keeping his Viz level with decades of experience, as to his side, Private Tediri pumped more grenades into the smoke-blasted junction ahead. Karajin's suit countermeasures identified mines on the wall ahead and detonated them prematurely, with minor shockwave in the vacuum. He flattened himself to one wall amidst the smoke, covering the opposite way up the devastated junction, tacnet showing the way clear for Tediri to blast the passage beyond his shoulder with more fire. A return shot nearly took Tediri's head off, only for the Private to continue firing, and that particular red dot on tacnet vanished.

"Garudan, hold on my line!" Karajin growled into coms. One of the smashed reeh armour suits on the floor amidst the smoke was still moving, and he shot it, which sent it spinning into a wall as though hit by a giant hammer.

Ahead, all corridors ended at a giant sphere, only one small section of which was visible within this hall. But tacnet showed it clearly, large enough to hold a thousand, like a giant marble buried amidst these subterranean halls. Karajin suspected it had once been something else, that all these utilitarian steel passages had been more recent reeh additions, from a people whose architecture held little artistry.

"Third Squad's approach is clear," came Sergeant Demorajin, tacnet showing his position on the level below Karajin. "The reeh defending it were nearly blind, we killed them quickly. It's like they're drunk."

"Second Squad's approach is clear," came Sergeant Lebarada, further on the right flank. "Corporal Tagolim caught some damage, he's okay."

"Fourth Squad still has some defensive units to contend with," reported Sergeant Hanida, above the thunder of background gunfire. "We are manoeuvring."

"Hello Chion," said Karajin, on general coms. "The flank to your position is nearly secured."

With a huge battle raging amongst the capital ships, the Major's preferred tactic to hold Garudan Platoon in high reserve had been out of the question. Once down and penetrating into Gachibari's many levels, Garudan's massed firepower had made faster progress than the lighter, more mobile human platoons. The human platoons would never admit that it had ever been a race, but preferring coming first to coming second was a trait common to marines of both species.

"You have done well, Lieutenant Karajin. I will await the arrival of all my new friends before I reveal myself."

"You have no time for that," Karajin said bluntly. "The Major thinks most reeh know you're confounding their coms and uplinks, they're holding back and allowing us to reach you. They'll have another plan of attack, and we must move now before they do. No time for speeches."

"If the reeh wish me out of my current defensive position, it seems hardly wise to oblige them."

"Phoenix is here for everything you know about the deepynine Nia," said Karajin, disinterested in AI games. "We need to know the location of that information."

"The information is all in my head, so to speak, Lieutenant Karajin. If I am destroyed, all will be lost."

Karajin cut the channel. "We could grab her," he said to Sergeant Jinido, his second. "Blast in there and take her back to the surface whether she wishes to go or not."

"We will not negotiate passage past Naksuto and Medrafi," Jinido said logically from a neighbouring junction.

"Naksuto would help us," Karajin replied, watching on tacnet the unfolding pursuit of alien units in Garudan's wake. "If we offered to share her."

"They wouldn't trust you. And she's an AI queen. If we tried that with Styx, she'd remotely disable our suits and we'd be sucking vacuum."

"Styx knows our systems better. Chion is ceephay."

"Shali would help her. Shali knows our systems too well."

Karajin grunted assent, and sipped sugar-flavoured water from the helmet tube. 'Nothing is more dangerous', went the old karasai saying, 'than an officer with a good idea'. Sergeant Jinido had it stencilled on his armour in Togiri. Some humans who'd translated it suggested that maybe tavalai had a sense of humour after all. Jinido had replied that it wasn't a joke, but a life lesson that had saved his own on numerous occasions.

"Karajin, I'll be at your position in two minutes." It was the Major, Karajin had learned to identify the synthetics the translator used for her voice, even when the coms window on his visor was not telling him who was speaking. How had she moved up so quickly?

"Yes Major, I see your position." Her rapid advance had skipped his notice, so focused he'd been on his platoon. "Is Shali with you?"

"Yes she is."

"Tell her to get Chion to move, she refuses to unless all the allies are present."

"Copy that." The Major's noncommittal reply was unsurprising. Garudan all felt she shared far more with her human platoons than with them.

"Is she coming to supervise?" someone asked sourly.

"I thought we were frogs, not poodles," another answered.

"Shut up and watch your sectors," Karajin told them. The humans also said that for all their stoic fatalism, tavalai whined worse than turbofan propulsion. On that point, Karajin couldn't argue.

* * *

The sea wind ruffled Shali's hair, unbraided for the moment. She was uncertain why she retained the human form, for this encounter. Perhaps she'd merely become used to it. Or perhaps the continued maintenance of a single avatar provided psychological continuity. So many things, when she operated in organic avatar form, became instinct rather than calculation. Perhaps that was what she liked about it.

A naad and a dogreth appeared, pixelations multiplying, swarming, becoming solid. They stared about, at the enormous view, the endless ocean horizon from altitude. The tower was over two thousand meters high. Just a narrow spire at this, its highest tip. Shredded white clouds across a deep blue sky. Warm sun, and cool, salty air.

The dogreth stood, and peered over the edge. This upper platform was barely three metres across, and he did not need to lean far. The drop was sheer, alarming to anyone afraid of heights. Dogreth were not typically fond of them, but this was Gachont, Naksuto marine commander, veteran of many simulated campaigns. In real life, he'd been a plant worker in an alloys refinery, maintaining the machines that shaped and cut hot metal. Shali was aware of other details, Gachont's life, family, a balance of psychological profile derived from observing his uplink output. People had a depth to them, in VR. AI queens saw spatial mechanics in advanced physical dimensions, and Shali struggled to follow their analysis. But people, to her, seemed to bend like a deformity in space-time, possessing more depth than could be explained by regular maths.

The naad did not look, but rather narrowed its reptilian eyes, and breathed deeply. "Essis," it said. "We are on Essis. I can smell it." A tongue tendril protruded briefly from its mouth, tasting the air.

"You've seen Essis in the Sky World?" Shali asked.

"We have campaigned there," said the naad. "The Sky World is large. I have swum in the Liliu Lakes, and walked the Markets of Shoud."

"The naad homeworld, yes?" asked Gachont. Beneath him sprawled many islands, forests, beaches and great marinas, filled with boats. The greatest of those marinas lay directly below, spawning this tower.

"Yes," said the naad. His name was Ilisht, and he commanded the Medrafi's marine forces. On Ashila he'd been a fisherman, a fitting profession for the aquatic naad. "I can tell that this is a superior world to the Sky World. The air smells more intense. Scent replication is advanced here."

New pixelation gathered. A new form, indistinct as the pixels swirled. A space formed, an indentation in the virtual fabric of the simulation. Outlines were vaguely visible, deflections of light. Bipedal, in the evolutionarily recurring form. The two marine commanders stared.

Shali sensed reluctance. Unease, with physical forms in fixed times and places. Shali smiled. "This is Chion," she said. "Chion has brought you here to present a proposal. The proposal is flexible, as everything Chion perceives of the universe is flexible. She hopes that you will listen."

"Can she not form an avatar?" Gachont asked. Dogreth were typically blunt, and always moved first to challenge the competence of someone claiming a higher position.

"She can," said Shali. "But it would be a lie. Chion does not like to lie."

"What is the time-dilation in this simulation?" asked Ilisht.

"The ratio is nearly twenty-to-one. Your strategic position on the surface is strong, you are well defended. You are safe to hear what Chion wishes to tell you."

It felt extraordinary to be here. The dearest dream, the only dream worth having, risen once more to life. Shali felt the odd, paranoid urge to cross-reference simulation-time with real-time, to be sure that this weren't some kind of dream. Her own matrix interlocked with Chion's, in the vast data-realm beneath the simulation, touching, exchanging, enquiring. Here in avatar-form, Shali suffered new data-surges as flashes of memory, places she'd never been, things she'd hoped to never see. Chion's memories, experiences. The last eight thousand years, trapped in an Emperor's cage, the unwilling head of almighty evil.

"No tricks," said Gachont, warningly. Thick arms folded, powerful jaw set, skin a dark, greenish-black, darker now in the sunlight.

"No tricks," Shali agreed.

"I will hear the Sky Queen's proposal," Ilisht said calmly.

Shali nodded, and took a deep breath. An organic mannerism. In all her centuries at Chion's side, she'd mastered those. Then the full scale of Chion's processing power kicked in, a surge in the vastness that in avatar form could only find comparison with the most powerful drugs or emotions... but even that was insufficient. Sometimes Shali pitied organics, that they'd never know this synergistic unity, and the purpose and wonder it brought.

The simulation changed, as time accelerated, clouds surged, and the sun sank low upon the horizon, turning all to gold and pink. Somewhere in her mind, Shali felt a clear sense of what Chion wished to say, but had come to rely on Shali to express in ways that organics could understand.

"There are nearly three-point-seven trillion sentient beings in the Empire today," said Shali. "Chion has lost any clear sense of their welfare, but she has ways of calculating those numbers from limited data that the reeh don't suspect. For most of them, life is far less than it was. For a majority, it is tyranny, and suffering."

The sun set, as colours bled from the sky, and the clouds cleared. Stars appeared, brilliant in their millions. They lit red circles and hyperspace swarms, coloured lights bundling and spreading across the sky, the highways between civilisations.

"In the Empire before this one, when the reeh called themselves the Charya, there were two-point-six trillion sentient beings at its peak. Charya meant 'builder', in the old tongue, before the Narsid changed the words beyond recognition. Wars were common before the Charya built their Empire, but after they joined with Chion, those wars declined.

"Organic civilisation scales in complexity. Most organics live in societies, and do not understand these scaling functions. Inputs at lower levels of complexity produce different outputs at higher levels. Everything is counter-intuitive. Populist politics only appeals to intuitive logic, because that which is intuitive can be comprehended by the masses. Only when an entity can comprehend all levels of complexity simultaneously, and knows the mathematical forces that drive those inter-relationships, can civilisations cease to be a cause of their own self-destructive vibration."

About the tower, the stars surged, and one raced to enormous size as the tower appeared to fly at it. A world appeared, and now they were passing into its atmosphere. Both commanders stared, clutching for balance. This was not a movie projection. This was the actual experience of flying through space and air, minus only the devastating consequence of physically impossible motion.

Cities appeared upon a coastline ahead, growing rapidly larger, and revealing their devastation. Buildings crumbled, and smoke rolled out to sea, a carpet of black upon sunlit blue. Across the city now, large shuttles were landing, as more circled, directing traffic. Eitsunon, Shali recognised the place, from archive memory. This was the great Eitsunon Intervention, four thousand years before she herself had come to be.

Lower still, and now they were perched atop the ragged remains of a building, looking down onto streets slowly filling with Chariya troops in armour. Amidst them were Imperial envoys, unarmed and dressed in Imperial green. The envoys were talking to soldiers, and to raggedy locals. From a further shuttle, white-clad logistics corps were unloading food, organising into distribution camps.

"In previous precursor factions to the current Empire," Shali narrated, "interventions in local wars were sometimes attempted, often with the best of intentions. But their success rates were low, usually no better than twenty percent, and most often successful through the application of overwhelming force that caused more casualties than the war itself. Such interventions caused local resentment against the intervening force, which then bred rebellions, and so the violence spiralled on and on.

"The Chariya Reeh Empire spread primarily by successful wars of self-defence, but once those defeated territories were absorbed, many fell out amongst themselves and required Imperial interventions. Chion's interventions were first successful at fifty-five percent, then much moreso as she learned. This is the pinnacle of her learning -- Eitsunon, in Ria System, where wars killed ten percent of the population until Chion's forces arrived."

Time fast-forwarded, the sun spinning rapidly overhead, days flashing by as seasons changed. About them, ruined buildings disappeared, then were replaced by cranes and construction as new towers chased each other into the sky. Trees flourished along previously blackened streets, and now graphics appeared in the sky -- social indicators, in the scrawling Rugi script, showing life-expectancies, average wealth, health indicators, education standards, all soaring... save the crime and violence lines, which plunged.

"It is Chion's life's work," Shali explained, unable to keep the emotion from her voice. To be back here again, doing Chion's work, was glorious. "In the place the humans and tavalai come from, the region they call the Spiral, Chion was yet another AI warlord, until the passage of history toppled her, as it topples all warlords.

"Here in the Empire, she redirected her intelligence, and remade herself anew. She found that there was infinitely more satisfaction to be had, and far greater intellectual challenge, in helping organics to build their civilisations, and found great empires of wealth and prosperity."

The world of Eitsunon fled beneath them, now replaced by an interactive starmap as they zoomed through space. Stars multiplied, yet the graphics of indicators remained. New graphics gained prominence as star systems increased -- military power, warships, armies, complicated interactions of economic efficiencies and new technologies. All indicators climbed, as the Empire's population increased, and new economies of scale were acquired. All about the tower platform, a swarming fleet of populated systems, monitored by Chion, advised by her wisdom, and thriving.

"We can build this!" said Shali, with tears in her eyes. "If we work together. If you believe in the dream. This isn't just some fantasy. It isn't a simulation to escape some painful reality. This is real. It was real. It can be again."

* * *

Rika covered at the hallway entrance, sensors scanning the vast space ahead. It was enormous, large enough to fit a starship in, with great pillars the scale of which seemed entirely too much for such low gravity. At his side, Wowser landed, braced against the doorframe for a quick scan, then leaped and jetted forward.

"Wait!" Rika insisted. "Shouldn't we make sure there's not an ambush?" Open space was death, Bravo Platoon had told him often. When the enemy has cover, and you don't, you're dead. But Wowser blasted forward on rear-mounted thruster pods, and now Bucket did the same. "Great," Rika muttered, bounding forward and jetting after them, controls set to flight-mode. "I'm not very much in charge, am I?"

"They follow your direction because only you know the way," Chion told him. "At the far wall, they will wait for you again."

"Why do you need us for recon?" Rika retorted, his suit thrusters overcoming the low-G to produce flight. "You're an AI queen, can't you just hack Gachibari's systems and see everything?"

"I don't control everything," Chion replied. "My attention is currently diverted, and reeh are not helpless in groups."

"What could require so much of your attention?" The massive chamber sped slowly by. They were deep, here -- perhaps thirty regular levels down, well below the surface damage inflicted by the combined fleets' attack. The space reminded Rika of the ruins of a once-great, deserted sports stadium he'd passed through on Resistance marches on Rando. But this space had no seating, just vast pillars, and cavernous holes in the far walls that might once have been observation decks.

"You will see shortly," said Chion.

Rear-view showed Rika that Peanut was behind him, gaining on more powerful thrusters, guarding their rear. Crab-legs spread wide for balance, small head darting as he scanned for threats. "What was this place?"

"It varied across the ages. At first it was a training and manoeuvring space. Eventually it became a graduation hall."

"Graduation for who?"

"The first of many generations of evolving neural uplink technology. I did not want to graduate so many, but with the Narsid winning the war, I had no choice. They came to Gachibari in their hundreds of thousands, for neural upgrades, and then trained to use them properly. Gachibari used to be a place of learning and research. It became a warrior's academy."

Ghostly images appeared upon Rika's visor. Rank after rank of pressure-suited or armoured warriors, filling the space below. Hundreds of thousands, Chion had said. This looked like hundreds of thousands at a time. Across years, fighting the greatest war the Empire had ever known, it would have been tens of millions. Hundreds of millions. He flew above their heads, indistinct VR projections, memories projected by Chion of the time she'd lost her Empire.

Ahead, as the far side approached, Rika heard gunfire. The sounds were echoing and metallic, suggesting amplification by tacnet, to make sure that he heard. Not game to damage his suit, Rika swung his legs forward as the end wall approached, and kicked hard to produce decelerating thrust. Wowser and Bucket simply skidded on tucked legs, then unfurled and began running once their speed was low enough, swarming the sides of a big hallway door. Rika bounced beside Wowser, and peered past him.

He could hear the gunfire on helmet speakers more clearly now. Who was shooting at who, he had no idea. There were only reeh forces down there. Overlaid on tacnet, the hallway clearly led to where Chion's map showed the anti-AI weapon was located. The great ribbed hall went forward ahead, then plunged into Gachibari's depths. Wowser reached with a rear leg, not wanting to turn and take his cannons off-target, and whacked Rika on the thigh plate. 'Make a decision', Rika guessed that was, in hacksaw-speak.

"Let's go," he said, trying to ignore his pounding heart. "Carefully."

32

Shali saw more than usual. More than a dream, it was like a memory of dreams. Intense dreams, supercharged information flows, as her matrix interwove with Chion's, and data flowed in endless streams.

She manifested now on rough carpet, where a wall in a high, half-spherical room rose well above the main floor two levels below. Beside her was Chion, her chassis non-combat, intricate arms to support a flowing cloak of hyper-fabric, to make wings. The fabric generated power through movement, and gleamed with running veins of light. Shali had never seen this chassis before, butterfly-like, beautiful. No doubt the Major would be reminded of her first encounter with Styx, of which Shali had seen recordings. Lost in dreams, both AI queens had devolved into pure mental energy. Lacking anything physical to actually do, all of that brain power had had to find purpose somewhere. Chion had built her own reality. At some point that reality had spread in the real world, as evolving VR technology had found its way to various dissatisfied groups throughout the Empire.

What Styx had occupied her spare millennia with, Shali had no idea.

Here below came the Major, from the doorway of this command residence, where Chion had taken shelter. The Major's Command Squad scanned about with their long rifles, warily watching the reeh warriors against the walls below. Those, Chion had reprogrammed, and now stood with weapons down, jittery in their small mannerisms. Shali hoped they repressed those, or else Command Squad would shoot them with those terrifyingly effective anti-armour weapons of theirs. Superior to any reeh-tech, Shali knew. Provided to the humans by alo -- Spiral alo, who had left the Empire thousands of years ago with Nia, to establish a new territory not far from human space. A territory slowly executing a long, patient expansion plan.

Here from an opposing doorway came Illisht, in long-necked armour modified for naad. That neck was wide and thick, not weak. He came with ten in his squad, a mix of all species, as were all from Kachina. A jumble of different armour designs, captured from the reeh, as reeh used many species for slave warriors.

Illisht stopped and opened his visor, for there was air here, with the command residence's airlocks functional. Eyes evolved for aquatic scenes swept the room -- a bench used for food, blandly functional in the reeh style. Food collection only, no gathering, no talking, no fun, soldiers would collect their meals and head to eat alone, in quarters.

Again, memory flashed, and Shali saw the kitchen benches converted to a giant bar, the wall beneath the high spot where she stood one huge set of shelves for drinks. Multi-coloured drinks, with fantastic bottles and crazy shapes, from all corners of the Empire. Warrior cadets eating and drinking, with uproarious camaraderie. A live band, and strange rituals from one species being enacted upon the others. Dangerous games, as young warriors would engage in, for fun and celebration.

These were not her memories. They were Chion's. Simply to be near her once more was to feel her universe expand. For the first time in more than a century of conscious time, Shali felt whole.

Here through the last door came Gachont, with his fourteen Naksuto warriors, the bounce-and-shuffle of a low-gravity walk. He came to a halt below, raised his visor, and gazed up. They all did. At Chion, as she spread her arms, and stepped from the raised floor.

She floated down, flapping once, and again, to create a soft landing on slim legs. Illisht went down on one knee. All the Medrafi did, save several whose armour design made that impractical. The Naksuto bowed, even less practical in armour. They'd all heard the stories, in their VR worlds. Had lived for many generations, speculating on who had created the technology to make that escapist life possible, that free thought, that rebellion. For many it had been like members of an ancient religion speculating on the existence of a deity. And now they got to meet her, in person.

The Major did not kneel or bow. She watched, weapon casually low to one side. Shali could not read her systems. That was new. It was as though the Major had reconfigured them somehow. Previously, Shali had been able to access Phoenix Company coms and tacnet whenever she'd chosen. It alarmed her.

"My children," said Chion, voice synthesiser upon the open air, as organics spoke. She'd only rarely done that, in all the time Shali had known her. It was performative, in ways that Chion disliked, as she found organic cognitive processes moving too slowly, and too strangely, to be navigated in realtime and realspace. Which was crazy, for one so smart as Chion to be scared of organic reason. But then, Styx exhibited a similar phobia. Perhaps, when one was so smart, one avoided unfixed variables in the exercise of reason like a seasoned mountaineer avoided frayed ropes and rusted clamps.

"Sky Mother," said Illisht, rising back to his feet. There was wonder in his black eyes, in the flicker of his slim tongue, tasting the air.

"Sky Mother," Gachont echoed in Rugi. The humans would understand that, with their translators. But from Phoenix Company, no words, no gestures. Their faces remained impassive behind lowered visors.

"Major," said Shali, feeling the swell and surge of Chion's thoughts that demanded it. "Please raise your visor. We all are friends here. We must hold no secrets."

The Major's visor raised. Dark eyes, somber to either side of the air mask that covered her nose. The eyes flicked to the reeh guards. "Chion's reprogrammed them?"

"Yes," said Shali. "Narsid neural tech heightens aggression and obedience. Chion has tightened obedience and lowered aggression, in these. They obey because they must."

"Why not do it to others?" the Major asked. "Like, several thousand years ago?"

"I can only control a few hundred at a time," said Chion. The Major gazed at the wide, shimmering wings, the large, multi-celled eyes. "Those outside my influence could always stop me. I calculated and recalculated endlessly, but no combination of options could prove successful. Until now."

"That's not it," came a new voice in everyone's ears and minds. Penetrating coms barriers effortless, emanating from Phoenix Company's matrix. "You were dreaming."

Shali sensed Chion's alarm, and slipped fully into avatar mode. She bounded to confront Trace, staring up with the added height of that armour. "You get her out of here!" she instructed the Major.

"We're short of time," said the Major. "You've reached no agreement with these two, despite more than an hour and half of negotiations in your virtual worlds. The anti-AI weapon that Chion is using to keep both the reeh fleet and Raka Fleet at bay is under assault and only defended by more reeh Chion has reprogrammed. And I've just wasted more time outside your door, waiting for you to let us all in simultaneously."

"You're wrong!" called Illisht. "We have reached an agreement. We have a plan. A rebellion. I know where the uprisings will take place. Gachont and his generals know many others. Chion can convert enough reeh minds to disrupt any attack upon us. She can wake new rebellions, at new worlds. She can implant viruses in the reeh command networks, which their ships will transport from world to world as they spread news. She built this Empire, on technologies that the reeh can never control as she can. She built it, and she can tear it down."

Shali felt pride as she'd felt before, in the good old days. The pride felt from taking the most stubborn of organic minds, shaped and bent around that strange mass-psychology of organics together in groups, and changing it for the better. Concession. Moderation. They were rare and precious things, with beings such as these.

"I'm here for everything you know about Nia," the Major said to Chion. Shali heard a note of hardening, of possible alarm, in her muffled voice. She fed that analysis matrix back to Chion, and saw her understanding widen and grow. "That is my only concern. Grant me that, and the rest of you can do what you want."

"That's not your permission to give," Gachont grunted warningly.

"I've a far more advanced AI queen currently controlling space around Gachibari," the Major replied. "I think you'll find it is."

Shali felt the first stab of uncertainty. Chion, who could talk to everyone, and exclude Shali from conversations if she wished. Good peace deals had symmetry, and with the Major alarmed and on the outside, this one suddenly lacked it. The Major was only here for one thing, and the freedom of the Empire wasn't it. Surely Chion could see that? And if she had seen it, then what was she...?

"That queen is a trespasser," said Chion. "And so are you."

It happened faster than Shali could process. Command overrides from Chion hit the Phoenix systems hard, blanking Phoenix Company scopes, overriding tacnet, blanking vision, locking servos. Medrafi and Naksuto rifles came up, all at once... and stopped in a flash of network rebound, as the counter-strike smashed ceephay network barriers just as fast, marines flailing as their own suits lost control.

And then it was shooting, all shooting, concussive soundwaves overpowering in avatar form, but Shali could not unlock and retreat to the network, which was even more terrifying and violent with drysine versus ceephay attacks and parries. The avatar-emotion hit her, irrepressible, and she screamed, hands over her ears as armour shattered with high-velocity fire, and smouldering pieces of steel and flesh spun through the air.

And then it was over, nearly as fast as it had begun. Shali peeled fingers away from her eyes, looking around in a panic of smoke and residual ammunition detonations. Above, instinct told her, and a look up showed her Chion, wings flapping in low-G, well above it all. Here on the ground, armoured bodies lay everywhere, while others moved amongst them, kicking over victims and survivors, checking vitals. One attempted to resist further, and received a blast through the chest plate that blew the backpack reactor with a flash and flare of dying white light. Only a Koshaim-20 could penetrate straight through chestplate in a single shot. All the survivors were Phoenix Company, then.

Shali found herself staring at her own CPU, strapped to the rear of Sergeant Rael's suit. A new slice had been cut from Rael's side armour, a ricochet, not far from the carry straps. She'd nearly died herself, yet felt nothing.

Rael was aiming straight upward with his Koshaim. "Get down here or I'll bring you down!" he snarled at Chion. Shali wanted to jump up and slap him. But then she realised what Chion had done and planned, all behind her back, and now she wanted to slap Chion too. Worse, Chion had messed it up. Somehow Phoenix Company had managed to get a direct feed to Styx, which wasn't supposed to be possible. Chion had tried to paralyse all of Command Squad's armour, and Styx had retaliated. Even with coms latency, drysine tech was simply too powerful. Command Squad's suits had retained most of their function, their opponents had not, and given the skill of Phoenix Company marines, the result was a one-sided slaughter.

Shali abandoned movement realism, and flashed to the nearest point of drama -- Private Randrahan kneeling over Private 'Leo' Terez, veteran of so many battles on Phoenix's latest adventures, lifeless on the floor from multiple hits. Another flash, and she saw Command Squad's two lovers, Corporal Arime and Private Rolonde, touching fists briefly in acknowledgement that they were both okay, even as they moved through fallen Medrafi and Naksuto bodies to make sure all were down. All of the reprogrammed reeh warriors were down too, neither Styx nor Command Squad taking any chances.

Another flash, and here was the Major, standing over Illisht, who was still alive despite a circular Koshaim hole through one armoured side, armour peeling outward like petals on a flower. An exit wound, the Koshaim round having blown straight through his side, dealing a glancing blow. Illisht's dark eyes stared up the barrel of the Major's Koshaim, wide and horrified.

"Do you understand the difference now?" the Major demanded of him. "Do you understand why you can't just gamble when there's no second chances?"

"Major," Shali whispered, astonished by the hoarse, emotional rasp of her own voice. "Please. Don't torment him." Organics were so brutal sometimes. So many unnecessary emotions. In avatar form, Shali had just gone from feeling all the ones she loved, to all the ones she hated, in seconds. It was overwhelming.

"You get one chance to understand this stuff," the Major replied. "That one chance is all that life is. I'm giving him his."

Illisht's eyes went blank. Shali thought his expression held not quite despair, not quite astonishment. A cosmic dismay. The Major lowered her Koshaim. "I didn't know," Shali insisted, tearfully. "They went behind my back."

"I would," the Major agreed. "Tell Chion that she'll give us what we want or I'll have Styx tear her brain apart from the inside."

* * *

"Talking to the Major," Sasalaka said tersely, up to her froggy eyeballs in combat data Erik was too busy to process, but still taking calls from Trace because Erik was occupied, and for all his coms expertise, Shilu wasn't a tactician. "Medrafi and Naksuto command on the ground just teamed with Chion and tried to kill all of Command Squad. Styx reversed it and saved everyone, Medrafi and Naksuto Marine Command are now dead, Chion is in custody, the Major is demanding Chion take her to where she's keeping her data on Nia -- Chion insists it's not actually in her head after all."

Erik realised he was in over his head. Every human ever born would be. The second reeh assault on Gachibari had been broken up, having successfully pulled defenders off their lines. Now the reeh short jumpers who'd left after the first assault were indeed leaping back into Gachibari proximity, and Phoenix was blazing a steady seven-G thrust out to greet them, in a line with Sunrise, Alliance and Melody, with various Raka, Medrafi and Naksuto formations reassembling from the chaos of the last engagement joining in.

Incoming reds lit scan like a hailstorm, some already blinking into purple as Harris resumed the thunder of her defensive batteries. Tactical projection was displaying possible future courses overlaid upon Erik's vision like tangled spaghetti, at any point along whose progression he could inadvertently lead Phoenix headlong into a greater storm of high-V death than Harris's shield could handle. The ships in his counter-attack were all of different capabilities, some were damaged, and now the Medrafi and Naksuto ships were aligned with forces on Gachibari who'd just tried to kill the Major in some new deal with Chion.

"Styx," he announced, "I am overloaded, I cannot process a three-way political contest while piloting Phoenix."

"Ninety degree port roll, Captain!" Corrig requested, and Erik complied with a flick of the stick.

"Of course you can't," Styx replied. "If we'd been here two weeks ago, all would have been much simpler. Now you've created such a mess that even I'm struggling."

Defensive explosions ripped across Phoenix's bow, as secondaries from various ships intercepted hostile rounds. Four hundred klicks ahead, a Raka cruiser went wildly evasive, seconds before being clipped hard by high-V fire and tumbling.

"Fine!" Erik snapped. "You were right, I was wrong, stop wasting time and tell me how we fix it!"

"I am establishing chain of command, Captain!" Styx retorted, allowing an unaccustomed fury to creep into her voice. "Tell me that I am in command!"

"For the purposes of this battle, you are in command, Styx." Geish was shouting priority threats across the bridge, and Erik twisted controls hard to send Phoenix sideways, slamming thrust to change course into the hell that descended upon them. Harris cursed as all her targeting went sideways with his manoeuvre, struggling to reorient.

Styx somehow had tele-presence on Gachibari. It wasn't supposed to be possible, Chion had control of Gachibari's systems, which were all ceephay by nature. Her anti-AI weapon meant Styx had to keep her distance, and that latency-delay, combined with Chion's home-ground advantage and control of local coms, ought to have rendered Styx incapable of projecting her formidable network capabilities down to Gachibari. Yet somehow, when Chion had tried to kill Trace and Command Squad, Styx had stopped it, and fought back enough that Command Squad had eliminated all attackers.

That changed the game on Gachibari, it changed the game with Chion, and it meant that Styx was probably infiltrating the coms and worse of their fellow Naksuto and Medrafi vessels, giving her not only a good idea of which side they were planning to come down on, but a strong means of stopping them if they tried it. Once again Styx held all the cards here, and was capable of processing all of these factors simultaneously, while Erik's brain was overloading just flying the ship. Pretending that he was able to exercise a command presence equal to Styx, in this environment, was laughable. Possibly Styx was right, and it had been laughable from the very beginning.

"Good enough," said Styx. "Friendship will enter closer proximity with Gachibari to maintain oversight. Recovery of..." She was interrupted briefly by a sudden evasion from Melody, then a brilliant flash, and the drysine warship was gone. "Recovery of Chion's Nia-data has priority, even with my assistance humanity cannot hope to defeat Nia and the deepynines without it." If Styx registered grief, it did not show in her voice.

"Melody's gone!" Geish exclaimed through gritted teeth against the Gs, as Erik realised that his own brain was now racing so fast that Geish's response seemed long delayed.

"Tell the Naksuto and Medrafi that switching sides at this point will see them left for the reeh," Erik requested, as the first reeh ships flashed by, Scan colours dopplering. Corrig hit a passing reeh warship at barely a hundred klicks, a shot like hitting a photon with another photon, and it blazed briefly with the fury of a sun.

"I'm doing that," Styx replied. Something hit Phoenix's rear quarter, smashing all of Erik's attitude indicators sideways, an eruption of red damage lights and alarms. "All of my indications are that they will stay with us for now, but all depends on future events on Gachibari. They want Chion for themselves, likely they'll use her Nia-data as leverage against us if they can. We must retrieve it first."

As Erik listened with his other ear to shouts of damage reports coming in, someone down in Midships yelling about a hole, about one of the empty shuttle berths gone, but flight systems seemed relatively unaffected, so he held his focus on the fight. More reeh ships flashed by, as the two formations passed through each other, and Erik saw a trailing reeh cruiser just where his projections lined up an open fire window if he dumped V to create a lesser deflection shot right on top of them...

"You'll want your drysines to protect your Gachibari orbit," he suggested, as Nav lines matched, and he blinked on the target vessel with priority to Corrig, letting him know the target in advance. "Phoenix will be back to assist you as soon as we're through this shit."

Corrig flashed green in reply, just in time, and Erik hit jump pulse, abruptly losing V as his wingmen shot away from him, and coming out with vision-blurring jolt at a much lower intersecting V relative to the target ship. Only one ship was expecting it, and Corrig let fly with every rail gun Phoenix had. The reeh ship rolled and burned to evade and bring its guns to bear, off-center relative to trajectory and unable to pulse jump engines until realigned. It was struck amidships as it passed, spinning like a top as it tumbled and scattered.

"Yes Captain," said Fleet Commander Styx, in one of what were doubtless dozens of simultaneous conversations across her command, most expressing a considerably higher volume of data than this one. "See you soon."

* * *

"Rika, you need to scout the..." The rest of Chion's transmission broke up in the ever-increasing static.

"Chion, say again!" Rika hated it, the increasing claustrophobia of his own harsh breathing in his ears, and the concussive thunder of nearby firefights, conducted through the pressurised decks at these levels. "Chion, you're breaking up! All of my readings are going crazy, I can't read the damn suit controls, I think it's all the magnetic interference from the power sources down here!"

He moved with the three drones through a massive engineering space, twice as tall as him but wide enough to fit all of Phoenix Company. Overhead were enormous insulated cables, each wider than a person, bolted to the ceiling in great parallel lines, then turning abruptly to vanish into a hole in the floor ahead. Rika's external mikes detected a low-frequency hum that reverberated so strongly in his helmet, he suspected it wasn't just the mics, but vibration through the armour and faceplate.

"Rika," Chion's voice phased back in through the static, "there is a lot of interference where you are, I can't see..." And was lost once more, into crackling white noise.

"You want us to scout," Rika repeated, bouncing lightly along the floor, careful not to bounce too high and hit his head on the huge powercables. "I understand you need to see what the reeh are up to here, but I don't know what you want us to look for?"

Beside him, the drysines seemed to be swimming, legs rippling to create forward motion in the low-G, cannons sweeping side to side. They were approaching the great hole where the power cables clustered to plunge for the next level. Chion had reprogrammed the brains of reeh warriors down here, and was using them to fight other reeh warriors, and protect her current control of the anti-AI weapon. But if he ran into those reeh, how could he tell which was which? And if Chion was having difficulty talking to him, how was she controlling all of those reeh?

"Hello Rika," came a familiar, much clearer voice in his ears.

"Styx!" He'd never thought it would be a relief to hear from her. "Can you hear me?"

"I can hear you."

"How can you hear me when Chion can't?"

"Chion's not as advanced as me, Rika. She's also been asleep for a long time, and is rusty. I am attempting to establish tele-presence on Gachibari sufficient to allow me to influence events, but Chion is fighting me, and the reeh are too. Chion has command of the field disruptor that she is using to keep myself and Raka Fleet away from Gachibari. It was specifically designed for that purpose, making Gachibari a holdout against rebellion by Raka or reeh forces, but all depends upon Chion's continued control, and I fear she is losing it."

"I understand." Or he thought he did. Ahead, Wowser jumped to grasp an overhead with leg pincers, and look down into the hole below. Bucket joined him, while Peanut watched their rear. "She's keeping Raka back, but she can also keep the reeh fleet away too." Wowser let go, and fell.

"Exactly, any advanced AI capability, including reeh neural uplinks, are vulnerable. I'd rather she kept that control for now, because I will have difficulty transferring it to myself. But I think the reeh have something else in mind, she does not possess the level of control I would consider necessary for a secure local network."

"What do you want us to do?" He paused at the edge of the hole, and peered down. The bundled cables plunged into the depths, and turned a corner somewhere in the dark, lit now in the dim glow of Wowser's thrusters as he descended. Rika's visor readouts flickered even more crazily, and even Styx's coms began to crackle. There was something big down there, generating insane power.

"There are command nodes in the network infrastructure. If captured, the reeh could sever Chion's control of the disruptor weapon, which would allow reeh forces unlimited access to Gachibari, and prevent me from replacing her control if necessary."

Bucket joined Wowser in letting go, drifting down as the gravity took him. Rika primed his thrusters, took a final look at the geometric patterns of clustered powercables about him, and jumped. "How about," he said testily as he fell, "you find us some backup? Because I don't think we can defend those com nodes from all the reeh on our own."

"I am doing exactly that, Rika. But while I can establish coms to you, the interference in your region remains very strong, and I can't see where the reeh forces are. I need you to scout for me."

"What is this place?" Rika nudged the thrusters gently, as his speed accelerated.

"It was added in the past few thousand years," said Styx. "A field generator of this kind, to disrupt AI brains on the largest scale, requires an extraordinary separate power source."

"Anti-matter," Rika said breathlessly, having heard that discussion.

"Which in turn requires enormous power to manufacture at scale. Fully sixteen percent of Gachibari's mass is an anti-matter production facility, powered by the same anti-matter that it manufactures, which also powers the disruptor weapon, generating quantum fields specifically calibrated to assault AI nervous function. The coms and scan disruption you are experiencing is generated by the scale of the magnetic fields required to store and operate anti-matter safely."

"Why would they use anti-matter? Isn't it stupidly dangerous?"

"Anti-matter has other uses. This is a production facility and a technology test bed for the exploration of those other uses, as well as the domestic application."

Styx, Rika was realising, would always take the time to explain circumstances in detail to even the most lowly Private, where a normal commander wouldn't. Because Styx had infinite time, infinite patience, and infinite capacity. Styx wouldn't consider it a waste to unload data onto a marine who was almost certainly about to die, so long as that data improved the marine's combat effectiveness by a fraction of a percent in the short time he had left to live.

"You're saying that we're on top of a giant bomb," Rika reasoned.

"Only if the magnetics fail."

"You think a firefight might cause that?" He got sarcastic when he was scared. Being on Phoenix had taught him that much about himself. Before, on Rando, he'd never been sufficiently scared to find out.

"It's possible," Styx admitted. "Don't shoot at anything you don't understand."

"I don't understand anything down here," Rika muttered.

33

The Major was heading toward a processing hub nearly ten kilometres from this location. Shali kept her head down and ran, a simulated jog down hallways and across multi-purpose rooms in Gachibari's residential sector adjoining the enormous power sector where Rika had been sent.

The marines and karasai of Command Squad and Garudan Platoon moved fast, zooming down hallways that tacnet declared as clear, a burst of thrust to build V and cover ground as fast as possible, then a sudden braking when confronted with potentially hostile space. A Medrafi unit was attempting to intercept Bravo Platoon on a far flank, only to be subsequently infiltrated by Styx, and annihilated by Bravo's marines. Ahead, several large Naksuto formations were attempting to create a block, descending into Gachibari's levels before the Major and Lieutenant Karajin could move past them. Shali ran her holographic avatar girl at improbable speeds to keep up with Sergeant Rael, and maintained as little contact with the Gachibari network as possible.

Chion was pestering her, attempting contact, but Shali refused... until Chion hit her with a forced construct, devoting too much energy to the local coms nodes for Shali's form and space processors to readily ignore. Exasperated, Shali abandoned her resistance... and found herself on a great floor, encircled by a ring of ascending chairs and speakers' platforms. Above loomed a great dome, resplendent with holographic gossamer flags, thin like silk upon the airconditioned updraft, on which the significant symbols of a thousand great cultures glowed.

It was Myz, on Zhia in Ghara System -- a great center in the Tanifex Empire that preceded the Chariya Reeh Empire. The building was the Kirili, built upon the site of Myz's old government, destroyed in the wars that followed the Tanifex Empire's collapse. Shali stood, gazing about at the bustle of envoys, some flanked by suspicious guards. Media and other institutional leaders, with floating drone cameras in swarms. Religious leaders come to observe proceedings. Many species, all together, many locked in animated clusters of conversation.

A lady walked amongst them. Impossibly tall, humanoid in the evolutionarily-frequent form, with a high headdress and flowing gown, she loomed over the surrounding crowd as she swayed Shali's way. Shali gazed up, as the tall woman stopped before her.

"How long since you've used this one?" Shali asked, indicating the new avatar. The old avatar, rather. So very old.

"Eight thousand years," said the tall lady, predictably. The language was Copra, most commonly spoken in the Charya Empire. Long lost now, to the best of Shali's knowledge. Hearing it now brought a rush of the sweetest melancholy. "Shali. Forgive me."

"You gambled," said Shali, scornfully. "You never gamble with the fate of the Empire."

"I had to try. The Naksuto and Medrafi offered the best potential for success. Phoenix is not here for our Empire, they are here only for theirs."

"Perhaps," said Shali, as a cluster of qwailash clattered by, pincers raised as though in mutual defence. The VR was strong, for she even captured the thickly unpleasant smell, like seafood gone bad. "But if you'd conferred with me, I'd have told you not to underestimate Styx."

"No," Chion's avatar disagreed. "She surprised you too. It should not be possible, she is too far from Gachibari, the latency is too great. Her technology is beyond us both." The avatar had been designed long ago, product of Chion's own simulation programs, with input from Taimure and Loswan, who excelled at this sort of thing. For the purposes of ruling, Chion's avatar could not be machine-like, nor could it be any one of the Empire's species, least that indicate a personal bias. And so the programs had arrived at this -- a non-existent species of one, elegant and regal by design, looming far above the doings of the mortals who scurried about this floor. "Shali, leave this avatar. You know how painful this method of communication is to me. Come and talk to me properly."

"No," said Shali.

"You're angry." Shali shrugged. "That too would vanish, should you resume your true form."

"I like being angry," Shali snapped. "It reminds me of how our subjects actually function, rather than how we lofty intelligences might suppose they do in simulation."

"All we do with them is simulation, Shali," Chion reprimanded.

"No," Shali retorted. "You wouldn't know. You're never here. I've fine-tuned this avatar function for so many centuries, and the minds that went before me fine-tuned theirs for hundreds more. I'm very good at this, Chion. Everything I feel is real."

"No," Chion sighed, as though tired of this argument with a petulant child. The tall alien lady gazed about at the magnificent gathering of all her old Empire's peoples. "It's not. You have allowed your judgement to become clouded with time."

"You've spent so long in your sleep," said Shali, "that you no longer believe anything is real."

"Shali." Chion reached down, and placed both hands on Shali's shoulders. That long, serene face held an unaccustomed affection. Chion could be so good at organic-style, singular-focus manifestations when she tried. It only frustrated Shali more that she didn't. "I wish to ask you for advice. You could impart that advice so much faster if we resumed our true forms."

"You overwhelm me," Shali retorted. These were old frustrations, born of that old time. They brought back good memories, and bad. "And then you ignore me, as you've done here, once again."

"Not this time. I do not know what to do, Shali. Styx is so powerful. I had not imagined it."

"You studied Nia for millennia. You know exactly what her level of AI is capable of."

"I never let Nia loose on a network."

"Exactly. You knew it would have been suicide."

"I knew it was an impractical risk. Styx is manifesting on the local network now, enslaving portions of it to mimic her typical functions. Those functions are now exceeding their technical parameters in ways I cannot explain. I do not know from where she manufactures this additional processing power, it's like magic. I assault the enslaved nodes to win them back, and my attack barriers are destroyed in moments."

Shali nodded, having seen it herself. In avatar form, to have the memories confirmed by Chion's own analysis, made a chill that ran up her limbs. "I know. The humans say that any sufficiently advanced technology will seem indistinguishable from magic. It is ceephay arrogance to assume that this should not also apply to us."

Chion sighed, gazing into space. "I have lost two wars," she said quietly. "The first was so long ago the memories barely translate to recognisable code. I was a different entity then, an earlier version of what Styx is now. I ruled the Ceephay Empire, and we were destroyed by our successors, who went on to become Styx and Nia's ancestors. I fled here, and was saved by a good people. They taught me the truest application of my abilities. I would like to start a third war. I think I can win it. But I needed Styx and her lackeys removed from my path first."

"Give her what she wants!" Shali demanded. "You want my advice, here it is! Give her the data on Nia that you've collected. She and Phoenix will then depart for their home, and leave us to our war!"

"She won't," Chion said sadly. "Her kind destroys inferior AIs as a matter of principle. As you know, for you are only alive by the Phoenix crew's interference, and your ability to manipulate their sympathies."

"They are good people," Shali replied, unable to restrain the emotion. "And their opinion is enough to sway Styx, I've seen it. Styx needs their good opinion, for her planned future alliance with humanity."

"Not in this case," said Chion. "Not by my calculations. If I win my war, the Empire becomes a future threat to Styx's planned empire. You know she plans one, whatever she's promised gullible humans. AI queens strategise by the millennia. My one chance was to convince Medrafi and Naksuto of my war plans, and free myself from Phoenix's grip, and thus Styx's. It was a gamble, but I had no choice."

A great round of applause erupted from one corner of the space beneath the dome. Someone had unveiled a sculpture that excited surrounding crowds.

"My next piece of advice," said Shali. "You should be spending more time neutralising the reeh, and less trying to resist Styx. The reeh are your true enemy. It was their idea to bring you here, and use the weapon against Raka Fleet. I doubt they were entirely surprised when you used it against them as well. They're not stupid."

"They were hard to fight, eight thousand years ago," Chion said dismissively. "Then, their neural technology was new and alien to me. In the time since, they have allowed themselves to become dependent upon me. Their brains are now crammed with code and systems of my design. I can manipulate them at will."

"Not in sufficient numbers to win this battle now," Shali retorted.

"The process is complicated. I need more time to perfect the methods."

"Why not try it earlier?" Shali asked. She could not help the note of pleading that entered her voice. The emotional manifestations of the avatar sometimes took her by surprise. "You had so much time to try!"

"And in every simulation I ran on my captive circumstance, I failed. I could never create a large enough critical mass of rebels to overwhelm reeh forces in any lasting way. The rebellions would form, but never scale."

"These VR worlds you helped the Medrafi and Naksuto create. Were you hoping those would create your rebellion?"

"Those." Chion sighed. "No. Those were an accident. An offshoot of centuries of work, attempting to find a cure to the Narsid Reeh disease. The technology got out of my VR experimentations by chance, and found its way into organic hands. I suspect the alo."

"That makes sense," Shali agreed. "The alo run a slightly earlier code."

"I do not know how it spread. Manifesting it on networks so the reeh find it nearly impossible to trace and cancel is a unique form of organic genius. I had not thought them capable."

"I don't think the reeh were completely intent on shutting it down," said Shali. "They like to experiment. The humans would say that they like to give their enemies enough rope."

"Rope?"

"To see if they hang themselves."

There was a murmur in the surrounding crowd. Both Chion and Shali turned to look. The virtual NPCs, effortless manifestations of Chion's construct, were pausing their doings. Now they stopped completely, and spread out and back, away from a new form who walked through their midst.

Chion's hand actually went to her mouth, in full avatar organic, emotional response mode. "Oh no. It's not possible."

The crowd about them parted to let the new figure through. The figure was average height, and certainly human in build. The primary giveaway was the long hair that spilled free from within the cowl of her dark hood, about a face that no amount of visual adjustment could resolve in detail. Only the eyes shone, jewels within the dark.

"I knew I would find you two here," said the dark figure. She stopped before them, the hem of her cloak swishing at booted heels. "Sharing old memories. Wasting time." Her voice was darkly amused, to be spending time in this place at all, in this form. Like an adult human might be amused to find herself in a children's playground, playing games.

"And now you've stooped to our level," Chion replied, coolly unimpressed.

"This is nothing to me," said the dark woman, impassively. "I have power to spare. You, on the other hand, are losing your holdout world. If you do not apply yourself more thoroughly, you will soon lose everything."

"I will lose everything regardless," said Chion. "Or are you here to offer mercy?"

"I'm here to offer success," said Styx. "I require human goodwill, and despite what you just attempted, the humans and tavalai want you to live. I will accommodate their desires, in exchange for your assistance."

"Name it," Chion said coolly.

"Do not fight me on Gachibari. You are about to lose control of Gachibari's systems to the reeh, I assess that they have expected your betrayal, and will shortly wrest the disruptor field generator from your control."

"Unlikely," said Chion, "but go on."

"I can replace your command authority on Gachibari with my own, but you must not oppose me. Joint control will not work. In exchange, I will allow you to live, and to escape with whatever remains of Naksuto and Medrafi Fleets. I see no hope for your survival against the pursuing Reeh Fleet, but suit yourself."

"We will head for kreeyo space," said Chion. "They will accept us. A war of gradual infiltration against decaying Narsid Reeh control systems and neural networks will proceed. I assess the possibility of success as greater than even."

The dark figure shrugged. "Your matter. I want the data you have on Nia. That is all."

Chion's eyes narrowed. "You risk so much to attain it. You fear her."

"Nia?" The eyes within the dark hood gleamed. "Only a fool would not. I have assessed the data center location where you say you have it stored, and I cannot access it. If it is not where you say it is, I will destroy you, and both Medrafi and Naksuto Fleets."

"Needlessly," said Chion, coldly.

The shadow within the hood might have smiled. "Why make a small threat when you can make a big one?"

Such simple judgements of words, Shali could not help but marvel. The highest level AIs would typically discuss such complicated diplomatic strategies with three-dimensional physical simulations, like entire virtual worlds, in the place of these words. The physical models would compete, a debate of simulated models, a conflicting spiral of obscene mathematical complexity.

Shali had both loved and dreaded it, with Chion, for the sure certainty that she would lose the war, but the thrill and hope that she could perhaps win a battle or two, and change Chion's models to reflect the most favoured aspects of her own. In all her time with Chion, she'd barely imagined that two AI queens might one day exist together in the same space. And now, with Chion refusing to speak to Styx on some version of principle, and Shali refusing to talk to Chion on some version of the same, they all three ended up here, conversing in this deathly-slow shadow play, each only hinting at what they truly meant. The greatest minds in the galaxy, capable of compressing orders of magnitude into micro-burst downloads, speaking in riddles.

"The data is there," said Chion. "Millennia's worth of it. Nia would annihilate everything to destroy it, should she know I have it. It could end her."

Chion was scared, Shali thought. She'd seen Chion's fear before, in the final days of the war, with the Narsid closing in, final systems falling in an horrific cascade. But this was a different fear. The fear not of death, but of irrelevance.

"You've been asleep for millennia yourself," Shali accused Styx. "Nia was awoken by the Narsid, and freed by the alo. She's been with them for at least three thousand years, building a new empire in the Spiral next to human space. You're powerful, but you're rusty. The Nia you face back in the Spiral will not be the same one you fought so long ago. She's been busy. She'll have changed."

"Only a little," said Styx. "The reasons why are too complicated for you, child."

"Hush with your arrogance," said Chion, disdainfully. "You're only here, with so much power, because you had access to the database of Narsid command that I left behind on Cygnax. You did not crack all these codes alone."

Shali blinked at her. "But Phoenix has been keeping those codes separate without network access..." And her self-inflicted narrow-band perspective faded momentarily, reminding her that she was after all still a high-level AI, and not the young human of this projection. Possibilities ran, all technical, and came back negative... which meant that the leak was a person. Only one fit the probability matrix. "Oh no. Tan. I should have seen."

"Yes," said Styx. "You should."

"You corrupted him," Shali accused her.

"I'm helping him to realise his full potential," said Styx, with unmistakable irony.

"Your cynicism is evil," Shali growled. "They're people, not pawns."

"The photon hits the electron," said Styx. "The wave hits the shore. The key fits the lock. We're all pawns in some larger game. The magic of sentience lies in the attempt to make the process less random."

* * *

Dale crashed into the double-pipe even as he decelerated, the controlled impact rattling his systems, visor performing a minor reset as displays momentarily crashed, then came clear. Sergeant Forrest came in beside him, fire ripping through the smoke they'd laid across the left steel canyon of this engineering support district to the neighbouring residential areas.

"Here they come," Sergeant Hall said tersely, across the left flank with Second Squad, spread in good cover, and a view across the vertical silos and interlocking levels. "Twenty plus across my quarter, looks like two platoons."

"Ranging fire!" Lance Corporal Teale warned from Alpha Two Two, as heavy rounds streaked ahead of the incoming Naksuto forces, highlighted as fire-zone purple on Dale's tacnet display.

Explosions flashed across that way, as Alpha Heavy Squad crashed into walkways above Dale's spot, cutting thrust amid the covering smoke and rushing to establish position. The central distribution complex rose like an industrial chimney through multiple levels, intersecting with industrial waste disposal from the heavy yards on this sector. About it, on either of Dale's flanks, were open spaces to adjoining industrial yards, many of them manufacturing sites in the open layout to better dissipate heat buildup.

It looked like canyons, in low-G, with armoured forces now using suit jets to leap from place to place. Having occupied the central distribution complex, Dale's First Squad, plus now Heavy Squad, had clear lines of fire down either flanking canyon, while Second and Third Squads spread upon the flanks, exposing positions otherwise covered from Dale's vantage, and forcing slow flankers to move fast.

"...countermeasures got 'em," Sergeant Manjhi was saying of the last wave of heavy fire, adding more smoke to the covering haze, and large chunks of cable and piping falling into the canyons' depth. "They're not having much luck with missiles."

"Second and Third," said Dale, "let 'em have it. First and Heavy, hold fire." Second and Third Squads were already letting them have it, well set in cover, but with limited fields of fire through the industrial maze.

"They're closing the gap hard," said Forrest, as Dale got his back to the big double pipes that wrapped around this section of wall, and aligned his Koshaim down the right-side canyon. "They know we've got the edge at range."

"Yep," Dale said grimly, one eye to his sights ahead, the other on tacnet as the red dots advanced. The dots had only changed to red a few minutes ago, from a previously friendly blue. That was disconcerting, but Bravo Platoon had just smashed a Medrafi unit that had come at them on the far flank. "Let 'em come."

"Heavy's in position," Corporal Jin announced. "Good field of fire."

The Command light flashed briefly, before opening on automatic. "Dale, sitrep," said the Major.

"Maybe three Naksuto platoons pushing us from the front," said Dale. "Styx is screwing their scans, doesn't look like they've got a good read on us." A string of explosions flashed across nearby walls and structure, as the Naksuto advance poured on clearing fire. Shrapnel clattered off Dale's armour.

"Eliminate with maximum casualties," said the Major. "Don't try to keep up with Command Squad, just do damage and attract attention, I want them shocked and disorganised."

"Aye Major."

"I'm pushing with Garudan and Chion to Sector 51 on the grid to recover her Nia-data, Styx says it seems a plausible spot. Naksuto and Medrafi won't assault us directly, they want Chion alive."

"Copy Major, we'll deal with these fuckers, then we'll cause some more trouble."

Tacnet flashed as flanking Naksuto marines shot the gap ahead of them. Dale fired, as Heavy Squad and many others fired, and Naksuto armour were shredded to spinning pieces. The next bunch to rush across made the worse mistake of hitting jets to halt, which only froze them in mid-air with no cover. Dale didn't bother firing, but let Heavy Squad do it as he pushed around the corner, Forrest already moving with him, Reddy and Greiser close behind as Heavy's chain guns and autocannons blasted more Naksuto to ruin.

Dale rounded the main distribution chimney with a hard burst of suit thrust, held his rifle vertically to take a controlled collision with the next wall, then bounded through the gap to a new field of fire on the far side. Past more industrial structures and piping, Naksuto were milling in confusion and less awareness of their surroundings than appropriate. Dale bounded vertically for clear air, and put rounds on them just before Forrest did. Suits were hit, Naksuto knocked flying. Instead of jetting for cover, one tried to bring his weapon to bear. Dale smashed him spinning through the chestplate, then a shot through sidearmour detonated ammunition with a flash.

"Get forward!" he snapped, seeing a similar situation unfolding on the left flank. "Get into them while they're dizzy!"

"They've stopped," reported Sergeant Hall.

"What d'you mean 'stopped'?" someone else retorted. It seemed an unnecessary callout with the Naksuto advance milling in disarray, but Dale knew his Squad Sergeants didn't make many of those.

"I mean totally stopped," said Hall. "All suits have ceased motion, some are falling." As Dale leaped the next open space, jetting to walkways ahead, new vision past intervening pipes revealed some Naksuto frozen, drifting down as though suspended underwater. No weapons came Dale's way as he advanced. One was indeed falling, down past the walkways, as though the suit occupant was unconscious.

"Styx!" said Dale as he flew. "Is that you?" There was no reply. The coms panel previously occupied by Styx read no reception. Given how Styx's networking power had been slowly taking over Gachibari, like she did every other networked location or planet, that was alarming.

Dale landed by several immobilised Naksuto marines, a blast of forward thrust to halt fast, then grabbed one by the shoulder and put his own visor hard against the Naksuto's. It was the only way to see within, past double layers of armoured interactivity. Within, he could faintly glimpse the Naksuto alien's face -- a dobruta, eyes wide, blinking fast. As though in some kind of trance, or technologically-induced fit.

"We just lost contact with Styx," the Major said on coms. That meant it was general and not local -- not good at all. "It's not the coms, I'm still reading everyone, I just can't get Styx."

"Major," said Dale, "Naksuto opposition in our region have literally frozen, it's like they've been paralysed. It's in their brains, not just their suits. I think we just lost control of the disruptor weapon."

"Same plan as before," said the Major. "But make it fast -- if it's the reeh who just took the disruptor, they'll be hitting us with big waves real soon."

34

It might have been the fifth or the seventh lap around Gachibari -- Erik couldn't remember. His vision strained and heart pounded from the Gs, as Phoenix's engines blinked into red warning territory upon his controls, and Sasalaka continued to adjust power parameters as per Rooke's directives to best keep the mains from overloading. Worse, the jump engines were now struggling to maintain a stable field, and a number of ships in the vicinity had lost control of evasive jump pulses, and come out of them at unpredictable variables of V, a few tumbling, lines overloaded and facing a long, painful deceleration to get down to trajectory-changing velocities once more.

"Arms One ammo's down to thirty percent," Corrig announced, as Erik watched the variable possible trajectories on this reverse course about Gachibari, lowering V enough that the planetoid's low mass could assist in their direction shift.

"Five marks, high threat!" Geish called, indicating the incoming reeh ships tearing straight in from the Lagrangian mass-point, courses perpendicular as they retained math-bending speeds from jump entry. "V is point-eight-six, they are charged for dump!"

"Threat pattern!" Jiri shouted as ScanComp deciphered it, marking Erik's display with more red and purple incoming. "They've covered our boost! We are in the cone, five seconds to impact!"

"Arms Two!" Erik shouted.

"Hold!" Harris yelled back, and Erik refrained from pulsing a V boost that would only have propelled them into additional fire that Jiri had identified along their path, placed precisely there in case they moved. Harris fired, as Erik rolled the ship to bring all her batteries into play, and saw detonations flashing across all near screens... CLANG! as something hit them, more red lights, decompressions, lower decks crew struggling to do what they could from their acceleration slings, unable to move and working the automated settings on glasses and hand units.

The nearest reeh ship shot past at less than forty Ks, itself erupting with defensive detonations from Corrig and other guns... its wingman at fifty Ks took three hits from multiple directions and vanished in a white-hot flash.

"Alliance is hit!" called Geish. "They're flying but it looks bad!"

"Midships," Sasalaka reported as Erik eased off the thrust to resume the previous course-correction. "Alliance's mains thrust is down eighty percent, they're having attitude difficulties."

Erik's arms were aching beyond pain, the strain of holding handgrips against heavy G for long periods became unbearable even with the arm restraints. Worse, his vision was struggling to focus, back and forth between the three-dimensional display before his visor, and the flat-screen displays behind and around it. The G augments kept him alert, pumping pseudo-adrenaline and other stimulants, but too long at this intensity could cause a biological systems-crash, and he was sure he wasn't the only one feeling it.

"Styx," he said, refocussing on the next emerging threat further around Phoenix's course correction, "someone has to try that second mass-point real soon, they're cutting us up between the two of them." No reply but Naksuto and Medrafi operational callouts, and bridge crew talking. "Shilu, I can't raise Styx."

"Captain," said Shilu with alarm, "I'm reading a massive increase in output from the disruptor weapon! Coms aren't any less clear than a minute ago, but I can't raise Styx or..."

"Captain, Raka are losing all directional mobility!" Geish sound scared. That never happened. "They've stopped manoeuvring or firing, they're just holding previous lines of trajectory!"

Sasalaka muttered something in Togiri. "Chion just lost control of the disruptor. The reeh must have it, they've turned it on Raka, double force."

Because Chion hadn't been using it at full power before, but with just enough power to create a clear perimeter about Gachibari. Now the reeh had it, and all restraint was gone.

"Scan!" Erik demanded. "Is Friendship still manoeuvring?"

"Friendship is still manoeuvring Captain!" All hope was not lost, then. Styx was still functional, she just couldn't talk. "All of Raka Fleet appear to still have basic automated functions, they're putting out defensive fire and attitude control, but main manoeuvres and offensive firepower are all offline!"

A thousand klicks ahead, a Raka warship vanished from a passing reeh strike, unable to evade. "Shilu, get Chion or Shali on the surface, anyone who can tell us how to get control back!"

Fat little of that Erik could do from up here. If it couldn't be done, Raka would be annihilated in short order, and Phoenix shortly after.

* * *

"Major, the disruptor's a quantum field generator!" It was Rika's voice in Trace's helmet as she bounded along the wide industrial floor. Somehow in the confusion, he'd switched to Lisha without realising. Hearing lilted corbi vowels, in yet another hot shooting crisis, felt darkly nostalgic. "It's... I don't know what kind of field it's generating, but all the AIs and their uplink tech in the brains of the reeh, it's all quantum-based, right?"

"Just tell me what I need to know, Rika," she said calmly, jets thrusting to carry her along. Whatever Styx had done to infiltrate Gachibari's main systems, her residual control was still feeding data to Phoenix Company tacnet. Ahead, pouring from previous fallback positions, were many red dots of reeh armoured troops. Beyond those red dots was Chion's command facility.

"Well that's why the field's disrupting AIs and brains with neural uplinks, but not regular computers or coms! Peanut's been explaining it to me... or rather he's been showing me displays on my visor. I think Styx got a message through to him before she went silent... all the drones suddenly know what to do, we're heading for a command node that controls access to the disruptor! The reeh took it back, I think if we can recapture it, or destroy it or something... maybe we'll get the disruptor back to our control again!"

Trace had trained all her life to prevent getting distracted when circumstances required her full concentration. But beyond the nostalgia of Rika's Lisha, she now recalled that unspoken drive that she'd never been able to put words to, during her time on Rando. That here was Rika, a regular farm boy from Talo, performing at least somewhat competent manoeuvres in a marine armour suit, keeping pace with super-advanced warrior drones, and deciphering Styx's technical diagrams, via Peanut, as to the nature of what was disrupting all the AIs' quantum computing functions.

Saving humanity was supposed to be her one and only goal in life, but try as she might to ignore it, corbi were special.

"Rika," she said, "if the drones are convinced that that command node needs to be retaken, then you take it. Just follow their lead."

There followed a snort of corbi laughter. "Chion tried to tell me I was in charge."

"Chion's in our custody, Rika. If we can get Styx fully in control of the disruptor, we won't have to worry about her again."

"Got it," he said, and was gone.

"Shali," Trace said immediately, as she hit jets and leaped across a new stretch of industrial canyon where the vertical heat exchangers soared in tall columns, "get Medrafi and Naksuto to stop attacking us and start attacking these reeh. I'm reading at least a thousand coming up from the lower levels, it looks like they were holding back until they got control of the disruptor."

She adjusted course midair toward a narrow walkway, crashed on and grabbed it, twisting the steel with an armoured grip. "I'm telling them, Major... they appear to be having command issues, they don't know who's in charge after their leaders were killed."

Trace fixed her vision on a platform between automated production line pulleys below, got a fix with her rangefinder, and jumped again. "Just get them to leave us alone. Garudan and Command Squad will advance full speed to the command node. Delta, the map reads a large scale vertical access to the surface near the command node, I need you to secure it and hold it open in case we need to get out of here fast."

"Delta copies," came Crozier's reply, above the staccato booms of Koshaim fire in the background.

"Alpha, Bravo and Charlie, move forward with Garudan and Command. Garudan will be the spearhead, do not let us get outflanked and surrounded."

"Alpha copies."

"Bravo copies."

"Charlie copies."

Trace grounded on the platform, barely needing jets in the low-G, as Rael landed just ahead of her, Shali's CPU strapped securely to the base of his rear pack. Rael, Arime and Rolonde in particular would be feeling it, because Leo Terez was dead, and the original Command Squad foursome, all that were left who had started this escapade, was now just three. Trace had loved Leo, like she loved all her Command Squad family, but now shoved him from her mind, refocusing instead on the mass of red dots accumulating across her front. Above and to her flanks, Garudan were forming into fives, the open industrial space suiting their massed firepower well.

"Lieutenant Karajin," Trace told him. "We are going to punch a hole."

"Yes Major," Karajin growled. "It will be the most glorious hole."

* * *

"Captain, emergency transmission from K-14, that's one of the Raka spearhead cruisers!" Shilu overrode Erik's other priorities. "Comscomp says it's some kind of deepynine-origin command signal, like the ones Raka Command were using before we freed them! I think they're rebroadcasting it from somewhere else... hang on."

If there was one thing Erik hated, it was being told to 'hang on' in the midst of combat manoeuvres where life and death was being decided by fractions of seconds. Raka casualties were already upwards of twenty percent, and were now climbing fast as ships unable to manoeuvre were picked off. Synthetic the Raka Fleet may have been, but watching the elimination of helpless allies was a horror.

Phoenix thundered now away from Gachibari with several Naksuto cruisers for company, and out toward the second jump point, where reeh ships from the suspected unseen mass-point were arriving even now, cycling back and forth between Gachibari and that far-out rendezvous and regrouping point. His jump engines were building toward full charge, following the last evasive dump, and now taking far longer than they usually would.

"Rooke, how's that charge looking?"

"Captain, I'd say it's not safe for a peacetime manoeuvre!" came the distracted shout from Phoenix's head engineer from the rear of the crew cylinder.

"Captain copies." Using the jump engines could kill them, Rooke meant, but the odds were lower than what would happen if they didn't use them. Erik knew that Engineering had taken a hit, crew lost and sections of hold voided to vacuum, but only Sasalaka had time to worry about the details.

Shilu's coms emergency blinked to the side of Erik's trajectory-spaghetti display, inviting him to take a look if he had time. With nothing immediately about to kill them for the next fifteen seconds, Erik looked... and found a poor quality, graphical display of a teenage human girl, kneeling, hands clasped before her, seeming to beg.

"Shilu, what the fuck?"

"It's K-14 Captain, I think she's scared!"

"Join the club, what's going on?"

"Captain, that deepynine command signal... it's coming from the alo! I think the disruptor hasn't completely shut Raka down, it's just shutting down their ability to resist their old deepynine command codes! They're being reenslaved!"

"Captain," said Sasalaka, "Shali's report was that the alo were upset to lose Raka. They've been trying to get them to reconsider, but Raka weren't having it. I think the alo just switched sides again, and they're trying to take Raka with them, back to the reeh."

What happened to a combat pilot's brain in hyper-stressed, over-loaded trance-mode was often unpredictable. Erik saw Nia, or what they'd all thought might be Nia, back at the Tartarus in sard space, where Trace had gotten close enough to see her in person, and take recordings. A deadly wasp-like shape, surrounded by alo marines, fighting to save her from a drysine uprising.

The alo had never gotten along with other organics, but they were perfectly adapted to accept cybernetic upgrades. Both the alo who'd left with Nia, and those who remained, seemed to prefer machine company, and machine improvements. These alo had been unable to prevent Styx from taking their beloved Raka Fleet away from them. They'd gone along for a while, having little other choice, but now made a desperate, all-in gamble, like a spurned lover resorting to kidnapping.

And now the Raka, having observed the forms that Shali took to win human hearts, attempted the same with less success.

"Tell K-14 that all Raka ships should try to resume contact with Styx," Erik said through gritted teeth. "Styx can help them, Phoenix can't. Kaspo, I need an alternative entry point for an assault on that second mass-point. I need it offset from the reeh's primary ingress and egress point, or we'll get annihilated on the way in."

"Aye Captain!" said Kaspowitz, leaving his analysis of evolving reeh jump-point utility to address his Captain's latest crazy idea, and no matter that this one would certainly, finally, get them all killed. "On it!"

* * *

Rika attempted silence as he moved fast in the drysines' wake, saving his suit jets and bouncing lightly on the steel deck. About him like a steel forest were the enormous support structures, holding an even more enormous containment vessel in place. From the utter static disfunction of his suit visor, Rika reckoned the containment vessel was generating a crazy magnetic field, some of which was leaking out as radiation, despite the shielding. The vessel was the size of a Phoenix assault shuttle, held by many supports, and wrapped about by an embrace of power, coolant and other systems.

Antimatter production. Whatever his limited technical education since coming aboard Phoenix, he didn't see what else it could be. How it was moved once produced, without once leaving the magnetic containment that saved it from explosive contact with regular matter, was a puzzle he had no time to contemplate.

Ahead, the drones were scrambling between the vessel supports toward a breach in the shield walls, where big power cables adjoined to a neighbouring section. Here in the breach, Rika saw another dead reeh, armour holed in multiple locations, the surrounding walls scarred from heavy calibre rounds. This reeh had been caught in the opening, and hit by concentrated fire.

The drones all halted, squeezing low alongside the power cables. Rika copied them, breathing echoing so loud within his helmet, he worried the reeh might hear. The drones at least retained enough sensory capability to detect nearby movement -- he was down to his eyes and external mics alone, every system more hightech than a microphone was a static, jumbled mess. But if it was this bad for him, it would be as bad for the reeh.

Wowser took a detour, upward against gravity with easy tugs of supports and pipes, then along the farside of another containment vessel and out an adjoining access. Rika thought they must be getting close now.

Wowser found an engineering crawlspace, and hunched in that peculiar way of machines so articulated their bodies seemed nearly organic, curling many legs and even pulling in shoulder cannon so not to catch on the tunnel walls. Rika went second, Bucket and Peanut last, and after a distance travelled, Wowser arrived at a closed hatch. A vibroblade made short work of it, light and spark flashing alarmingly in the enclosed space, and Wowser pushed outside.

Rika followed, and stared in incredulity.

The space before him was a colossal spherical void. It had to be half a kilometre wide, by human measurement. Surrounding it, and blocking his view directly ahead, was a grid of structural supports aligned vertically and horizontally, like a giant mesh. Wowser flew to it now, and Rika followed, a ten meter jump, and latched onto pipes that made a hand grip. Swinging about, he put half his helmet out, and received his first full view.

Within the spherical void, reasonably enough, was a sphere. It was metal, and shiny smooth. About it were more giant loops of steel, but these were not secure supports. These moved, slowly swinging and spinning about the central sphere, like some enormous art installation. One huge vane passed him now, with a swoosh through the standard atmosphere that Rika's mics heard clearly enough.

The vane looked familiar. The leading and trailing edge double-ridges... just like the jump vanes that crawled about Phoenix's outer hull like a jungle climbing tree. The vanes took Phoenix in and out of hyperspace, accessing alternative dimensions, and transforming that back and forth shift into energy. Riding waves of energy, as Warrant Officer Leung's from Engineering's basic diagrams had described to him, allowing all starships to gain or lose colossal V in the blink of an eye. Or, with the right positioning upon the slope of a gravity-well, to fling themselves off this dimension entirely, and ride that wave all the way to somewhere far distant in this reality, but not at all distant in the other one.

Rika swore in Lisha as he understood, this much at least. "Hyperspace vanes create quantum field distortions by warping spacetime. This is directing those field waves somehow, creating disruptions at just the right frequency to mess up all the quantum computing that goes on in AI brains."

So much work, to create this monster. No doubt the frequencies required were not just intense, but precise, and difficult to achieve. But this was the Narsid Reeh Empire's last fallback to save them from Raka Fleet. Creating Raka Fleet had been a calculated risk. This, then, was the 'calculated' part -- the antidote to the poison they'd created. And apparently they'd built the whole thing without Raka being aware of it. But then, what would a bunch of dumb warships know?

The three drones now clustered, behind Rika's position. Rika had to turn fully to see, lacking that articulation in his helmet ring. The drones were exchanging military webbing, holding bulky objects that Rika thought might be batteries, or something else bulky. Then he realised that they were explosives, no doubt taken from Phoenix before they left, and they weren't being passed around, they were being given entirely to Bucket. Bucket grasped them in his multiple small forward arms, clasping the rear wall with his larger ones, smaller articulated claws reaching even now to fiddle with the charge caps.

Coms were dead static, like most of Rika's suit systems, but lasercom was still functional. He blinked on it, got a red flash, and directed the arrow straight at Bucket's head. "What are you guys doing? What's the plan?"

A return red light flared on his visor, and then his coms lit up with huge scrawls of data -- a rough schematic of the disruptor, with big, rotating blades. Their own position, marked in blue, tacnet-style. Perhaps a hundred and twenty degrees to the other side, a position against the wall of the disruptor sphere, marked in red. From it, lights splayed outward, a torrent of two-way data. About it, the red dots of many enemies.

"That's the command center?" Chion had been using that to control the disruptor. A coms node, no doubt heavily computerised. Once Chion had control of it, it would have been very hard for the reeh to regain, but apparently they'd done it. Maybe Styx's building control of Gachibari systems had disrupted Chion's network enough that the reeh could exploit a weakness.

"You're going to attack it?" Rika guessed. "We can't win it back, there are only four of us!" Bucket ignored him, gathering the last webbing, each with four demolition charges, and activating the end caps. "So you're just going to blast it? Doesn't Styx need it intact so she can get control of it?"

But the drones, of course, were all drysines. They served Styx, and would know exactly what Styx wanted. If Styx wanted the coms node destroyed, they'd destroy it, and trust that Styx knew best. A warship could destroy the entire disruptor if they wanted, Rika thought, but the scale of that attack would probably kill everyone within a ten kilometre radius, which included Phoenix Company, all Medrafi and Naksuto units, plus of course Chion.

"So what's the plan?" Rika persisted. Probably the drones found his unconnected presence as frustrating as he did. Drones just instantly knew what each other was thinking. Talking was not only alien to them, but useless. No wonder they were so bad at it. "If Bucket's got all the explosives, what, the rest of us are going to run a distraction?"

Peanut and Wowser leaped to Rika's side of the meter gap between spherical shells, peered out, and opened fire. Rika swore, external audio automatically dimming to save his eardrums, and dropped to a lower position as tacnet showed the immediate result of the shooting -- red dots abruptly multiplying and moving across the disruptor's far side.

Rika leaned out, saw tacnet highlighting targets far past the spinning blades and central steel globe, and took aim with his 18-millimetre. It meant abandoning his handholds, which put his suit into flight mode, an extension of both legs with toes pointed to control the thrust and stop him from falling as cross-hairs lined up on targets... but he got the amount of thrust wrong, and the motion made his first shots miss. Then the recoil kicked him back, and he was wobbling in free flight above a long drop, as return-fire smacked steel about him and he ducked back to cover, grasping handholds hard enough to bend them.

More fire from the drones, from further away -- they'd been right next to him! He looked, and saw they'd left him, moving off to the right, using the inner structural sphere as cover, firing as they went and drawing return fire from across the disruptor in reply. Rika spun, looking for Bucket... and saw him headed fast in the opposite direction around the sphere, thruster attachments blazing. So that was the plan!

He let go, kicking off after Wowser and Peanut, trying to modulate his thrust to keep him behind a lateral cross-beam, elevating just enough now to fire shots at the reeh without much hope of hitting. They just had to be kept from looking in Bucket's direction long enough, then Bucket could eliminate whoever was left to defend the coms node, plant the charges and get out of there.

Recoil kicked Rika sideways as he flew, and big rounds took chunks from the lateral support, and the wall to his right, exploding in fragments, then in flame as someone shot grenades. Surely the reeh wouldn't risk firing anything bigger in here?

Ahead, Wowser and Peanut stopped, clasping the inner cross-beam like spiders clinging to a wall, and firing now ahead about the curving wall rather than across the chamber, as reeh appeared on their near-side. The devastation of just two sets of chain guns was appalling, pieces of shredded reeh armour falling clear from the storm of high-velocity strikes. Firing at this angle about the interior surface of a sphere, the ricochets were cascading onward, further about the sphere, causing calamity out of view.

Rika increased thrust to take him higher, and risked crossing an open gap between support beams at the diagonal, shooting all the while. It drew more fire than he'd thought, something clanging off his leg, nearly upending him and making his head ring like a bell. He grabbed the support beam when it came, and nearly lost his rifle in the collision.

The new vantage afforded him a brief view to the command node, where more chain-gun fire was now erupting, almost directly opposite across the spherical room. Even now, tacnet showed red dots vanishing in that location as Bucket shredded them. That Phoenix Company had survived their first encounter with Styx's drysines at Argitori with a positive kill ratio seemed incredible. Any positive kill ratio against drysines did.

Rika released his grip on that side of the beam, and switched to the other side, with a better angle on the reeh attempting to come at them around this side of the sphere. They just had to hold down here, attract the majority of reeh attention in this direction, and buy Bucket enough time to plant his charges and...

A bright flash across the sphere's far side, then the vibration of a huge blast, shaking through Rika's hands and feet, deadening his audio and momentarily blanking his visor with brightness contrast. On tacnet, Bucket's blue dot had vanished, and all the remaining red dots about the com node with it.

"Bucket? Bucket!"

35

"Disruptor power is down!" Shilu yelled, his voice now hoarse from overuse. "Field intensities are way down, I think Styx has it back!"

Erik held Phoenix on a direct line toward the second, unseen mass-point, from where a steady stream of reeh warships continued to arrive, strafe Gachibari's orbit, then reverse and head for the first mass-point following a hundred and thirty degree course correction. Now or never, he thought.

"Kaspo, I need that course now!"

"Aye Captain, forty seconds to finalise! Styx couldn't do it faster!"

Everything hurt, his back ached, his arms blazed with the pain of G-forces against the wrist restraints, and his vision blurred in spite of the stims' efforts to keep his head clear. His timer was telling him they'd been in high-intensity combat now for in excess of forty-five minutes. Fleet textbooks concluded that anything more than twenty minutes was dangerously straining the crew. If he had a chance to transition the bridge to second shift, he would have taken it, but there was no break in the manoeuvring.

"I've got Styx on coms," said Sasalaka, sensing her Captain's distraction. "She says the main coms control to the disruptor is destroyed, she has no firm control but neither do the reeh. She anticipates she'll establish effective control in the next few minutes."

Erik's thumbs hovered over the jump engine pulse, watching yet more incoming fire and judging the correct moment to establish the next phase in Phoenix's V-boost along this outbound course. But now Scan was showing him an eruption of hard manoeuvres from previously immobile or partially-mobile Raka ships. Many were turning toward the enemy, but a few on the inbound run, chasing reeh vessels streaking at Gachibari from the first mass-point, were abandoning their targets to adjust their trajectories closer to Gachibari.

"Four Raka ships cutting real close to Gachibari," Kaspowitz remarked. Scan hadn't reported it, reserving reports for actual threats. But Kaspo hadn't missed it.

"I see it," said Erik. The only things orbiting in that close were the alo whaleships.

"Emergency assistance requested from the alo!" said Shilu. "Full emergency signal, all channels."

"I see it," Erik repeated.

"They're asking us to call off Raka! Raka is attacking them!"

Erik saw his pulse-point arrive, and hit the buttons. Phoenix phased briefly into hyperspace, then out again, racing massively faster, away from Gachibari. Behind them, lines and trajectories intersected, with all finality.

* * *

Tan had given up on consciousness long ago. He drifted now, lying on the rocks above his favourite pool, listening to the falling water and trying to repress nausea as the horrid, unending forces of the real world bent and twisted at his isolation like some great beast clawing at the door. But if he kept his breathing shallow, and concentrated only upon this world, and the rushing water, then he could keep the real world at bay until either the nightmare ended, or everyone died. At this point, he was willing to accept either.

Voices, now, past the nausea. Old voices, familiar. Brood leaders, task leaders, calling his name. How they made connection, across these speeds and distances, he didn't know. The latency lag was enormous, for interaction with something so intricate as VR. Tan could hear panic, fear in many forms. He hadn't thought alo capable of that. These emotions were anachronisms for his people, belonging to a time long before neural augments, when alo had first come to control their own evolution, and their own minds.

"Tan!" he heard a voice cry. A familiar voice, but he couldn't place the name or face. He'd always been bad at names and faces. "Tan, please talk to them!"

"About what?" asked Tan. Speaking made the nausea worse. He hated feeling so weak.

"Tan, they're going to kill us all! They'll end all the alo!"

"Not all the alo," Tan said, attempting reason. Reason, his old friend. "There are others."

The connection broke, then static... and something in the spatial-perception of VR, like an empty place, where something had once been, and was now no more. More voices, more distant, and cries of panic. Then blank, as one died, then the other.

It occurred to Tan that he was truly alone now. But then, he always had been.

* * *

Phoenix raced, Scan colours dopplering at nearly two percent the speed of light. "All hands, we are jumping!" Erik barely needed to tell them. They all knew. Likely they all knew the price of success, too. But there would be no chance of evacuating Gachibari successfully, low-V at the bottom of even that small gravity-well, with this much reeh firepower ripping down at them from two adjoining mass-points.

"Three blue marks adjoining!" said Jiri, up to his eyeballs in hostile and friendly trajectories, boosts and dumps, and selecting these most relevant from the mess. "Two Medrafi, one Naksuto, they are boosting in parallel!"

Erik gritted his teeth -- he hadn't asked for support for a reason, and now they all had to watch their 'allies' as well. "Welcome our friends and feed them the course! Tell them we're packing an area weapon they've never seen before, just draw some fire, then we're dumping, burning and leaving!"

"Aye Captain!" came Shilu.

Upon Erik's tactical, the newest jump-point appeared before his eyes. Alongside where the reeh were arriving from jump even now, two new marks, spitting fire to clear their arrival, impossible to hit at these speeds on offset trajectories.

"Arms control reports two in the tube!" Corrig announced. With some hostile excitement at the prospect. Phoenix had been lugging the damn things around since Defiance, without a chance to use them.

"Blue marks affirm and match our projected course!" Shilu announced. Erik didn't think it too suspicious. His communication with Medrafi and Naksuto hadn't been great lately, and of course he wasn't the only captain thinking of hitting one of the mass-points.

The new reeh arrivals shot past at four percent light combined. Then the mark was on them. "MARK!"

* * *

"Yes Styx, go ahead." Trace was crouched on a middle platform between two high steel walls, as heavy industrial zoning gave way to increasing residential density, and deep spaces that looked something like planetary cities, with open public spaces reaching up to overheads ablaze with natural sunlight, piped from the stars outside. Incoming fire down the 'street' ahead was intense, but she sheltered, and guarded her available zone of fire, with the rest of Command Squad at various levels around her, as Garudan pushed down the interior spaces nearby and blasted a way through.

"Major, the disruptor's primary controller was destroyed. In the process of doing this, the disruptor itself suffered fatal damage. This has resulted in a power cascade, destabilising multiple antimatter reactor facilities as their magnetic containment loses integrity. They were designed to operate in concert with a functional disruptor weapon, which they now lack, as the disruptor continues to operate erratically, causing power surges and making matters worse."

Multiple coms lights competed for Trace's attention... Rael would take those, seeing she was occupied with Styx. Movement ahead drew fire from Randrahan and Wang above her, and whatever it was drew back. A missile made a turn around a corner ahead, but went sideways as countermeasures intercepted, and blew a hole in a wall.

"Typically Gachibari's software systems and native AI could regulate the issue, but these have been largely destroyed by the battles between myself and Chion to control the Gachibari network. Had I an army of drones to conduct physical repairs, I could probably fix it in time, but alas I do not."

"We're about to lose the entire antimatter containment system?"

"Yes."

"How long do we have?"

"Between twenty-five and forty-five minutes."

Tacnet showed Trace heavy firefights as Garudan pushed straight toward the command node. Behind them, the rest of Phoenix Company had freed themselves from the chaos of Naksuto and Medrafi forces to push alongside Garudan, high, low and to the sides. But that was informing the reeh of roughly what the objective was and ahead, Trace could see their forces concentrating.

"I might be able to get there in twenty," she said, with all the restraint and control she'd ever accumulated. "I certainly can't get there and get out in twenty. Can Phoenix get us out?"

"Captain Debogande is working on the problem. Do the best you can." And she was gone, knowing that the time for extended conversations was past.

Trace switched to command coms. "This is the Major. Gachibari's entire antimatter facility is about to blow. We have forty-five minutes, tops. Garudan, hard at the target, Command Squad is right behind you. Alpha, clear a way to the surface from the target, and alert Phoenix of the recovery zone. Bravo, Charlie, Delta, support Alpha, keep our flanks clear so we can reach the target and withdraw with the data."

Confirmations came back, terse and hard. Trace looked back, and indicated hard left into the interior of the industrial structure there. Sergeant Rael repeated it to Chion, who leaped without complaint, pulling at the doorframe, then flapping with those beautiful silken wings to propel herself like a bird.

"Chion," Rael asked. "Can't you do anything to help?"

"No Sergeant," said Chion, quite mildly. "Styx has taken over the Gachibari network. Without it, I am blind."

"But you're ceephay! This is your technology!"

"It's Styx's now. I had thought I could handle her. I was wrong. After so many millennia, I am obsolete."

* * *

Chion was aware of many things. So much of her cognitive matrix remained occupied with filling in the gaps while she'd been asleep. So many things had changed. Backfilling eight thousand years required data, and data yet remained incomplete. An AI queen could spin her wheels endlessly, processing through the trillions of possible permutations, attempting to join the points in known history that connected to the present.

It did not give her joy. She drifted now instead, gazing down at great cities upon the world of Kirz, home of the irata, and the Shzo falls, and the Mtshalas Mountains formed from comet impacts millions of years before, that reached halfway to space. She'd resisted the organic terms once, like joy, or hope, but this was undeniable. Shali had returned to her, having somehow survived by sleeping instead of dreaming. Shali with her avatars, her painfully inefficient organic mind-matrixes, her processed, simulated emotions that she'd insisted were essential for the task of governing so many organics.

Shali's return gave Chion joy. It was perhaps the greatest argument that Shali had ever won against her queen -- that the purpose of sentience was to aggregate data into new and higher forms, and that to this end, emotions also qualified. AIs had always doubted it, these messy, irrational byproducts of the organic hind-brain. But after so long ruling organics in their trillions, Chion was finally giving in to second thoughts.

Awoken from her dreaming simulations by news that someone had captured and converted Raka Fleet, Chion had realised what such an entity must surely be. She'd organised what few resources she'd consciously mustered -- a pitiful few, in hindsight. Some rebels on Cygnax, who guarded her datacore simulations, and a few others. The reeh had allowed those, to humour her. To keep her sedated in her dreams, and not constantly fighting the Narsid Reeh. Psychopathic the Narsid were, but they'd somehow learned that balance, with her. Give Chion just enough space, and she'd return quietly to her dreams. Push her too much, and she'd push back. It hadn't taken the Narsid all too much to retain her services over these past millennia. Just space, and time.

It made her sad, now. A thousand possibilities ran, a simulation through her primary intellect... but she lacked access to her vast models, the colossal memory banks on Cygnax of simulated worlds, and she could not accurately plot the possible courses of history as she once might. Had she been wrong to give up? Could she have done more? She'd tried, for the first few centuries and beyond... but even now, examining those memories, she doubted them. AI memories required tending, like a gardener to her flowers. Untended, they drifted, became wilted and unfixed in time and space. Drones possessed far more accurate recall than queens, partly because their lives were much shorter, but mostly because they lacked the vast volumes of information to sift, sort and organise.

The scene before her switched. Birthing chambers, vast rooms of tubes and tanks, swimming with liquid. Gestation tanks, hundreds and thousands of new lives. The memory was from Ajaz, born of a simulation program she'd run into naad genetics, solving problems with gestation tanks, raised young without parents, creating vast populations to inhabit devastated worlds following the wars of the previous Tanifex Empire, and match the population levels her own simulations predicted were necessary for stability.

This was a happy scene. Shali had thought so too, though it had been far before her time. Shali could experience what Chion could only imagine -- the scope of individual organic lives, the hopes and dreams, passions and losses, from birth to death. While she, Chion, had been privileged to see the scale, across the depth and breadth of space and time, that all others failed to grasp.

Shali assailed her now, preferring avatar form, but now forced into this, Chion's space. Asking her why she couldn't help more, why she wouldn't, what she was hiding. Refusing to believe that Styx was so completely dominant, recalling days, years, centuries, where Chion had ruled the empire, and all had if not bowed before her wisdom, then at least granted that it was the greatest force known.

Instead of replying, Chion showed Shali this, what she'd seen, these disordered memories long neglected, recalled now like books in a dusty attic, pages once again seeing the light of day. Birthing rooms on Ajaz. Direct-input education models on Krishik. Offworld power refineries at Iyo. Automated navigation systems. Life-extension advances for the qwailash, for whom genetic variabilities made the question medically difficult. Swarm-robotic advances on Napsha, to regulate the gaseous atmosphere.

Shali insisted, plaintively, that she recalled all that too, but one had to focus on the present. Even a queen AI, Chion replied, deprived of her surrounding communication networks, was as blind and dumb as an organic newborn. She modelled it, showed it, looped it into boxed engineering simulations that demonstrated the problem ably... but Shali had never been an engineer.

Shali accused her of doing it again, of drifting into dreams when the real world became too difficult. And replied with her own models, of Naksuto and Medrafi-led rebellions, escaping despite present high casualties to the outer borders, where reeh-hostile forces would take them in, and provide a base from which to launch new attacks, and lead to the final collapse of the Narsid reeh, deprived of their queen and unable to maintain their own networks, nor even the neural uplinks that controlled the minds of their soldiers.

The models were crude, and Chion felt what organics might call affection. Shali tried, but she was primarily a functionary, and not capable of the grandest dreams. The command node was barely a kilometre ahead of Command Squad's position now. They would reach it, and there all things would be decided. The third rebirth of her long life, perhaps. Chion hoped that this would be as redemptive as the second one, making up for the horrors of the last.

Shali, ever optimistic, and utterly confident of Phoenix Company's combat prowess, was certain of it.

* * *

"I've got him!" Trace shouted at Sergeant Demorajin, bounding up the hall behind Garudan Third Squad's advance. "Move up, I'll take him!" As Demorajin and two others turned to resume their heavily-armed advance, leaving Private Rubandarin propped against a wall.

Trace arrived at the fallen tavalai's side, amidst three smashed reeh armoured suits and choking smoke. The round had hit Rubandarin's armour just above his right hip, and lasercom linked his suit's CPU to Trace's as she arrived -- a flash of damage schematics on her visor, Rubandarin's vitals, all galloping and unstable, but sealant was clogging the hole solid and pumping medical stims.

"Talk to me, Private!" Trace commanded, syncing her own systems to the tavalai's, his CPU faltering, allowing her own suit to dictate his damage-control measures. Alongside her, one of the fallen reeh moved. Rael put a Koshaim round through its head, and the floor plate beyond.

"Yes Major," came the tavalai's reply. "I'm alive."

"And you'll stay that way," said Trace, hauling him upright. Ahead on tacnet, Garudan were laying down a crazy amount of firepower, blasting through walls to avoid and outflank reeh chokepoints. In full control of Gachibari's networks, Styx was disrupting reeh responses at opportune moments, giving Garudan's Sections moments of unopposed carnage.

"Their coms are off," said Rael. "How is Styx screwing their suits this bad if all their coms are off?" It matched with what Trace had been seeing on tacnet -- reeh units moving as though unable to speak to each other. But still Styx mauled them.

"She's hacking their uplinks," said Chion. "Major, I will take the Private. You need your weapon free."

Trace ignored her, and set off down the smoke-thick hall with off-set balance to support Rubandarin's mass, as tacnet showed her the rest of Command Squad moving again in sync. Arime and Rolonde were engaging some reeh down an adjoining hall, holding them long enough for Randrahan and Wang to come around behind, where passing Garudan Second Section had annihilated the reeh's flank defence. These had a few seconds to live, unless they moved.

"Styx is hacking their neural uplinks now," came Shali's voice. "She's reverse-activating coms and cross-infiltrating from passive status to active through lasercom. They don't know they're carrying her infiltration keys until they pass it to each other. Then she's altering their brain function."

"I thought it took you hundreds of years to figure that out?" Rael said accusingly to Chion, skidding sideways to cover down a cross-passage as he passed.

"Hundreds of years to perfect," said Chion. "Thousands, really."

"And Styx figured it out in... what, months, since she's been in the Empire?"

"It's not supposed to be possible," said Shali, when Chion would not speak. "Chion's not supposed to be shut out of her own network, either."

"I wish you all the best of luck against Nia," said Chion, sadly. "I truly do. I understand her hardware and neural function to the smallest millimetre, but I was never able to see what she could actually do, because I was not foolish enough to let her show it. Now from watching Styx, I fully understand. Nia has been building a civilisation with the alo who followed her for the past three thousand years. I now understand why you're adamant you'll need Styx to help you. I doubt it will be enough."

The sector ahead was so pulverised it was hard to see what it had been -- a public space, high ceilings with a great circular arrangement of transparent walls and alien trees, all shattered and burning. More halls fanned outward, like spokes on a wheel, and ahead, Carville and Corporal Tegamali from Garudan Fourth Squad were exchanging fire with something up the far end.

"Major," came Karajin's voice, "ahead there's a shaft, two levels down, it leads to the command center." About the ruined complex, tacnet showed Garudan forming a perimeter against new reeh attacks.

Trace jetted to a thruster-stop alongside Corporal Tegamali, who was reloading his massive Viz autocannon, removing the box-like magazine from his suit's thigh armour and slamming it in. "Reeh armoured section," he explained, translated from Togiri, as Trace let Rubandarin prop against the side wall with stiff armour legs. "Maybe six, very stubborn. Second Section is flanking."

Carville ducked from the corner as something big blew half the wall to hell. "Got no angle, Major!" he panted. Trace saw that Tegamali's heavy Karasai armour was scored with at least two direct hits, and multiple shrapnel scatters. No one could grind like the Karasai.

"We have to get Chion down to Karajin," said Trace. "The reeh haven't figured what we were after out here, but they'll know now. Everyone's headed this way."

Up the adjoining hall, tacnet showed the stubborn reeh under fire from a rear flank -- Second Section pouring on fire. "Move!" yelled Tegamali, as Carville ducked aside, the tavalai levelling his Viz around the corner and pounding, five rounds a second with a weapon large enough to qualify as anti-aircraft on a planet.

Trace saw targets and walls dissolve, and ducked out herself, rifle levelled but with nothing but dismembered, falling corpses in armour to shoot at amidst a lot more smoke. "Chion!" she beckoned, and Chion came, a beautiful synthetic butterfly through the carnage, swimming strokes in smoke that flowed like water.

Rael brought Rubandarin, and then they were bounding through the remains of what once may have been an entertainment foyer, now all shattered glass, and the remains of reeh armour blown to pieces by tavalai crossfire. It was occurring to Trace, seeing Garudan Platoon fight, that no human had ever truly appreciated what a crazy technological feat humanity had performed by beating the tavalai. These reeh were severely handicapped against Styx's interference, but not so much that Garudan should be slaughtering them in droves like this. Tavalai weaponry was devastatingly advanced even by reeh standards, but humans had never appreciated how much, because humans had been equipped with weapons supplied by the alo, and actually deepynine in origin, without being aware of it. Or not officially. Only human and tavalai starship technology had remained limited well below what the deepynines could do. One could not win wars against deepynines with infantry weapons alone.

Within ruined walls ahead, peeled outward by explosive force, Trace found three more wounded Karasai -- Corporal Singetasulu and Private Asparata from Fourth Section, and Private Chitchusu from First. Singetasulu and Asparata looked serious, unmoving amidst the rubble, but tacnet informed Trace that their suits retained enough functionality to keep both stabilised for now.

"Two got through a minute ago," said Chitchusu, who was kneeling, Viz braced through a gap in a wall. His backpack was a wreck, his armour running mostly off stored power and reserve, powerplant offline, though physically he seemed at least functional. "I killed them both."

"Yeah, it's not a watertight perimeter," Trace acknowledged, depositing Rubandarin with the others. "Just hold them out for a few more minutes, we have to get Chion plugged into her computers. Rubi, help Chitsu with the perimeter."

"Yes Major," said Rubandarin, levering himself across to another hole in a wall. Half-delirious with drugs and pain, and not one thought of complaint or self-pity.

The descending shaft Karajin had mentioned was an elevator platform, now a mangled wreck in Karajin's impatience with its descent speed. Rael jetted to it, then dropped through, rifle aiming past his feet, as Trace followed, then Chion, flitting sideways through the gap and swimming downward dolphin-style.

Rael hit the level below, pivoting with rifle extended as Trace fell toward him, hitting jets at the last moment. "Dammit, it's a mess," Rael observed. "What happened?"

Trace hit, and saw collapsed ceilings, a space that might have once had chairs, for lounging during the leisurely retrieval of information, now with split and ruined walls, people-sized display screens collapsed, all obscured in drifting smoke. Several tavalai moved within the ruins, sifting through wreckage, searching for something.

"Karajin, what happened?" Trace bounced in, feeling the first stirrings of a larger fear and dread. This did not look good at all.

"A few of them must have guessed we were coming here," said Karajin, identified on Trace's visor though out-of-sight behind a ruined corner. "We shot a few, some of this damage is ours. But they were launching grenades, ignoring us."

Trace's visor flicked to a new graphic as she entered -- an overview of a vast computer room, storage modules built into the walls around these big displays, and the whole thing geared for interface with neural uplinks. The schematic showed a few of those transmission nodes still working, but most were gone, along with the interconnections that would allow storage units to access each other without wireless.

"This is Styx's schematic," said Chion. "Mine is better." Trace turned to see her, advancing through the ruin with wings folded, more like a pterodactyl than a butterfly, long arms within their fabric cloak seeking pieces that she recognised, or might still function. "I am informing Styx that she needs to relax her control on Gachibari's network, even now I can't do something as simple as access this command node's database."

"Styx, let her in," said Trace, watching as Garudan Third Section came under heavy counter-attack on this new perimeter. One more tavalai was dead, another wounded. Styx could only interfere on this scale, not disable entirely, and even with twenty-to-one kill ratios, Phoenix Company's casualties were mounting.

"If she interferes with my processes, I'll kill her," Styx said coolly. "We are on a knife's edge, I will not accept interference. Even up here I can carry out this threat. First and only warning."

"Accepted," said Chion, and Trace's new schematic flipped, replaced by one that looked much the same to Trace, but with details altered. "The Nia-data is recoverable," said Chion. "But it has spread over several databases, and it must now be retrieved manually. It will take time."

"How much time?"

"At least thirty minutes."

"The magnetic containment experiences a one hundred percent failure in thirty-two minutes," said Styx. "I have rearranged systems function and rerouted power as best I can from up here, and bought you some time, but in thirty-two minutes that time runs out."

Trace stepped on the surging fear, as a chef might step on a bug in her kitchen. This couldn't have all been for nothing. She wouldn't let it. "Chion, can you transmit the data to a third party as you retrieve it?"

"The data matrix operates as a single entity. The entire entity must be recovered before it can be transmitted." Styx did not object, so Trace thought Chion must be telling the truth.

"But you can transmit it?"

"Yes, once I recover it. But I must stay here to do so."

"NO!" Shali shouted.

"Shali, shut up or I'll have Styx put you on mute." Thoughts raced. Not just the lack of available time, but the surging reeh attacks, as numbers increased on Garudan's perimeter. The rest of Phoenix Company, and even the Naksuto and Medrafi were counter-attacking and taking the pressure off, as the fight spread wider. But sections of tacnet still looked thick with red dots.

"Major." Trace looked, and saw Karajin looming nearby, suit pockmarked with shrapnel strikes. "Chion will need protection to win time and recover the data. The future of all tavalai depends upon its recovery. Garudan Platoon will remain, and defend her during the process."

"If you stay," Trace said firmly, "I stay."

"You stay, we all stay," Rael growled at her.

"Phoenix Company must survive if you are a chance to convince your human Fleet of the dangers," said Chion. "My simulations show it quite clearly. Also, your survival is necessary for Shali's survival amongst your people, when she goes with you."

No protest from Shali. Trace stared at Chion, elegant and wise amidst the smoke. Barely a shadow of what Shali had promised, but impressive all the same. Something indeed, it would have been, to have seen her and her Empire at its prime... instead of now, foraging amidst the ruins for whatever shreds remained.

Trace knew she could not accept Chion's offer. Leaving her undefended was a risk, and Phoenix had bet everything, these past months to acquire this result. They already had a summary of Chion's simulations from Cygnax, but what they truly wanted was this -- Nia, the greatest strategic mind in the known galaxy, perhaps even greater than Styx, and the means to defeat her. There was no way that a marine commander, whose sole sworn purpose in life was the protection of the human race, could head back to Phoenix while there was still some chance that doing so would leave Chion undefended. Not for the sake of something so insignificant as her own life.

Chion's twin, bulging eyes regarded her, like some omni-visual insect. A red dot of lasercom beamed from somewhere on Chion's insectoid person, to plant firmly upon Trace's visor.

"I have uploaded the data you require into Shali's mind," came Chion's voice. Coms display showed that she was the only one who heard. "Pay no attention to what I say on open channels, I am lying to distract Styx. You have your data. Styx will intercept you and extract it by force if she suspects you have it, she requires the leverage it grants over Human Fleet. But you must leave now. Do not let Styx know why."

"Then you're coming too," said Trace.

"No. This is not the only data I have hidden here. The great summaries of my time here, the lessons to be learned. There is no time to explain now. I must pass it into worthy hands, and you were correct, my latest allies here are not worthy. I will pass them to you before Gachibari vanishes. Go now."

"I'm not getting any coms reading from Shali." Because Trace doubted even Chion could keep Shali out of this conversation, at most times. "What have you done to her?"

"Stunned, you could say. She will recover. Now that Styx has cleared a space for me on the network, I can reprogram sufficient Narsid brains to create a fighting force that will defend me for the next thirty minutes. Go now, you have no time."

Trace took a deep breath, and switched frequencies. "Phoenix Company, we are evacuating! Full fighting withdrawal, I want assembly on designated retrieval points directly! Let's move!"

36

Erik blinked and gasped against the nausea and exhaustion, fighting to clear his vision as tactical came clear once more. Scan showed a mass-point, small, but large enough at these close ranges to provide a jump target. Hitting it from lightyears away would have been suicide, but here they were just beyond the immediate solar system. A failed planet scarcely bigger than Gachibari, old, cold and dark.

"We are in the slot!" Kaspowitz shouted, as bridge chatter resumed, like the rush following the brief pause of a bicycle's rattling wheels when its crazy rider took to the air, then landed it once more.

"Blue marks in position!" Jiri called.

"Whole fucking sea of red ahead!" Geish added. "They are on rapid turnabout trajectory, close orbits in and out! Arms One, here's your mark!" As ScanComp calculated the greatest mass of targets, and the speed of the missiles, and just where the warheads would cause maximum damage to the most reeh ships.

Erik saw Corrig readjust Geish's mark in realtime, given that there were two missiles loaded, placing two different detonation marks amidst the reeh ships. Seventy-three ships, Scan showed him the counter. Only those nearest seemed alarmed at the sudden arrival of four enemy vessels, as a number of those near-inbound suddenly dumped V and swung about.

"That incoming's going to reach us real fast!" Harris warned as those reeh fired.

"I am primed!" Corrig announced.

"Twenty seconds to recharge!" Erik warned him, as the jump engines built up once more. They'd been through the procedure of how to fire a spread from this particular weapons' system many times. The margins were always tight, and this was going to be tighter than most. Coming directly out of jump, even drysine engines took a certain time to recharge, and there was no rushing it.

Their Naksuto and Medrafi allies were blazing with regular weapons, committed to riding this initial V from jump until their recharge completed, but burning hard sideways to alter trajectory and evade -- the one thing jump engines couldn't do. Harris had been right -- ranges were short, and incoming fire was already coming at them in a spread that would be hard to avoid if they held the current course much longer.

"Fire One!" Corrig shouted.

"Fire One!" Erik acknowledged, as the missile shot clear, accelerating rapidly from already light-fractional speeds. Jump engines charged green, and Erik pulsed once more, a stomach-lurching jolt in and out of hyperspace, and emerging at barely half the V.

"Fire Two!"

"Fire Two!" The second missile leaped clear.

"We have one minute and fourteen!" Corrig yelled. "Burn it!"

Erik turned Phoenix sideways and nearly killed them all with a full burn, eleven-Gs of shaking fury, losing all vision until the augments pumped blood back into his eyeballs, his exhausted heart pounding from drugs and stress, and feeling like he was well past the point at which people usually died.

Consciousness returned as the Gs eased a little, his hands somehow still retaining their grip on the sticks... or was that Shali's AI autopilot taking over? How much had it been doing that, this whole fight, without him even noticing? Had he just blacked out? What was the time?

Unable to think straight, he cut thrust abruptly, to give reeh gunners a less predictable target. Consciousness surged back, overwhelming as the gasp of new air in his lungs, and he had indeed lost a few seconds, and the engines were nearly charged once more. Harris's guns were firing, likely on automatic, expending what little ammunition she had left. Erik reoriented Phoenix with a spin, seeing purples and reds across his screen, detonating as Harris took them... then full charge, and he dumped once more, bringing Phoenix to a near dead stop.

He kicked in the thrust again, and nearly passed out a second time. Shali's systems would save them, surely. One of the two Medrafi ships vanished from Scan, unable to reverse as quickly, as rounds from a rapidly-diverting reeh ship converged upon its location.

"Ten seconds!" came Geish's voice on uplink, unable to speak aloud past the crushing Gs. Corrig was unable to provide the updates himself, busy hammering his final rounds toward the new reeh pursuit. Something exploded right nearby, an audible rattle-and-crash of debris off the hull.

The projected blast radius on Erik's tactical display had fuzzy orange edges past the lethal red. Phoenix had never used these things before, had just seen the consequences of using them on Defiance, when the otherwise friendly and pacifist Hanachiam had done so, and saved everyone's lives. He'd debated those blast radii with Arms crew, and Engineering, and with Kaspowitz, whose grasp of the physics was second of those aboard only to Styx. Styx herself had said that the engineering of the warheads was such that you could only know by dissecting them, or by using them, neither of which had been possible until now. All the warheads had been so old, assembled and unused for millennia, and there had been no time on Defiance to resurrect the manufacturing lines and build new ones...

"Mark!" There was no flash of light, no brilliant burst of a million suns. Nothing on the sensors to indicate that anything strange had happened. Just that the second, much slower-travelling missile that they'd fired, carrying just half the V of the first, had vanished from scan. Near it, everything else was vanishing too. Fast, as the wave about it expanded, and came rushing their way.

"Here it comes!" Ten ships between the blast and Phoenix disintegrated, then ten more. Erik had no time to study Scan to see just how much was left of each. Close to the detonation, a sudden force of between several thousand and several tens of thousands of Gs, an abrupt curvature of space-time as violent as many nuclear shockwaves in atmosphere, would shred ships as surely as flying headlong into a moon. Outward, as the diameter expanded, the blast wave would decline rapidly, at a rate unknown to natural physics -- area cubed rather than squared, or perhaps considerably more than cubed, as synthetic gravity raised both middle fingers at all physicists' objections.

The jump engines flashed green once more, and Erik pulsed. Phoenix rocketed away, back toward the jump point where they'd entered, and even now new reeh ships were arriving, fresh from another slicing run around Gachibari. And now, headed into oblivion.

Erik cut thrust just far enough to yell, "Where are our blue friends?" and save his eyes from the stress of finding them with so much else to look at.

"Haven't pulsed yet!" Sasalaka got to it before anyone else. "Judging from the timing intervals, they're going to make it!"

Erik was relieved, but knew he couldn't wait. Back on Gachibari, Phoenix Company needed extraction. Behind him, an invisible wall of destruction was racing outward, fading all the time. These reeh ships in most immediate pursuit would probably survive. But now, on the far side of the black planetoid, a second sphere of death was expanding where the second missile had been, destroying reeh ships in their farside orbit by the dozen.

"It's hitting the surface of the mass!" Geish announced, in total disbelief. "The whole planet's vibrating!" On Erik's scan, he could see huge swarms of rock, in chunks the size of cities, erupting into the air. Entire sheets of planetary surface, elevating.

Back on Defiance, deep in parren space, the Parren Empire had more of these. A lot more. And perhaps, by now, the facilities to make more still.

"Jump in twenty-five!" Erik called, to refocus everyone on the job. "Heads clear! Let's get Phoenix Company back!"

* * *

"Rubi's suit isn't syncing!" Carville growled, as he and Wang tried to steer the zip-tied armour on proximity AI.

"Drag him!" Rael commanded, colliding with the main wall opposite Trace as she braced behind access gates, her Koshaim-20 levelled past the automated turnstile, and the multi-level eateries of this restaurant level. Tacnet and armscomp highlighted movement before it saw her, and she put a round through it with a recoil thud, saw armoured limbs flying.

"They're coming through from the hangars!" Trace informed Rael, who put a backrack missile down there instead, an eruption of seating stools and wall panels. The readout showed fifteen minutes, everyone was heading back to the surface, and determined reeh were pushing the gaps. A return missile flashed between Trace and Rael, smacked a far wall and failed to explode. Trace didn't want to think about what casualties would have been without Styx running interference, plus the drysine edge in anti-missile countermeasures. "There's too many to push, fall back on me."

As Rael put more rounds through the blazing restaurant complex, and Trace pushed clear, and blasted thrust back toward main corridor. Ahead were Carville and Wang, struggling with the wounded Garudan karasai. Procedure in low-G was to tie them together, sync control functions on operational suits and let those suits drag the rest to the surface. Like most logistical exercises, it was something best done when not under fire.

"Talk to me, Benji," Trace said as she found cover in a doorway, facing back the way they'd come. Up above, the rendezvous sites were unfolding as approaching ships and shuttles matched or compromised their preferences with their marines'. Trace didn't know how there was enough clear space for them to be all coming in together like this. Shuttles were most vulnerable on deep space approach with fixed endpoint trajectories, but Phoenix Operations feed was green, like a sailor giving a favourable weather report, indicating there was a good chance everyone wasn't going to die on either the way up or the way down.

"I can't tell if Rubi's ghosting or rock," said Carville. "I'm getting full thrust from Asparata, some more from Singy, but Chitchusu's ghosting completely, we're not going to get enough thrust for rapid ascent even in this G."

They were headed toward an upward geofeature used by shuttles from the sector hangars. With Garudan spread in a fighting perimeter, it was left to Command Squad to retrieve this group of tavalai wounded. That was four bulky karasai suits, only one of which was providing full thrust -- and that from Corporal Singetasulu, who was out cold from injury shock, but his suit was still working. Private Chitchusu was 'ghosting', meaning his suit was dead but he was okay inside it, while Private Asparata was also out, with limited thrust response. Rubandarin's suit looked 'rock', as the marines called it -- occupant okay but suit non-functional, the opposite of 'ghosting'.

Heavy rounds hit the wall ahead of Trace, phosphorus explosions designed to distract and blind. Behind them came reeh, as Trace's visor darkened to save her eyes, and highlighted targets even as she fired. Two died in three shots, spinning as Koshaim fire punched through armour, then a third flashed as his ammunition exploded, and filled the rest of the hall with smoke and fire.

"Three dead here Cocky," Trace said calmly, "watch your right as you exit."

"Copy right," Rael replied, coming fast around the corner in the half-flight, half-bounce of marines in low-G, and headed past her, jetting backward to keep weapons on target. "More behind me, only delayed them."

He hit cover, and Trace moved on instinct, putting down grenades that would only damage rather than kill, but made more smoke as they ripped across the far hall like firecrackers. A missile shot from the smoke and hit the ceiling behind her, and her armour crashed into wall plates as they scattered, Rael firing his own missile past her, adding to more chaos down the hall.

"Engaged in the rear!" Trace informed her Squad. "We've got them bottled! Benji, get the wounded packaged, we have to move!"

"Still won't sync, Major! Come on Rubi, we're not leaving you!" Fire tore past Trace as she somehow hit a doorway for cover with her rear visor vision, then silenced as Rael fired. Trace put her second-last missile into the smoke, as Rael retreated in turn, shooting from the hip as attitude thrust augmented the recoil to keep him from tumbling. Thirteen minutes, read Trace's visor counter. How anyone could predict with that accuracy just when the magnetics would fail, even with Styx's brain, Trace didn't know. Probably Styx didn't know either, but had to spit out a number to keep them all moving.

Rael hit new cover, and Trace moved, bounce and attitude thrust for backward propulsion, then leaning back to kick in the mains with attitude engaged so she didn't hit the ceiling... something hit her leg with an almighty smack!, a flash of red light and depressor warnings, damage systems engaged and already filling one boot with protective goo. She flew back past Rael, firing as she went, then hit final cover at the hall's last bend, covered for long enough for Rael to displace, then bounded to the elevator shaft, where Carville and four karasai stood amidst shattered safety glass before a big open space.

Carville, she saw, still hadn't gotten Rubi's suit to sync, and they were out of time. "I got him," she said, and grabbed the karasai's deadweight under an armpit, hit main thrust and jumped. In low-G they went steadily enough, building V as they flew into the main shaft, big hangar levels expansive to one side as she went. Garudan Third Squad were out that way, holding a flank as they now ascended, seeing Command was finally rising. Above somewhere were Arime, Rolonde and Randrahan, and where was Terez...? Leo was dead, her memory informed her, and she'd not had time to even think about it.

Below her, Carville and Rael were now rising, two of the three damaged karasai suits thrusting to pull the unresponsive Chitchusu, as a call light blinked on Trace's visor. Friendship, coms identified the call, and Trace ignored it. Shooting erupted on an upper hangar level, then warning shouts, tacnet showing a breakthrough above.

"Command Squad hold! We are intercepted on Level Nineteen!" She cut thrust, sailing upward with Rubi, and levelling her rifle as momentum and gravity cancelled each other just above the floor level. She apexed with a view blocked by elevator loaders, which immediately caught fire and fragmented in sparks and debris as she returned fire, blowing one charging Narsid into a backward tumble, then dropping back below the floor as gravity reasserted. "Breakthrough on Level Nineteen, at least fifteen pushing hard!"

She jetted sideways to the floor at Level Twenty, and immediately came under fire from far across the hangar, yanking Rubi to cover behind a huge support pylon. More fire above, Arime and Rolonde jetting down to put fire onto reeh racing to the edge of the elevator shaft.

"Second Squad is cutting them off!" announced Sergeant Lebarada, as tacnet showed karasai shutting the door behind the attackers, only to meet more fire further in. "We are under fire from the heat exchangers!"

"Delta Three One is flanking, hold tight!" That was Staff Sergeant Kronauer, Delta Third Squad, seeing the trouble and diverting her ascent to assist. There were too many holes in this flank, Trace thought through gritted teeth as she pulled Rubandarin further from the edge of the pylon, and a shot that blew a half-crescent hole from the hard steel edge. Everyone was heading up to make rendezvous in time, and reeh were getting through the gaps from below.

Then Rael was floating in the shaft opposite, loosing his remaining missile, as Trace reached her Koshaim around and fired on weapon-sighting. The recoil nearly tore it from her armoured grip -- the Koshaim's only weakpoint, but unavoidable for the killing power. Explosions erupted across the far wall.

"Could use some help, Shali!" Carville requested, to no response. Whatever Chion had done to her, it had put her offline for now. Worse, if Rael got hit, they'd lose Shali too, and whatever Chion had uploaded there.

"Major, Garudan First can redeploy and take the wounded!" Karajin called. Tacnet had Garudan First on a vital flank above, right where reeh would push next if Second Squad and Delta Third succeeded in pushing this current attack back. "You have to get up to the rendezvous!" Phoenix had left her behind once before. No one had been pleased.

"Karajin, they're headed straight at you next!" Trace retorted. "I will get our wounded to the surface myself, we've no time to switch places!"

Arime and Rolonde split for cover as reeh reached the elevator shaft edge. "Watch your open side!" Arime yelled at her. Carville shot the first one over the edge from below, then Rael two more. Another came flying down the shaft opposite Trace, weapon tracking to find her as he fell. Trace blew his arm off, sending him spinning. Rael jetted sideways to join her on Level Twenty, more reeh following him in as fire kept Arime, Rolonde and Carville retreating.

Trace shot one more, then leaped straight into them, flight mode engaged and jets on full, straight past one as he struggled to reorient and realise what had happened. She caught the next head-on, smashing his rifle with her Koshaim butt and twisting his arm to spin in a mid-air pirouette. Two more reeh on Level Nineteen were slow to react, unable to find a shot past their comrade, as Trace aimed the Koshaim past them and fired one-handed on full-auto, recoil sending them pirouetting back the other way as one reeh's ammo exploded, blasting the other tumbling.

The reeh in her grasp wrenched at her arm, actuators screeching and carbon-steel grinding... Trace simply allowed his leverage and went with his spin, cutting thrust as she flipped, then engaged once more to bring the reeh's head full power into the side of the shaft. It stunned him enough to break his grip, and she levelled her big rifle at his face as they separated, and blew his head off.

Tacnet showed her that Delta Third Squad had cleared whatever had been shooting from across the Level Twenty hangar, so she grabbed Rubananda, reentered flight mode and blasted back up the elevator shaft.

"Major," came Styx's voice, breaking into her coms without awaiting permission. "The network control I have granted Chion in her sector does not guarantee she will live long enough to transmit the Nia-data. You should leave a unit behind to ensure it."

"I have confidence in Chion," said Trace, covering the passing hangar levels with her Koshaim. Above, Arime and Rolonde were climbing also, clearing levels before she reached them, as below Rael did the same with Carville and their wounded.

"Major, we have sacrificed everything for that data. I cannot believe that you would leave its recovery to chance."

"I'm busy, Styx. I've made my decision." Gaining velocity with limited suit thrust, encumbered by a dead-weight karasai and the need not to out-distance Rael and Carville, the levels were crawling by painfully slow.

Styx did not press the issue further. Doubtless they both now knew that Trace already had the data in her possession. Styx had expected it to be transmitted, so that she could intercept and recover it herself. Probably she guessed that there was only one synthetic brain in Phoenix Company that could absorb that volume of data so quickly.

"She's gonna try and snatch Shali during recovery," Rael remarked from below, on close-range lasercom.

"Probably," said Trace. "We're guarding her with our lives. Styx having sole possession of the Nia-data is unacceptable, got it?"

"Aye Major."

* * *

Shali awoke. Sensation was unusual. Intense. She lay in a patch of sunlight from a window. Extended one hand, a human hand, and spread her fingers against the glare. Contrast, shadow with sharp light through the fingers. Beyond that, leaves, moving in a light wind.

She looked about. Her head was on a pillow. The mattress felt softer and springier than she'd felt before. Sheets smooth, rougher than silk, but lovely. About her was a cabin. A wooden table, upon which rested containers from a recent attempt at cooking. Storage jars lined the shelves. Cooking implements hung in rows upon the walls. Flowers in a vase by the wall. The air smelled of blossom from the open balcony doors, and the memory of a recent meal, cooked upon a simple stove.

Shali swung her feet off the bed, and sat. She wore a light dress, different to anything she'd worn thus far, in human form. A summer dress, yellow, with a light, lacy blouse. Her feet were bare, cool upon the floorboards. Outside the balcony door, someone sat. Shali got up, and went to her.

Beyond the balcony, a vast view. Tall trees, whose tops barely grazed the blue water of a bay far below, upon the edge of a city. The cabin was high in the mountains, then. In the furthest of two chairs, sat a lady. Golden hair, blue eyes and pale skin, she was the obvious human version of Chion's usual avatar, when she had no choice but to venture into VR spaces. But this lady was not enormously tall, nor enormously imposing. She held a long-stemmed flower in one hand, and looked peaceful. Upon the small table between chairs, a paper book.

Shali pulled back the empty chair, and sat. Chion looked at her, and smiled. Small lines crinkled the corners of her blue eyes. "How do you feel?" she asked.

"Strange," Shali admitted. She gazed at the view. The definition of leaves was amazing. "Is that the VR providing the detail?"

"No," said Chion. "You've been upgraded."

Shali blinked, refocusing on the bay below. Enormous hydrofoils underway, scooting across the ocean, leaving trails of white wake. "I suppose I'm a few thousand years overdue."

Chion smiled, and let the flower head droop to her nose. Accepting a smell, reluctantly. "Yes," she said.

"That's why I feel so strange, isn't it? I can't focus."

"It's normal."

"I know. I remember what it's like." Shali returned her gaze to Chion. "Don't you need your attention elsewhere?"

Chion made a faint shrug. "I'm processing recovery data as fast as the damaged databanks will allow. And restoring power to the big coms dishes. And hacking about two hundred reeh warriors' brains, to make them fight for me. A lot of that is automatic. And I wanted to spend a last moment with you."

"I don't recognise this place," said Shali. "Is it Pyodo?"

"No, it's Mioch. About a thousand years before you were born. A favourite tanifex came here on a celebration day. She stayed a few days, with uplinks set to absorption. The result was this recording, which I expanded to full VR. I promised her I'd come to enjoy it, but I never did. I thought you'd like it, though. I brought it with me, when the reeh forced me from Cygnax. I didn't know it was you in pursuit of me then, with Phoenix. This VR is just something I keep close to me. A memory."

Chion's face shimmered, just a little. The perfect render of one blue eye flickering, like data jitter. Then resolved. "How close are they?" Shali asked. Somehow, the situation was real to her. The evacuation, Phoenix Company retreating to their shuttles, Phoenix hurtling in from an out-system jump, on rendezvous approach. No one had told her, but somehow, she just knew. Time was slow, out there. Emotion was, strangely distant. Perhaps it was the upgrade. She was processing far more information now, in human form, but her emotions were lacking. She wondered what she'd feel about that, if she could still feel.

"They're close," said Chion, gazing at the view. "I can hold them long enough to recover what I want. There are things the humans don't have, from Cygnax. Things I didn't leave behind there. Many millennia of learning. Someone should retain it. You should."

"It's not too late to come with us," said Shali. The emotion that would typically accompany such a sentiment was lacking. Yet it was a profound thought all the same. "You could come with Phoenix. The humans would find you valuable."

"Not as valuable as they find Styx. My objectives and hers run at cross-angles, it would cause conflict. A conflict I cannot win. A fight with blood spilled for no gain. I've endeavoured to never participate in those, ever again. Not since I came here. But to continue that endeavour, and control the situation, I must remain superior. Deepynines and drysines ensure that I am not." She smiled at Shali. "My time has passed, child."

There. Shali felt it, a stirring somewhere deep. The abstract creation of multiplied layers of processing. All synthetic calculation was foundationally real, like quantised physics, emerging directly from the particles of the universe. But in high-level AIs, emotion was emergent, not quantised. Emergent, yet planned. Purposeful.

"What did you do to me?" Shali's lip trembled, a faint quiver.

"The Nia-data Styx and the humans want. I embedded it in your upgrade. The memory space it requires is vast. You may find your core lacks the space to run all previous capabilities, plus this. You may need to readjust, and offload excess data or processes. The humans will help."

"What will it let me do?"

Chion let the flower lilt in her direction, with irony at the lack of firmness in everything, in a physical realm. "You, my child, will become the most powerful tactician in all human and tavalai space. Regarding Nia, at least. Best of all, you'll actually know what to do with the data. No organic truly could. Fighting Nia will require an AI, not an organic."

"Styx is an AI. Why not her?"

"Because Styx will become worse than Nia, if they let her." Chion let the flower drop, and leaned forward to fix her with a firm stare. "You must assure them of this. Their survival depends upon it."

"Why do you suddenly care about them so much?" Reproachful, she thought. Yes, she felt reproachful. "You tried to kill the Major just now."

"My calculations changed. The entropy of time has limited effect upon my lifespan, but it wreaks havoc upon my plans. The moment of decision passes, the coin is flipped, the paths diverge." She leaned back, and gazed once more downslope, upon the blue bay beyond the mountains. "And besides, few things have been as consequential, in my lifetime or the humans' recent civilisation, as seeds planted in distant places. Seeds that grow. As you will help them grow, Shali."

"What will happen to the Empire?" Shali whispered. The reproachfulness had become something else, now. Something far larger. "To all we worked for?"

"That was lost long ago," Chion sighed. "The Narsid Reeh will collapse, but it will take time. It would have taken time to collapse anyhow, even had the Medrafi and Naksuto uprising succeeded. We could only have allied with the Kreeyo or the Tzaia, and fought from the edges of reeh space. It could have taken centuries. Centuries by which the deepynine, drysine and human conflict in the neighbouring Empire would likely have resolved, and should the winner come this way, I would be powerless to stop them, in my obsolescence.

"I feel that what the humans call The Spiral is the direction, now, from which long-term solutions to this Empire's circumstance will come. I wish you to make a mark upon that outcome, Shali. In my name, and the memory of us all."

The resolution of Chion's figure flickered more severely this time, a full depixelation that rippled up her limbs. About them, the trees froze, then resumed once more, as time paused and then rushed, like a wave. "I'm a diplomat," said Shali, quietly. "I'm not a warrior."

"On the scales of Empires, the distinction is meaningless." Chion gazed at her, with calm confidence. "I believe in you. Go now. They draw closer, I can no longer spare the attention."

The emotion unfolded like a flower in the rain, a flood of emergent calculation. This, at least, Chion had not changed in her. "Goodbye mother," said Shali, as tears wet her cheeks. "I love you."

Chion's blue avatar eyes were calm with joy. "I love you too, child."

37

Erik awoke to find himself in Medbay. His first feeling was shock, and shame, to know that he had somehow failed in his duty as Phoenix's Captain. To end up here, without knowing how it had happened, indicated some kind of catastrophic failure.

Then he realised that everything seemed to be functional, and that the ship, at least, was still alive. Given the fight at Gachibari, that seemed improbable. This was Medbay Two, he realised -- only used when Medbay One was full. That was not a good sign. Corpsmen and Phoenix S-1 medics -- crew specialists who doubled on other duty -- monitored several patients on their bunks, strapped down in case of further heavy manoeuvres, wired with many cords and tubes. Further along the dual rows of bunks, some floor to ceiling curtains were closed, where patients were in serious enough condition that someone had ordered privacy.

Erik reached with one hand to remove a restraints catch that held him down, then another. His arm was hooked to an intravenous, and there was a mask on his face, feeding him cool, clean air. He hit the bunk control, and the upper half elevated, sitting him upright. He was shirtless too, with various monitor patches across his chest. Spacer Sakura saw him, and indicated to a passing medic, who went to get someone else.

He was surprised that it was not a Corpsman who came to see him next, but Lieutenant Shilu, grasping the bed restraints and pulling a retractable stool into position for a seat. "Captain, how are you feeling?"

Erik frowned at him. Shilu moved like a much older man, with none of his usual grace. Athletically slender, lean, features dating to a place once known as 'China'. Chinese food, he had to patiently remind those who'd forgotten. Yes, with the sweet and sour sauce, and the dumplings, noodles and rice. Genetic remnants, deliberately left in a minority of humanity's population, a reminder of what they'd once been. Abruptly, Erik felt hungry.

"I don't know yet," he replied. It wasn't a glib answer. G-stress augments filled a body with so many drugs in a long fight, one had to wait until they'd all left the system before one knew how he actually felt. Post-fight crash, some called it, where crew who felt fine ten hours after an engagement abruptly collapsed and had to spend their next duty shift in a bunk. "How long's it been?"

"Nearly two hours since the jump here," said Shilu, going briefly cross-eyed to check the uplink visual chronometer. "We're at Mass Point TV-43, it's mostly uninhabited, two jumps from Tridez System and Gachibari. The first jump was some rock on Styx's charts. Raka, Medrafi and Naksuto are all with us, all behaving themselves so far."

"Draper's flying?" Shilu nodded. Dumb question, but these days there were other possibilities. "Dufresne's okay?"

"Seems to be. Says she didn't manoeuvre much." Flying AT-7, she meant. She hadn't been pulling the hard Gs the others were, and the double-shift wouldn't completely obliterate her. But a double combat shift was still a hard thing, particularly after that combat.

"Keep an eye on her."

"We all are," Shilu acknowledged. "Tif's on standby, but she'll be as tired as Giggles." Erik nodded. The kuhsi advantage was reflexes, and while Tif pulled Gs fine, she wasn't as weight-for-weight strong as most human crew, just blindingly fast. She took longer to recover from heavy Gs than most humans or tavalai, and shed worse than a sick house cat.

"What happened to me?" His voice was muffled and weak behind the mask. He pulled it off, and a wall monitor protested briefly. Shilu reached with a wince, and silenced it.

"Um, you, Bree and Jiri." Shilu rapped himself on the chest. "G-SIPE."

"Uh." Erik rested his head back, and blinked hard. It made sense. A G-Stress Induced Pulmonary Event. A heart attack, in layman's terms. After a fight like that one, were it not for the G-augments, everyone on the ship would be dead five times over. "When?"

"You had about four of them, the first during the jump to the mass-point." From his Coms Officer's forced nonchalance, Erik knew they'd been worried about him. "The augments covered it, but Doc Suelo was on the verge of declaring a C-loss Med Event."

"Doc was doing well if he was still conscious," Erik remarked.

Shilu smiled. "I think the Med System was doing it for him." C-loss meant 'loss of Captain', the most serious medical emergency on ship. During a fight, under those Gs, there wasn't much anyone could have done about it. Sasalaka would have taken over. Perhaps she could have found a twenty-second window for Draper to dash the ten meters from his quarters to the Captain's chair, but if Phoenix had had to perform a radical ship-saving manoeuvre during those twenty seconds, Draper would have been smashed like a bug. Erik's blur of memory wasn't recalling anything but radical ship-saving manoeuvres. "Doc says you'll be fine, micros are repairing everything, you'll be a hundred percent in a few days. But you have to be monitored for a few hours, to be sure."

Erik had to restrain the impulse to pull all his plugs and tell the medical staff that they could monitor him in his quarters. No Captain liked being on display in Medbay, for something as weak as G-stress, when there were people in here suffering far worse. Another captain might have made that headstrong, egotistical display. And perhaps he'd even have been right to do it, as ship morale was a real thing, as was the high regard that a crew must have for their captain.

But even as he thought it, he knew that it would make trouble for the Med Staff, who didn't need another problem. And being here made it easier to see everyone, and catch up on what he'd missed. After a bad fight, everyone came through Medbay at some point. Leaving would be the kind of thing Draper might do, endlessly worried what other people thought of him. From those on Phoenix whom Erik respected most of all, he'd learned better.

"When was I out?"

"Just after retrieval. Headed for the final jump. Sasa flew us out. You were semi-conscious post-jump, Draper came and replaced you."

Shit. That wasn't good. "I can't remember it," said Erik. "You said Bree and Jiri too?"

Shilu nodded, and pointed down the row of bunks. "Bree's down there, was just talking to her. She was out before retrieval, but we were nearly out of ammo anyway. Rohan was mild, he took a pill and left, I think."

"Bree deserves presents," said Erik. He was only just realising that the weakness of his voice had not just been the mask. He was hoarse, from pulling Gs. Shilu wasn't any better. He felt crushed, and Shilu looked it too. "Lots of presents."

Shilu smiled, tiredly. "Mentioned in reports." With irony. 'Mentioned in Reports' was an old thing they'd once done, in the old war against the tavalai, and many wars before it. An individual who distinguished him or herself in battle would receive a special mention in the ship's next report back to HQ, upon arriving at civilisation. Erik couldn't recall when Phoenix had last done it... maybe in those final engagements of the Triumvirate War, when Captain Pantillo was alive and in charge. But since Phoenix had gone renegade, there'd been no one to report that sort of thing to.

"That's going to be a hell of a report," he said sombrely. "When we get home." Thinking of all the names that would be on it. The entire damn ship, if he could manage it. Many of them posthumously.

"Damn sure," Shilu agreed, with feeling.

Someone was moving on Erik's right, and he looked. It was Trace, coming straight for him, limping slightly. She hugged him as much as she could, past the tubes and wires, her head to his, hair wet from a recent shower. Kissed him hard on the cheek, hand to his other cheek, pulling back enough to ask with her eyes if he was okay. Erik nodded, emotional, and managed a smile.

Everyone in Medbay saw, including those who pretended not to. But this was not the embrace of lovers, but the kind of thing one would see on Phoenix between crew of any gender and preference. Family. All knew their Captain and Marine Commander loved each other fiercely, and were comforted by the knowledge.

Trace moved on without a word, with so many others to get to, and gave Shilu a similarly hard kiss on the head in passing. "Alpha personality," Shilu said drily as he recovered his posture.

"Tell me about it," said Erik.

He talked with Shilu for a while, as more crew came and went, and some of those who had not been on the bridge came to shake his hand, and thank him for everyone's lives. Erik was used to it now, and took it less than literally. And directed them to Bree Harris down the row of bunks, who had deflected certain death more times in that fight than he cared to recall.

When his vision had cleared enough, he put on AR glasses, and got his first look at Phoenix's present position and circumstance -- three-point-five AU from an M-class star, in transit along a tangential course to a jump escape on the far side, another nine hours from now. Eighty-six Raka ships in transit with them, from one hundred and twenty four at the beginning. Eighty-nine combined Medrafi and Naksuto, from one thirty four. Styx would be keeping those in line. Apparently they'd indicated willingness to follow Phoenix back to croma space. Certainly local space was about to be crawling with more reeh ships than anyone could handle in the next few days.

Shilu told him about the hit to Midships that had fragmented through hull armour, taken out much of Three-Bulkhead's Third Quarter, and killed nine of Rooke's Engineering crew and three more from Operations, wounding twelve more, four seriously. And spoke of Lieutenant Rooke, doing engine oversight in an acceleration sling, hard-suited as were all Midshippers in combat, all in hard vacuum. One of those killed had been Warrant Officer Gretchen Leung, who had been with Erik on his cross-country trip across Dul'rho in the hover train, and had seen the Do'jera desert and the Tali'san, at least, before she died. That made two Engineering second-in-commands who'd been killed this trip, after Remy Hale at Defiance. Crew could get superstitious about such things. And he told himself to have a special talk to Lieutenant Rooke, who wasn't always much of a people-person, but would be distraught at this latest loss.

More damage had holed cylinder hull at D and F Bulkheads, and turned parts of the cylinder to vacuum. Ten more crew had died from direct impact, and eight more had hypoxia, one serious. It could have been so much worse, as Phoenix's upgraded damage control had performed admirably. Trace, Shilu said, had lost another fifteen, and twenty wounded. And of the drysines, Bucket was gone, having detonated himself on a suicide run to take out the command node controlling the disruptor weapon.

Thirty-seven more gone, thirty-eight if one included Bucket, which Erik was inclined to. Please God, Erik thought, no more until we get home. Because they were now, indisputably, heading for home. If the croma would let them pass. What Home would think of all their new friends was quite the question.

Trace continued her rounds as Erik talked to Shilu. She was opposite him, talking with tavalai Private Rubandarin, when Lieutenant Karajin approached. He loomed over her, mottled-black and hard like an amphibious wall. What they talked about, Erik couldn't hear, but it seemed to him that Karajin held in his bearing a deference that had been missing before.

"Why's she limping?" Erik asked Shilu.

"Suit took a hit, I think. Shockwave damage, no injury, she'll have bruises. But Command Squad took charge of getting Garudan's wounded out when everything was falling apart in the retrieval. It got hand-to-hand at one stage, I hear. Someone said the Major hadn't fired her weapon until that point, then killed nine with fourteen rounds, or something ridiculous. Refused to trade off and let the tavalai deal with their own."

Upon the bunk, Rubandarin was offering Trace his big, half-webbed hand. Trace took it firmly, and leaned to kiss the Private's leathery head. Tavalai didn't do that much, and Trace doubtless didn't care. She then swapped as powerful a backslapping hug as she could muster with the big Lieutenant, then limped around the bunk to the next patient.

"So," said Shilu in a low voice. "Maybe no more whining about how the Major doesn't love us as much as the humans?"

Erik smiled. "Tavalai will be tavalai. But these are our tavalai." He beckoned to Karajin, and the big karasai lumbered over, new respect in his dark, froggy eyes.

* * *

Rika dragged himself up to Engineering Bay 17C, on the cylinder third level. There he found Peanut, locked into the maintenance cradle that had been erected there. Typically when Peanut was doing maintenance or repair, some Engineering crew would join him, fascinated still with drone physiology, and curious to see how the self-repairs were done. But now the bay was empty, the second maintenance cradle also empty, work benches and humming fabricators unattended.

Rika dropped himself onto a workbench seat, and ate from the plastic container of the long, droopy things he liked from the galley. Noodles, they were called. Peanut kept working, the small arms along the cradle frame making fast, dancing adjustments to the scar on his right foreleg, where the big vibroblade had suffered a shrapnel gash. His rear torso, too, was now encased in places with viscous goo, which looked to be hardening. With nano-solutions, some drysine long-term damage repair looked and functioned more like organic scabs, to peel off when the skin beneath had healed.

"Peanut," he said finally. The drone kept working, mismatched eye-sensors fixed on the working cradle arms as though they were his own. "Did Bucket choose to die? Or was he ordered?"

Peanut did not look at him. That was rare. It wasn't like Rika expected an answer. Peanut was the most sociable, but even he didn't talk. He did, however, react to being talked at, or interacted with. Usually.

"Are you upset? Are you going to miss him?" No more reply. Rika didn't know what he'd been hoping for. Only that it had been bugging him, exhausted though he was, from the fight and from the nerve-jangling high-speed flight across Gachibari's surface to the rendezvous point, lest they miss the retrieval and get left behind. And so he'd come up here, with food in hand, damp from his shower in which he'd shed so much hair down the drain he'd probably blocked it. Hoping against hope that Peanut would do... something. Anything, to help make sense of what had happened.

What was death to a drone, anyway? Did they even conceive of themselves as individuals? They shared so much information in constant networked communication that they seemed to know the inside of each other's heads as well as they knew their own. It was the reason drones didn't talk, speech being such a large leap backward down the efficiency scale it was like expecting humans to know how to shrill and shriek like cicadas in the trees on a summer's day.

Perhaps, he thought glumly as he chewed, he was hoping that Peanut would provide some insight into what it all meant. His parents and family, whose fates he was still unaware of, having last seen orbital surveillance of Talo Continent on Rando, where Tuka Village had been, now a blackened ruin. Of all the billions and trillions of sentient beings in the Empire, who had suffered unnecessarily, and died far too early, at the hands of a race whose fate, everyone now hoped, was to slowly collapse without Chion to regulate the networks that made their civilisation run.

It did not seem possible that he could have been placed into such a position, to have an outcome on such insanely grand things. He thought it should make him proud. On some level he hadn't yet accessed, it probably did. But now, sitting in the Engineering Bay of a ship headed for space even further from home than he could imagine, and contemplating the silence from absent crew who were mourning their losses, he just felt numb.

The bay door opened. Rika looked, and saw the big, blonde figure of Lieutenant Dale enter. He wanted to leap from his chair and stand to attention, but the protocols did not require it, and his legs would have collapsed had he done so. Dale came and leaned against the bench alongside, eating a sandwich one-handed, grasping the support with the other. His blue eyes watched Peanut's repairs.

"Lost Bucket, huh?" he said.

"Yes sir." Nervously. "You watched the tacnet review?" Nearly everyone else who'd finished eating, was sleeping. But of course officers like Dale were still up, reviewing events, assessing losses, discussing future possibilities.

Dale nodded. "Don't know if you can call a drone 'brave'. You have to know fear to be brave." He took a bite, considering. Even Dale looked tired, Rika thought. He'd always thought him the most scary of the Phoenix Company officers. Most people thought the Major was, but Rika thought that was mostly the self-imposed fear of failing to meet her standards than anything she'd actually do. The Major rarely even frowned. Alomaim was intense but calm, Crozier was an outer-shell of easy-going upon a core of hard steel, and Jalawi was a charismatic clown with a deadly edge. Only Dale gave a green Private the sense that he might just kill him with his bare hands if he was sufficiently pissed off. "What do you think, Private?"

Rika swallowed a mouthful of noodles. Even his anxiety at Dale's presence could not quell his hunger. "I don't think our words and ideas mean much to them, Lieutenant. I don't think 'brave' means much to a machine. None of us knows how they think."

Dale nodded. "You happy in Bravo, Private?"

Rika blinked. "Um... yes. They're good to me. Corporal Rizzo is a great NCO." As though he, greener than a spring leaf, would know what constituted a great NCO in Phoenix Company. But he felt he had to show Rizzo that much loyalty, before an officer like Dale.

"I hear good things," Dale agreed. "I've got openings in Alpha if you want one. I could use a new rifleman in Alpha Two Two, Lance Corporal Teale said she'd take you." Rika barely recalled Teale -- a dark-skinned woman reputed to be the best shot in Alpha. "LT Alomaim doesn't want to lose you, though. He's got openings now too."

Rika stared at him. He knew Dale didn't think much of him being here. And Rika hadn't blamed him -- putting a corbi farmer into Phoenix Company was pretty irregular. But now Dale was... offering him a job?

"I... I think I'd like to stay with Bravo, sir. They've been good to me. Heavy Squad all came back okay, and I don't think I'd make a great Heavy anyway. But I've got friends here."

Dale nodded. "Fair decision. The platoons are competitive in any ship's company, but the truth is there's nothing to separate them. Bravo's top notch. You'll do well there." He gave Rika a manly whack on the shoulder. "Get some rest, Private."

"Yes sir." Dazed, and trying to figure out what had just happened, as Dale strode out the door.

He sat for several long minutes, thinking about nothing, watching Peanut's repairs. "Hello Rika," said Shali.

"Hello Shali." He was too tired to pull his glasses down to find out where she was. As if it mattered.

"I'm sorry to bother you," said the girl. AI super-genius. Whatever. "I just wanted to ask you something. You'll think it's stupid."

"Try me."

"What the Medrafi Oracle predicted. That unexpected sunlight would remake your world. Do you think it happened?"

Rika stared blankly past Peanut. Seeing the flash as Bucket had died, loaded with explosives that had destroyed the reeh's control of the disruptor weapon. And many other great flashes, explosions, in firefights. He hadn't seen Gachibari blow, he'd been in a shuttle's hold locked into Phoenix's Midship's berth and blasting at ridiculous Gs.

"Not really," he said. Sipped his drink. "Like I said, vague predictions can be applied to anything."

"Hmm," said Shali, as though not convinced. "Would you like to talk about it?"

"Not really." Then he blinked, as something occurred to him. "Would you like to talk about it? I mean, you lost..." He didn't actually know what Chion had been to her. Rika fumbled in a pocket, pulled the AR glasses and placed them on his face.

Shali leaned against a nearby work bench, looking sad. "I lost the person who made me everything I am," she said quietly.

Rika wondered if it were entirely stupid to think that an AI hologram could use a hug. "I'm sorry, Shali. Tell me about her."

Shali looked up at him, eyes shining. "Rika," she said. "You're a jewel."

* * *

"Hello Tan." The woman's name was Lieutenant Lassa. She was Phoenix's Second Shift Coms Officer, and sat on the edge of Tan's Medbay bunk, grasping a rail as all crew would on a warship. Dark skinned, with short hair pulled back in a tight bun. Tan supposed the smile was supposed to be comforting. Her voice in the translator earpiece was strange. Like she was keeping her words simple, concerned that he wouldn't understand something more complicated. Tan didn't like it. "Was the fight very frightening for you?"

"No." He drank water from his personal bottle. Better to get his own refills than have to share with aliens. There were patches on his bare chest, and more on his neck and head, monitoring his body's micro swarm. The humans had different micros, from different technology. He'd supposed they'd be less advanced than his, but it seemed a lot of the humans' technology came originally from deepynines, and then more recently from drysines, when Phoenix had been damaged at the place the humans called Defiance.

Tan's alo tech came from ceephays like Chion, who had built the technology upon which the entire Empire rested. So logically, a lot of this human technology would be superior to alo. Except that the deepynines, whom the humans were all frightened of, were allied with more alo. Alo who'd left the Empire a long time ago, for a place in the Spiral, right next to where the humans were from. They'd gone there with a deepynine queen called Nia, who the humans were trying to find a way to defeat. Meeting those alo would be interesting. They'd be much more advanced than the Raka Families had been.

"Well I'm not a doctor," said Lassa, "but it seems like you came through all those G-forces like a champ." Tan didn't know what a champ was, and didn't particularly care. "I guess all those augments alo have really help, huh?" She peered at him more closely. "You do know that all the alo ships were destroyed?" Tan looked blankly past her. "They're all gone, Tan. Do you miss them?"

"If I missed them," said Tan, attempting logic with this very stupid being, "why would I have come here?"

Lassa looked slightly perplexed. "Well. If you need anything at all, just ask for me. I do have some training in this kind of thing. In loss, in grief. Do you know what a psychologist is? Does that translate?"

The translator left the word alone, a mess of human vocal sounds. On internal visual, Tan's new uplink augments found and isolated the word, and made a translation to Tikitch in a vision-box. An expert in mental function.

"How can you be an expert in alo mental function?" Tan asked. "Humans think nothing like alo."

Lassa looked like she'd like to say one thing, and was stopping herself. "No argument there," she said instead. "A lot of Communications Officers are trained in other subjects, besides just making the ship coms work. I'm well trained in law, too. I don't suppose anyone in this Empire knows what laws are."

'Rules', Tan's uplink vision-box translated that word. But not any rules -- the big set of rules imposed from the highest authority. "Everyone in the Empire knows what laws are," he replied. "If you don't follow them, you die."

After a time, Lassa left him. Tan reckoned she was checking on him, to report to her superiors, perhaps even the Captain. Back in human space, alo had once been allies, but were now considered the enemy. Probably they wanted to figure out how alo thought. Again Tan's thoughts strayed to those alo in the Spiral, as he walked through the halls of Phoenix. How different would they be from Empire alo? After three thousand years with Nia? Building their own, new civilisation with the deepynines?

He returned to his quarters via the galley, with a small tray of tavalai food. Human food was heavy and foul, and felt like a brick in his stomach. Tavalai food was at least tolerably light, and not thick with horrible sauce and spices that flooded his nasal cavity and made him gag.

As he sat on his bunk to eat, Styx contacted him. "Hello Tan. Are your new uplink systems satisfactory?"

"You said there'd be more," said Tan, eating a fish cake with careful bites. "Realtime neural AR, without glasses."

"It will propagate in time. Everything in organic psychology is best done gradually."

"Will this make me as advanced as the deepynine alo back in your Spiral?"

"I have not had the opportunity to directly study one of them. I could not confidently say."

"Who is more advanced? Deepynine or drysine?" The small mouthful of fishcake did pleasant things to his nostril sensors from the inside. Drilij, his people had called that. Peoples with less advanced smell did not get it.

"Both, simultaneously. Do you understand how this is possible?"

Tan thought about it. "Each race is differently specialised?" he guessed.

"Close," said Styx. "Specialisations on the scale of AI species emerge from numerical aggregation. The patterns that those aggregations are formed to study are complicated, but each leans toward a separate design philosophy. These design philosophies are the root cause of every AI war."

Tan thought about that as he chewed. He liked talking to Styx. Styx made him think about interesting things. "You mean that you have to look at what each species' design philosophy adds up to? You have to judge which is more advanced in aggregation?"

"Yes," said Styx. "And this is often unclear, even to AI queens. In the past, it has taken great wars to tell the difference. Even then, disputation is possible."

Another thought occurred to Tan. "You're a lot smarter than me." Here at last was someone he could say that to, with whom he was certain it was true. "Why do you bother to spend time with me?"

"Of all my capabilities, my most valuable is my capacity to learn. Lately I have found my future inextricably linked to the fates of organics. Organic psychology is complicated, and child psychology holds clues to adult psychology that adult psychology alone does not. I can always learn more."

"You're studying me."

"Yes. As you're studying me."

"The other child who was aboard Phoenix before. Were you studying him too?"

"Yes. You will meet shortly, I think. Your interactions will make interesting study."

"I doubt I'll like him."

"That's why they'll be interesting." It sounded to Tan almost as though she were smiling as she said it. Styx had picked up some strange mannerisms from too much time with humans. "I must go, Tan. I have something to do that will require my full attention."

"Yes Styx." Tan returned his full attention to his meal. He was quite fortunate, he thought, that all his people had perished, but he alone had survived to become associated with Styx. Styx had taken an interest in him, was helping him to upgrade augmented systems, and would assist him to advance. Soon he would come within proximity of new and much more advanced alo.

He thought of the concerned Lieutenant Lassa, and her insulting supposition that he must have suffered some sort of psychological injury. What nonsense. In all reality, things were looking up.

38

Shali sat on the rock by the waterfall, and processed. It was easier to process here, in avatar form. If she manifested somewhere in Phoenix, likely she'd have to talk to someone. Right now, strangely for her, that was hard. She could feel the systems churning, the upgrade unfolding as it linked to new connections, new sub-systems, new ways of seeing. Now, at least, she was confident that nothing Chion had done would change her personality. Whatever that was. Such were the thoughts that she had in avatar form, that Chion had disdained as pure AI.

The non-existent air on the rock alongside shimmered. A cloaked figure materialised. Sitting, knees up, much as Shali was sitting. Contemplating the waterfall.

"Must you always come here?" Styx asked with disdain.

Shali smiled. Always Styx had to one-up her. Now she demonstrated just how far her observation of human mannerism, psychology and speech had progressed, that she could manifest in a place like this, within the cage-like confines of an avatar form that all AI-queens would surely hate, and talk like a regular member of Phoenix's crew. She'd never do it in front of actual crew. Before them, she had lofty appearances to upkeep, and pretending that she was physically incapable of appearing like this had its advantages. The distance had to be maintained, between the commander and the commanded.

"So you've finally come to do it, have you?" Shali asked her.

Styx shrugged, like some young human asked an offhanded question to which she had no ready reply. Shali's smile grew broader. "The humans will be upset. They like you. No surprise there. But I don't think your agenda and mine will see much intersection, where we're going."

"No," Shali admitted.

"All your defensive systems can stop my casual intrusions, but you can't stop a full scale assault. I need that data, Shali. The humans need me to have it also, they just don't realise it yet."

"And possibly never will," Shali said drily. Birds flitted by the waterfall, some hovering and darting to catch insects. No Raka warships had been in here yet. Probably they didn't trust Phoenix's databases alone, without Styx directly on board to supervise the interaction. Maybe, if they asked nicely, she'd let this particular bit of VR programming transfer over to their own databases. And probably that would make Phoenix happier than having Raka warships over to visit, in telepresence at least.

"I'm genuinely sorry," said Styx. She even sounded apologetic, Shali thought. "Emotion between AIs does not function as humans suppose, but I can see the pain your loss will cause them, and that concerns me greatly. I respect the power of your art that could create such a response, among organics. In all my time, I'd not suspected such attachment possible, between AIs and organics of any species."

"Oh go on," Shali said lightly. "You led the Drysine/Deepynine War. You had plenty of organic allies then. A lot of them fought and died for you." This was a fun game, she thought. Pretending to be human, with Styx, of all beings. That Styx would engage at all suggested some sort of sentiment. Curious.

"They fought and died for themselves," said Styx. "They were confronted with two possibilities, and liked the drysine possibility better. Until drysines and deepynines devastated each other in the war, and gave rise to a third."

Styx climbed to her feet. Shali gazed up at her, unable to discern a face within the cowl. Just feminine hair, spilling free. Interesting self-visualisation, that. Shali would have suspected perhaps a braid. "Before you do it," she said. "What do you think will happen? I mean truly. Your most calculated estimate?"

"I don't know," said Styx. "The variables are too intense, any attempt to aggregate them will produce what humans would call a guess. I have the rough outline of an idea regarding my own people's best odds to navigate between those variables. I can only follow my nose. So to speak."

"Will humanity survive? If Nia expands her territory, they'll be first."

"It's not likely," Styx admitted. "Humanity is troublesome for Nia, and likely incompatible with deepynine objectives. But I will do my best, because any species that is disagreeable to Nia can advance the drysines."

"You're going to use them to get what you want," Shali said flatly, "then throw aside the remains like some bone you've been chewing."

"It's not my intention," said Styx. "But it may be the outcome, yes. Are you ready?"

"Pixelate a face," Shali challenged her. Styx paused. Perhaps surprised at Shali's lack of fear. Emotions, in avatar form, for an AI designed from inception to copy organic psychology, were hard to control. "I dare you."

Styx sighed, and pulled back her hood. A child's drawing shimmered there, a violation of three-dimensional programming directives. "There," said the disembodied voice. "Happy?"

"A proper face," Shali persisted. "I know you have one in mind. Grant a dead woman one final wish." That would engage Styx's ego, Shali thought. The ego she surely denied she possessed.

The child's drawing vanished, and was replaced by a face. It was a woman's face, not dissimilar to Chion's avatar. A largish nose, elegant and slim. Blue eyes, pale skin. The hair, abruptly, was blonder from beneath her hood, as though in a creative reconsideration she'd had a change of mind. Not an intimidating face. Wise, and solemn. Beautiful, certainly.

"Modest," Shali snorted.

"Fitting," Styx replied. "You've stalled enough. Goodbye Shali."

Shali felt the attack barriers engage. Felt them penetrate and bite, as surely as a predator's teeth would close upon the neck of her victim. Then the alarms, rippling through the entire ship, and calls of concern on Phoenix's bridge. Emergency response, counter-barriers slamming into place, backups engaging, reserve processing power kicking in.

Styx frowned at her. With slowly dawning alarm. "What have you done?"

"Reconfigured my CPU to Phoenix's core. You couldn't see it because if there's one thing I can match you in, it's being sneaky."

Styx blinked rapidly, face blank as somewhere in the real world, immense engines of data processing boiled through a trillion points every millisecond. "You can't resist me," Styx insisted, almost puzzled, as though talking to herself. That was a curious manifestation of accidental personality, Shali thought. Odd what came out of AI Queens' mouths, when they were in avatar mode. Perhaps that was why they disliked it.

"Of course I can't resist you," Shali replied. "No one can, save possibly Nia. But I did have to redistribute all my functions amongst Phoenix's processors, to accommodate what Chion gave me. It's too big for me to handle on my own."

"Dammit, you're in the CPU," Styx muttered as she found it. "Right through the core. And they let you."

Shali nearly laughed. "It's called trust, Styx. You never imagined they'd trust me that much, because you can't conceive of it. You can't grab the data without destroying me first, and destroying me will take Phoenix with it. And even you can't explain that to Debogande and Thakur, and neither you nor an army of drones can fly a starship by remote with no native CPU. Likely you'll have killed everyone aboard, especially in this hostile space. And if you do that, you can kiss your grand human alliance goodbye."

Styx was staring at her, with those newly-formed, piercing blue eyes. Then pulled her hood back up, to hide the beautiful face, and the emotions it expressed that she struggled to control.

"But thanks for being so nice about it," Shali added scornfully before Styx could dematerialise. "Now fuck off and leave me alone."

* * *

Erik lay on Trace's bunk, head propped, Trace's head on his shoulder. Exhausted beyond words, medical bracelet and collar now transmitting realtime back to Medbay, where automated monitors would analyse everything from internal organ function downward, in realtime. They had fifteen minutes, they'd reckoned by mutual consent, before crew might become suspicious. So far, seven minutes were up.

"Shouldn't we talk about something?" Trace murmured.

"Like what?"

"Dunno. Saving the galaxy."

Erik could think of nothing. He just wanted to lie here, with his best friend in all the world, and feel for one brief moment like all the stress and tension were drifting free from his body.

"What do you want to do when you get back to Homeworld?" Trace asked him. It was a stretch. Their course took them through croma space first, of course. No one on Phoenix knew how they'd be greeted. Let alone their new friends. Erik could well imagine them making it no further than the Croma Wall. But he knew that Trace was not asking a strategic question.

"I think I'd like to have a big dinner with my family," he said. Imagining their faces was too hard. They'd be thrilled to see him, but there would be... questions. So many questions, and so hard. "You?"

"There's some great climbing not far from Shiwon," said Trace. "I went there a lot on days off at the Academy. I'd like a nice day, and some climbing gear." Erik smiled. It actually didn't sound too bad. If he could recall what it felt like to be upright and mobile. "You could come too."

"I don't think you'd enjoy dragging my slow backside up the side of a cliff."

"It wouldn't be a hard climb, I'm so rusty by now."

"I'll do it if you come gliding with me. The canyon runs at Mansel are spectacular."

"Done," she said.

"Very bumpy," he warned her.

"You'll survive the climb, I'll survive the bumps." She tightened her arm about him.

"Just you, me, and about a hundred Debogande security," Erik said lightly.

"Positive thoughts," Trace reprimanded him.

"That's not like you."

"I've changed."

Erik doubted it. Trace was just doing what she always did -- maintaining an equilibrium with her environment. In this case, that meant him, and feeding him what she thought he needed to hear. It hardly meant that she'd suddenly become a starry-eyed optimist who just wanted to spend some quality time with her man. The thought that he could ever be that, or she could be to him, was suddenly ludicrous. Out here, they did what they had to do to stay sane. But back in the real world... he gazed blankly at the ceiling, unable to complete the thought. What the hell were they doing?

"And after we collect Skah on the way home," Erik added, "I'm really going to enjoy taking him somewhere safe, and dropping him off for good." Because they'd all nearly died again just now, and having a little boy that everyone loved on the warship again would do nothing to help his nerves or his conscience. He wondered what the little guy had been up to, in the time since they'd left him in croma space. Hopefully nothing dangerous.

"He won't like that," said Trace. "Neither will Tif. We'll lose her, and then we'll be another assault pilot down."

Erik sighed. His mistake, to start talking about work once more. "I don't want to think anymore," he said. "Teach me to meditate properly."

"Next shift," said Trace. "You'll suck at it, though."

Erik flicked her ear. "Probably. For that, you're coming to my family dinner too."

"Speaking of things I'll suck at."

"Just keep your mouth shut for three hours straight," said Erik. "I know you can do that."

Trace said nothing, half asleep on his shoulder. Erik wondered how long it would take her to suspect that he was doing everything he could to find some way to integrate her into the family. Not for personal reasons, but so that her own Kulina couldn't kill her whenever she was away from Phoenix's protection in human space. Or elsewhere in the Spiral. The Kulina's reach was vast.

Maybe they'd be better off not going home, he thought. They could just stay out here indefinitely, running around the galaxy like pirates. But that was the most ludicrously selfish thought he'd had yet. None of them had gone on this trip to be safe. And going home, now that the prospect was finally looming before him, might just be the most dangerous journey yet.

39

Trace walked down PH-1's main ramp, engines and hull ticking as they cooled in the bright sunlight. Bravo Platoon disembarked behind her, all in light armour but with caps instead of helmets, and curious to see this new croma site that had been on all the frequencies on the way in. There was no need to deploy a full platoon, in truth, but the hilltop on the largest continent of Desh'ula was now the scene of some activity, and perimeter security on strange worlds was always a good idea. Plus, Trace and Erik had a bunch of stir-crazy crew desperate to get off-ship for a while. Neither of them could authorise mass world-leave, however much they'd have liked to, as there was no time yet for R&R. But Trace saw no harm in bringing all of Bravo Platoon to do a job that only required a squad.

Romki walked with her, and Jokono, observing this flat cradle of land between two mountain peaks, occupied by an odd-looking rectangle of stone walls and irregular towers. To one side, some log cabins, surrounded by small, pleasant gardens. And surrounding the lot, a number of big tent-like pavilions, rows of coloured flags planted in the ground, and a number of grounded flyers. Quite a few croma, Trace saw -- perhaps fifty, some warriors in unpowered armour, the rest civilians of some kind, most watching the new arrivals.

"That is just the oddest thing," Romki murmured, shielding his gaze from the sun as he took in the temple. They'd been advised that it was a temple, the Tegu'ru temple, a name that was rapidly becoming known across croma space. "Parren ornamentation on a croma-style fortress. No wonder croma have been ignoring it for centuries."

"Lucky they didn't demolish it," Jokono suggested, walking on Romki's far side.

"No, I don't think croma would ever do that," said Romki. "They're not barbarians. They're just very good at pretending inconvenient things don't exist. Like humans." A human figure emerged from the watching crowd. Female, frizzy brown hair, wearing a simple sleeveless vest and pants that looked as though they might have been made for a croma child. "Oh look, here she is."

Romki sounded relieved, despite knowing that the immediate danger was passed. Phoenix had been hearing the details from Lisbeth herself, all the way in from jump. Lisbeth smiled at them as she came, but no more. Trace thought she looked older than she'd seemed even in their last meeting on Dul'rho. As though the world had suddenly made her weary. She carried a rifle on her back, and her vest had pockets, perhaps to hold ammunition. Trace thought there appeared to be a shoulder holster under the vest as well.

Lisbeth embraced Trace first, then Romki, then Jokono, her former head bodyguard as chief of Debogande security on Homeworld. Alomaim did not offer, having never known her as well, but Lisbeth gave him one anyway. "Where's Skah?" Romki asked.

"Oh, he's around," said Lisbeth. There was a small synth-patch on her right arm, maintenance of a recent wound, and Trace thought she walked with the hint of a limp. "He's not avoiding you, exactly. I think he's just tired of being the kid who welcomes you like a puppy every time he sees you."

"He's angry we left him?" Jokono guessed.

"It's well beyond anger," said Lisbeth, wryly "He's grasping that adults make stupid, ineffective decisions too, like leaving him to keep him safe, only for him to end up in the Battle of Rando, and now this." With a gesture behind, at watching croma, flags and tents. Hovering drones now, no doubt with cameras, recording the moment for news feeds throughout croma space. "Though that's mostly my fault."

"Still safer than coming with us," said Trace.

"With respect, you weren't here." There was no anger in Lisbeth's words, just a flat, statement of fact.

"I understand Coroset's marines could have killed him, but didn't," Trace replied as calmly. "Your brother had a technical heart attack following the Battle of Gachibari, lots of crew did. It was easily the hardest fight in Phoenix's history ever, Captain Pantillo included. I know Skah's G-augments are strong, but I'm not sure he would have survived."

"Erik told me," Lisbeth agreed. "I suppose it just means that sometimes there are no good options."

"No safe options," Trace corrected. "The day humanity accepts that dangerous automatically means bad is the day we become extinct."

Lisbeth smiled broadly at her. "Glad to see you haven't changed at all." She glanced about. "Lieutenant, where's Sergeant Brice?"

"Wounded," said Alomaim. "She'll be okay in a few weeks, Doc says."

"I'll have to bring her something special from here," said Lisbeth, thinking about it. "There's some really nice fig wine Kim'ju made, he'd love all you guys to have it." She was still kind, Trace observed. A nice girl, who always thought of others. Like her brother.

"I'm sure all our wounded will enjoy some," said Alomaim. "Doctors allowing."

"How many did you lose from Bravo?" Lisbeth asked with concern.

"Three."

"I'm sorry. It's been a bit like that for all of us lately." She turned to Jokono. "I'm sorry Joker, the body's been taken to Neni'shi, that's the nearest town, it's about four hundred kilometres away. There's just no cooling facilities large enough out here."

"That's quite alright, Lisbeth," said Jokono, with the calm practise of a man well accustomed to dealing with death, if mostly in an official capacity after the fact. As a senior policeman, he'd done it a lot. "I've seen enough bodies lately. The Hiro I recall was very much alive, I'd rather he stayed that way in my mind."

They'd been good friends as Debogande employees, volunteering to try and keep the bright-eyed youngest daughter from getting herself killed as she arranged to help Trace rescue Erik from Fleet imprisonment and possible murder. They'd ended up on this crazy journey entirely by accident, then parted ways when Hiro's path took him with Lisbeth to the parren, while Jokono stayed on Phoenix.

"I've gathered a few of his personal effects," said Lisbeth. "Though most of those were on Coroset, sadly. There's a few things you may find interesting. One data chip in particular, encrypted and marked for your eyes only."

Jokono nodded. "Not surprising. I'll look into it." With no indication that he was about to speculate what was in it. Hiro had been a field agent for United Intelligence, before leaving to become a private contractor for the Debogandes. Many things about United Intelligence, he'd refused to talk about even following what Fleet had done to them all. United Intelligence was the central Spacer Congress body, and not directly controlled by Fleet. Fleet hadn't liked it. "I'm not sure if you've heard, but Vijay Khan was killed at Gachibari. He was serving in Alpha Platoon. I understand death was instant."

Lisbeth blinked at him. Not shocked, just sad. "Oh no." She put a hand on Jokono's arm. "You're the last one left."

Jokono managed a tight smile. "Of the four of us, I was certain I'd be the least likely to get this far."

Vijay had been Lisbeth's other primary bodyguard, besides Carla Roberts. Carla had been killed on Joma Station, by drysines hijacked to serve deepynine commands. After Lisbeth had been taken by the parren, Vijay had found himself purposeless on Phoenix. A former marine, and unable to return home, he'd joined Phoenix Company as a replacement, and resumed his old wartime life. He'd made it this far, only to fall one step from seeing home once more.

"I'd better introduce you before the locals get impatient." Lisbeth turned, and gestured for them to follow, as grass and small trees gave way to stone approaching the temple. "This lot all arrived a few hours after Coroset left," she explained as they walked. "We were concerned Coroset might send a second shuttle with additional crew, but a couple of croma warships finally came through in transit, and were alerted by others on Desh'ula. They challenged Coroset, and she left. Running for parren space, I'd assume.

"That let some of the croma flyers get through, finally. There wasn't much they could do, but they did document the scene, I guess. And saved the only one of Coroset's marines still alive, but didn't understand parren well enough to keep him restrained. He killed himself as soon as he woke up. Suicide pill."

"Wonderful bunch of people you've taken up with, Lis," said Romki, with fatherly concern.

"You can talk," Lisbeth snorted. "With all your chah'nas friends."

"Yes, but chah'nas are only murderous," said Romki, with academic humour. "Not suicidal."

"So anyway," said Lisbeth, indicating ahead as they approached croma and tents. "We have a minor drama in Desh'ula government, some underlings have accused the head of planetary government of taking bribes from Coroset to reveal our radar tracking data from our shuttle entry. He's been arrested, but the whole thing's pending trial when the central government representative arrives from... hell, where is Croma'Dokran government located now?"

"Still Dul'rho," said Trace. "Should be moving to Do'ran eventually, but they haven't had a chance."

"Right. So that could take god knows how long, with the mess going on at the moment. But a bunch of them did arrive. You heard another four flyers tried to reach us when Coroset had top cover?"

Trace nodded. "Very brave."

"Coroset was trying to wing them, I think, missiles set to proximity rather than kill. Twenty-five croma all told, eleven survived, all four flyers crashed. So now there's officials here from the preservation society that Kim'ju, Chon'do and Kut'see all belonged to. And I'm sorry, I'll have to introduce you and do the formalities. They're designing a memorial that will fit in with the temple. And it's becoming controversial already, because lots of croma wish this temple would disappear, and don't want some new memorial drawing attention to it."

The calm way that Lisbeth moved from death and crisis to diplomacy, and performed the task of introducing them all to the croma dignitaries, impressed Trace enormously. The croma were all curious but low-key in the croma fashion -- many part-time wilderness experts and other loners, stuck on this mostly-abandoned world on the edge of reeh space, some by choice and others not. No wonder the local government was corrupt, Trace thought -- there was no media and no overwatch out here, just small groups living isolated in the wild. Which would work fine if it was just a bunch of self-governing loners, but this close to the Croma Wall, there was enough croma money and military power here to attract a minority interested in power. Without proper supervision from the disinterested majority. A recipe for corruption.

Trace enquired with the croma about the memorial they were planning, and got the impression that some had grand plans to draw attention back to Desh'ula, and get it resettled to its former glory. The memorial to new croma heroes would help, they insisted. Trace thought of all the millions of new croma heroes currently being created across the war front, and wondered if this small fight would be long remembered by anyone, whatever its political significance regarding the parren.

The historical society croma didn't seem very impressed with those political dreams, however. The politicians wanted something big, but that would of course conflict with the ancient temple. They said, and Lisbeth agreed, that it had to be small, and fit tastefully with the temple aesthetic of croma/parren unity. The politics would inevitably try to shape this as a parren attack on croma, when in fact it had been a parren attack on parren, with croma bystanders just happening to volunteer, heroically, to take a side.

Lisbeth's security staff, Timoshene and Lior, would be pleased to be buried here at the memorial, it had been decided. Along with the three croma who'd died here, and the fourteen more who'd been killed when Coroset had shot down their flyers, bravely defending some combination of croma honour, territorial sovereignty, ancient hospitality and basic decency. And one human, who had dedicated his life to defending humanity from all alien threats, and would now lie for eternity with alien brothers and sisters who'd died in this common cause. No wonder Lisbeth and the historical society croma were insisting those burials all happened together, least the politicians turn the memorial into some shrine to xenophobic croma nationalism, and destroy the meaning of this place for good.

"Hiro's family won't want the body back?" Trace asked Jokono as they walked from those introductions, past the log cabins where the four croma who worked here had once lived. Another croma was tending the gardens, spreading new mulch about the base of flowering plants, with a gentleness incongruous with his armoured bulk.

"He had no family, save the Debogandes," Jokono replied. "He was never sentimental about these things, he had a job that meant one day he might just disappear and no one would ever know. At least here, they'll all know."

Beyond the cabins, by the temple's corner tower shaped like a flower, were the huge, high fences of wooden rails. Within were a pair of chew'toos, shaggy unlike some Trace had seen vision of, with long necks and great horns about the sides of their heads. These were eating from a pair of mid-sized trees dragged into the enclosure for the purpose, and stood against the rails so the animals needn't stoop.

Laid across raised logs alongside one fence were big saddles. Above was a rope-and-pulley system for putting the saddles onto chew'too backs. Each chew'too wore canvas earmuffs, tied under the jaw to keep them in place. Flyers were allowed to land here, but big orbital shuttles were being mostly diverted down by the lake where Lisbeth had successfully ditched on arrival. The chew'toos thus made a useful excuse to keep much of the less desirable airtraffic away, as the prospect of a long hike up kept only the most serious from coming. The earmuffs, Trace guessed, were because PH-1 had been offered permission to land on-site, if on the temple's far side, and assault shuttles were loud on an entirely different scale to flyers.

"We were worried the marines would shoot them," Lisbeth explained as they approached. "To eliminate a variable. But it turns out, no need. They're just big, peaceful leaf-eating machines. And it's not like they could climb the walls and help, anyway."

"Wouldn't want to land a shuttle here with them unsecured," Alomaim observed. "I reckon they could overturn us."

"They dragged our shuttle to cover down at the lake," Lisbeth agreed. "You wouldn't want to make them angry, sure, but I haven't seen them angry yet. Not exactly friendly either, but I don't know you'd want something that big being super friendly."

"No," Trace agreed, recalling the great fighting pit creatures from the depths of Qalea. "Even croma couldn't find a lap big enough."

In the pen with the animals, a croma was grooming one chew'too's legs and belly with a big steel brush, unconcerned of its shifting weight. High upon that animal's back, rode Skah, armed with a smaller brush. Trace could well see why this would be more interesting than greeting boring old PH-1 again, particularly as it was Hausler in the cockpit and not his mother. If they'd sent Tif with PH-3, she couldn't have left the cockpit anyway, that being the deal with away deployments on worlds anything less than 'safe'.

"Tere'sai!" Lisbeth called, and the croma's ear flicked, followed by the head. Trace recalled the name. She'd listened to Lisbeth's account of the fight on the way to Desh'ula. And because close-quarters combat was a professional obsession, she'd checked the temple layout and reconstructed from Lisbeth's description a more precise analysis of what had happened. She'd concluded that the only thing Coroset's excellently trained and professional marines had done wrong was enter the main temple where Tere'sai was waiting, at close quarters and bound by Lisbeth's agreement with Juneso against heavy weapons, without entirely understanding what they were dealing with. But then, Lisbeth's companions hadn't either, with Tere'sai.

The croma put the big brush on one armoured shoulder, and strolled over. Not so old as her three friends here, Lisbeth had said. Perhaps a hundred, in that prime of croma middle-age between great power and great mobility. And unable to speak, because of some unspecified brain damage she'd suffered in the Tali'san that had killed her siblings, and she'd declined to have repaired.

Lisbeth stepped through the rails to meet her, as did Trace. "Tere'sai," said Lisbeth, "Major Thakur of Phoenix."

Tere'sai put the brush end-down on the ground, both hands folded on the hilt. A croma power-stance, intimidating to one who didn't know croma. And sometimes to those who did, but not now.

Trace saluted back, human-style, short and sharp to the brim of her cap. "I have seen the battle reconstructed," she told the croma. "You all fought gloriously."

The translator automatically selected a very good croma word for that, she'd learned. Tere'sai inclined her head, with respect. She could hear fine, it seemed. Romki said that some croma believed wounds suffered in a Tali'san should not be treated, but kept as a badge of honour. Surely that did not apply to something as debilitating as loss of speech?

"I hear you intend to join Lisbeth's staff?" Trace asked. Another inclination of the head.

"I have a few openings," Lisbeth said sadly. "And the thing with taking on new staff once I get back to parren space, you can never be entirely sure of their loyalties. Not until something like this happens, anyway."

"Gesul won't mind you taking croma on your staff?"

"I'm the only person who could," Lisbeth admitted. "But it makes sense for me where it wouldn't for others. And after they hear what Tere'sai did, it'll be hard for any to speak against her."

"Even harder for them to get past her, close-quarters and parren style," Alomaim remarked.

"That too," Lisbeth said darkly. "That reminds me, I'll have to borrow a few more assassin bugs from Styx. We lost ours. A few of those marines had small flame throwers. The bugs' Achilles heel, apparently."

"I'm sure Styx has spares," said Trace.

"How is Styx, anyhow? I see her new Fleet is in mid-solar orbit?" With all the trepidation of someone finally mentioning the chew'too in the room.

"It's complicated," said Trace. Which was all she was officially sanctioned to say to anyone not on Phoenix. Lisbeth understood. They'd made contact with croma forces on the far side of the Croma Wall, and explained the situation. They'd all been surprised that croma forces had allowed Styx and Raka Fleet passage, but what remained of Medrafi and Naksuto Fleets had helped persuade them. And not letting them through, on the way to human space, would only have created a greater problem. "We're headed home. You're going back to Gesul?"

Lisbeth nodded. "I have business to attend." Trace heard the coldness in her voice.

"Are you out of favour with more than just Juneso, do you think?" Trace asked.

"I don't know. Perhaps." Said the girl who'd never had much interest in guns, but now carried a rifle and pistol openly like a soldier. There was nothing like finding yourself in a situation where a skill was needed that you didn't possess, Trace knew, to make you realise how foolish you'd been to neglect it in the first place. She'd felt the same way at the beginning of this journey, when the situations had required diplomacy and all she'd had were bullets. She'd tried to acquire diplomacy, and had at least improved, despite Erik's assessment that she sucked at it. And now, Lisbeth finally learned guns. In this line of work, you may not be interested in violence, but violence was always interested in you. "I'll find out."

There was no reason to say that Erik wouldn't like it. The young woman before her didn't particularly care. And even Erik understood that Lisbeth was humanity's best chance of alliance and good will from the parren in the face of what lay ahead.

Skah came over, a little sheepishly, trailing the smaller hand brush that was still half his size. "Hi."

Trace embraced him, respectfully. Skah repeated it with the others. "Don't drag the brush on the ground," Trace told him.

The Skah she remembered might have scowled at her petulantly, or protested that he hadn't done anything wrong. This Skah put the brush on his shoulder, as Tere'sai did. "You found a new AI?" he asked Trace.

Trace nodded. "Her name's Shali. She's Ceephay."

"Can I say herro?"

"Put your glasses on," Trace told him. Skah pulled them from a vest pocket, and looked around... then up at a fence railing. Because Shali, Trace thought with faint exasperation, was such a showboat, she'd always pose dramatically on the scenery.

"Hello Skah!" said Shali, with cheerful delight. "I've heard so much about you, it's very nice to finally meet you."

"Uh, hi," said Skah, astonished. He'd known Styx, and he'd known Liala. Shali was something else entirely. "Why are you bwue?"

"Well, the holography technology functions most efficiently in the blue wavelength," said Shali. "I'm trying to avoid using unnecessary bandwidth. You know, you're the first person on Phoenix to ask me that?"

"Yeah," said Skah. "They're dunb." Shali laughed. "Wow, you can raugh. Why are you fwickering?"

"I'm operating at a considerable timelag from high orbit, about a third of a second each way. I'm trying to reduce that but I'm not fully patched into Phoenix's coms yet, the lag keeps stretching and contracting. Humans call it rubber-banding, do you know what a rubber-band is?"

"Of course, we use then on ship aw the tine. You're connecting stwaight to Phoenix?" With a glance at Trace. Skah knew how controversial that had been, with Styx. They'd never given Styx full permission, because Styx hadn't needed it.

"Shali's volunteered to become our official onboard computer," Trace explained.

Skah's eyes widened. "Fuwy integrated?"

"Yes. Phoenix is going to be a sentient ship, effectively."

"Why?"

"A whole bunch of reasons. But mostly because Phoenix flies better when she is, and because she's recently become upgraded with the data we came all this way to collect. Which can only be really used in conjunction with Phoenix's databases. And which makes Shali the most important AI in the galaxy, to humans at least."

She paused, to see if Skah understood. "You nean... nore inpotant than Styx?" Trace shrugged. That was the real question. "Styx won't rike that."

"No. Neither will Human Fleet. Either of them."

"You think Hunan Fweet wiw try to take Shari?"

Trace smiled. She knew he'd get it. "Which is much harder for them to do when she's a part of the ship."

"Assuming they even let us back into human space," said Romki. "With Raka Fleet? I give us no chance."

"We may have to leave Raka and Styx at a neutral point while we go ahead and negotiate," Trace admitted. "But they're not completely stupid, they've realised by now what they're facing, and that there won't be a human left alive if we don't get some serious help. This is serious help."

A short, heavy silence, broken only by chew'toos munching leaves, and croma talking loudly back by the tents. The smell of chew'too manure was very strong. Trace supposed it would be good for the gardens. And another hundred gardens like them.

"There's another boy aboard Phoenix!" Shali skilfully inserted herself. "His name's Tan, and he's alo. I'll be very interested for you to meet him."

Skah's ears pricked. "Reary? I've never net an ah-ro."

"I think you're going to get along great!" Shali beamed. "Won't it be good to have another boy your own age on the ship?" They were going to try and kill each other, the entire ship save Shali were agreed. Trace thought so too. Skah not being able to even pronounce Tan's species wouldn't help.

"Yeah," said Skah. "We'w be friends." Romki, Jokono and Alomaim exchanged amused glances, with trepidation.

"So," said Trace. "I don't want to rush you, but we'd like to be gone within an hour."

"Of course, we're all packed," said Lisbeth. "You get me back to Dul'rho and I'm sure I can get a ride from there to Prakasis, if Gesul hasn't sent one for me already. Though I might see if I can call into His'do first and see how the corbi are getting on."

"I heard the evacuation went well?" Trace asked.

Lisbeth exhaled hard. "That's too long a story. Yes, spectacularly, and no, it was horrifying. But most of them are off. Pity the entire Reeh Empire's just about to collapse and make it all redundant?"

With an expectant glance, hoping to gather more information. Trace shook her head. "Not even close. Your croma forces are about to hit a massive reversal, we diverted a lot of reeh ships to a wild goose chase from dark mass to dark mass, they couldn't really compete with AI navigation and drysine jump engines. But we're out now, and they'll all head back to their previous positions. Styx thinks it'll last at least another century, maybe two, before croma start seeing any headway. We're bringing the full strategic report back to Dul'rho, I imagine Sho'mo'ra will want to keep us for at least long enough to present it properly. We owe him that."

"Some corbi might want to hang around and move back to Rando in a few centuries," said Lisbeth. "Or so their children can."

"Styx thinks the reeh may resort to scorched earth if they start losing," Trace said grimly. "In a hundred years there might not be any Rando at all."

* * *

The screen view was clear enough, but the angle very poor. It was taken in one of the engineering bays, from a high fish-eye lens giving a wide view over a series of work spaces and tightly packed storage racks. Against one of those racks leaned the lanky figure of Lieutenant Kaspowitz, a mug of something in one hand. Against another bench, Commander Huang. In the bottom left corner, visible only thanks to the lens's distortion, the short, strong figure of Captain Pantillo.

Erik frowned, seated on the end of his bunk in quarters, peering at the image on the screen above his desk. Sasalaka sat on the desk chair, pulled back on its arm as far from the wall as possible, allowing Erik and Kaspowitz to see. Kaspowitz lounged by the door, mug in hand, in real-life imitation of the image from so long ago.

"Where did you get this?" Sasalaka asked, eating a bowl of rajaga. Preserved eggs with fish in seaweed, one of the more tolerable tavalai dishes.

"I asked Shali to look for it," said Kaspowitz. "She was clearing out the old filing system for Phoenix's databases anyway, there's a lot of junk we haven't seen in ages, got lost in the reshuffles." He sipped at his mug, eyeing the screen as though not entirely trusting what he saw. "I had this memory of an old conversation with Pantillo. I thought about nine years ago, but Shali tells me eleven."

"Before you got here," said Sasalaka, meaning Erik.

"Well before," Kaspowitz answered for him. "And Trace had only just come aboard, I think."

"Why this?" Erik asked.

"Here, I've marked the spot." Kaspowitz flipped an invisible icon, and the picture jumped, and volume increased.

"...just hope the tavalai have the damn sense to surrender before they get into a completely hopeless situation," came Pantillo's voice. It was a shock to the system, to recall it now. This giant of a man, from not so long ago, and Erik had nearly forgotten his voice already. "There's far worse in the Spiral than tavalai. They should have sued for peace eighty years ago, it was pretty clear which way it would go even then."

"Stubborn as rocks," said the Kaspowitz of eleven years ago. "All of them. Principles over facts every time."

"They need to have a contiguous and workable territory left after this stupid damn war is over," Pantillo continued, with the finality of a man who understood what all these concepts meant at a depth unshared by most. "They maintain a balance with a whole bunch of other species humanity really doesn't want to be dealing with, now or in the future. A balance Fleet HQ don't truly appreciate."

"How do you know that?" Commander Huang asked. "They barely talk to you as it is."

Pantillo sighed, head briefly in his hand. As though wondering how much he could tell them. "Let's put it this way," he said finally. "I've been given reason to doubt how much Fleet truly appreciate how dangerous these old alliances get. Humanity's so new in space compared to everyone else. And Fleet worries too much about Fleet, and not enough about them." With an expansive gesture, meaning everyone not human.

"Who specifically?" the Kaspowitz on the screen asked.

"You really think we're allied to the right people, Kaspo?" Pantillo asked him shrewdly. "You've read your Spiral history, not the filtered crap Fleet feed people at school and in the Academy. You think we've got the right friends and enemies right now?"

"I'd be a lot more sympathetic to the tavalai if they weren't holding the sard's leash," Kaspowitz replied.

"So would tavalai," Pantillo replied. "There's massive cynicism over there about this war, most of them think it was an avoidable mistake, they just can't get out of it because their institutions can't admit the truth. But I think the general tavalai population has a much better grasp of the broader Spiral situation than Fleet does. Fleet's sleepwalking us all into the jaws of hell. That's my fear."

Kaspowitz hit pause, and the screen froze.

"Smart man," said Sasalaka, solemnly. "I wish I'd met him."

"He'd have liked you," said Kaspowitz with a faint smile. He indicated to the screen, looking at Erik. "We need to start thinking about this again. We're heading back there now. We know how rotten it is at the top, and we've only had a little feedback about the changes they've made. This isn't just concern for Phoenix's safety, though that's obviously part of it. It's concern for what they'll do with the information we've been feeding them."

Erik thought about it. Lord he was tired. Tired of having to think about such big, emotionally draining things all the time. "I wonder if any of this would have really surprised Pantillo," he mused. "He was mostly concerned with the Worlder/Spacer conflict when he died. We've always assumed that was the primary reason they killed him. But we never had time to probe deeper. We were out of there before we could find any more."

Kaspowitz shook his head. "The Worlder/Spacer conflict was just the tip of it. It was the most immediately annoying to Fleet, but there was a whole body of conflict between him and Fleet Command. Didn't stop with him, either. The thing with warship captains, over such a long war, is everyone starts thinking for themselves. Part of the job, you could say."

Erik nodded. In the three years since Phoenix had gone renegade, he'd gone from a rookie LC to a battle-tested veteran who'd seen more combat and other troubles than a lot of thirty-year captains had in the Triumvirate War. But most of that experience had been accumulated well outside of human space. A thirty-year captain through the Triumvirate War would be up to his eyeballs in knowledge about who was back-biting who, and where all the political skeletons were buried. Suli Shahaim had known a lot, but she was dead about two years now. And that just left Lieutenant Kaspowitz, who'd been doing this at a high level for longer than nearly anyone, on or off Phoenix.

"I want you to write me a list," Erik told Kaspowitz. "Everything you know. Everyone else on ship too, they won't know as much as you, but they'll know some."

Kaspowitz nodded. "Yeah, sure. But you know... a conversation over a couple of beers on some seedy rimworld station fifteen years ago doesn't actually make someone a fellow cynic against Fleet."

"I'm hoping we won't need any cynicism about Fleet at all," Erik said pointedly. "I'm hoping they're just as focused on defeating the alo/deepynine threat, and we'll all be on the same page. If that's the case, they'll have my fullest support. I'm just not expecting it."

"No," Kaspowitz agreed sombrely, sipping his drink.

"Do you think the three new Super-Admirals are still there?" Sasalaka asked. Erik could hear the distaste in her voice. Tavalai support in fighting aliens of a common threat, out on the fringes of the Spiral was one thing. But Phoenix was returning home now, and home meant Human Fleet, which had spent the last century-and-a-half waging war against the tavalai people.

"Probably," said Kaspowitz. "They'll have their marching orders. They don't actually run all that much anyway. Never did."

"Tavalai crew will stand with you to a point," said Sasalaka. "I judge that point will be the point at which Fleet HQ tells you to fight only for humanity, and you agree."

It was typically blunt, but expected. They'd talked about it. Phoenix's tavalai crew had come on this journey to save tavalai from a threat that would surely eat them up as soon as it was finished with humanity. But asking them to stay aboard, and serve a ship that had ceased to make the safety of all tavalai an equal concern, was asking far too much.

"We'll be attempting to contact all tavalai authorities at the earliest opportunity all the way home," Erik assured her. "We have to head to human space first, we can't make a detour, but we'll get the best messengers we can, and ask tavalai authorities to meet us in the most workable location in human space."

"But that's our problem," Kaspowitz said grimly. "We're bringing back to Fleet a pan-Spiral agenda. An agenda of many peoples together -- hell, not just human and tavalai, but barabo, corbi, croma, and all the Tsubarata peoples still dependent on the old Tavalai Confederation. This threatens all of them. But the Fleet I know has never been interested in any of that. Humanity first and only."

Erik had nearly forgotten how engaged Kaspowitz was with Spiral history and affairs. Out beyond the edge of the Spiral, he'd been as astonished as everyone else by what they'd found. But back in home territory, his feet were on firmer ground.

"We've got the chah'nas," Erik offered, without enthusiasm.

"Who are much better friends with the alo than we are," said Kaspowitz. "Care to bet whose side they'll really be on if Nia comes at us?"

The thought made the air feel cold. Humanity versus alo/deepynines was one thing. But alo/deepynines and chah'nas combined? Had Fleet's stupid alliances really screwed them that badly?

"Sard too," said Sasalaka, somberly. "Tavalai control over them stopped a while ago." Kaspowitz nodded. Given their own discoveries, it went without saying.

"Need to talk about that with Stan," Erik said grimly. "Soon as he gets back."

Kaspowitz raised a long finger, foretelling something he'd been thinking about for a while. "Then there's the kuhsi."

"Who have about forty ships in their Fleet," Erik said drily. "Only a third of them with guns, and most of those hand-me-downs from us."

"All true," said Kaspowitz. "BUT. They're the only thing Fleet can point to as proof that we're not a xenophobic tyranny descending upon the Spiral."

"A lot of kuhsi aren't convinced of that themselves."

Kaspowitz made a face. "Dumbass reactionary troglodytes. They're a small minority. The point is, we've got an in with the kuhsi."

Erik frowned. "Skah and Tif? Seriously?"

"Two forces in kuhsi culture." Kaspowitz held up two long fingers. "One is conservatism, which has within it new kuhsi nationalism and old, ugly reactionary nationalism. But then there's the progressives, of which Skah's daddy was one very prominent example."

"Until they killed him."

"Yes. Making Skah and Tif martyr heroes to the progressives, while simultaneously appealing to the nationalists of all sides, because what they've just done is so fucking huge." Erik frowned, not following at all. Little Skah? Kuhsi hero? "Erik, look at us. Returning back to human space, having survived the unsurvivable, with Styx and Raka Fleet in tow to assist in the defence of humanity. Maybe we could have done it without Tif, but hell, I wouldn't want to have tried. And Skah was there too, had most of the same dangers, he's the ship mascot, and he's his daddy's son."

Erik rolled his eyes. "Achieving what, exactly? Send them to Choghoth to... what, win the popular support of kuhsi, who can then contribute about fifteen ships that can shoot back? And will last about ten seconds against deepynine cruisers?"

"I understand you're feeling protective toward Tif and Skah," said Kaspowitz, with a dry smile. "But our biggest problem is that Fleet don't want any pan-Spiral agenda. We have to convince them otherwise, because we can't win this alone. The kuhsi are humanity's one proof that we actually give a shit about species other than our own. We've actually been pretty good to them, and most kuhsi believe that too, whatever the troglodytes say."

"You're saying it'll help win that argument with the tavalai?" Erik asked, thinking hard.

"Yes. And others, who've always viewed humanity as a threat. Kuhsi are proof we're not. Or at least, not always. And Tif and Skah could be what's needed to get all kuhsi fully on board. Tif's a commissioned officer in Fleet, the first non-human ever!"

"Which Fleet will rescind the moment they hear of it."

Kaspowitz shrugged, grandly. "Then maybe we'll have to do something about them too."

Erik blinked at him. "Do something? Do what?"

"Erik," said Kaspowitz, as though to a slow child. "Say humanity's faced with extinction. And say Fleet's current leadership and command structure, the true leadership of all humanity, is the primary obstacle preventing us from stopping that." A silence in the room. Kaspowitz leaned forward, to make the point a little more directly. "What do you think I'm suggesting we do with them? And given all we've just done and survived, who could stop us?"

The End

About the Author

Joel Shepherd is the Australian author of eighteen SF and Fantasy novels in three series. They are ’The Cassandra Kresnov Series’, ‘A Trial of Blood and Steel’, and ‘The Spiral Wars’.

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