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The End

The vibration wasn't initially severe, but the pulses built and formed harmonics. Standing waves humped the swampy soil. An old woman near Farrell at the front of the column fell down.

The thing rose slowly, visible both through the relatively sparse trees and above the spreading canopy. The segmented outer shell was rusty maroon with yellow-gray blotches. It would have passed for a hill of the coarse rain forest limestone.

It had passed for a hill when the survey ship orbited Bezant.

"C41 to the front," Farrell ordered as he extended the tube of a 4-pound rocket. It wasn't going to be enough. Heavy Weapons Platoon, full-strength and fully equipped, wouldn't have been enough, but hell, you had to try. "Strikers who pass the trailer, bring all the extra rockets. Admin, get the civilians moving back fast. Throw all your gear away but don't leave people behind. Six out."

The creature advanced like a snail on rhythmic pulsations of its undersurface. Because of its size it moved as fast as a healthy man could walk on smooth ground. The shell slipped down with every forward pulse, then lifted again. The lower edge of each shell segment was pointed the way a snake's scales are. They gouged away everything in the creature's path like the bite of a shark whose teeth were three feet long.

The civilians weren't healthy and the bulldozer's path wasn't smooth. Only a fraction of the Kalendru expeditionary force had escaped the snail's attack, and they were crack troops.

Strikers jogged to the front of the column. Most of them carried rockets. They waited for Farrell's fire command. No point in wasting warheads on branches when you knew the target was going to clear you a field of fire in a moment or two.

"Major," Manager al-Ibrahimi said. "Don't throw away your personnel! You can't stop that creature but you may be able to escape."

"Get your ass out of here, civilian!" Major Arthur Farrell shouted. "This is a tactical decision and I'm in tactical command! Get your people back. We won't be able to hold it long."

We won't be able to hold it at all. But hell, you've got to try.

Seligman was so focused on the ground twenty feet in front of the bulldozer that he didn't notice the creature rising out of the jungle three hundred yards to the side. He increased power to the left tread by minuscule increments to avoid losing traction as he tore the blade through a root.

The ground was shuddering like a lake in an earthquake, but you didn't notice that aboard the tractor. Matt had seen the creature, though. Was it a snail?

Esther Meyer raised her visor's magnification to x64, as high as she could focus on the vibrating deck. The thing's teeth were the plates of its shell. They sawed from side to side as the creature advanced, grinding trees to bits the way a gear train chews twigs that fall in.

The snail must have a mouth on the underside, though, or there'd have been a wrack of destroyed vegetation to the sides of the path through the jungle. Meyer had wondered about that trail when she echoed Blohm's imagery. She'd learned a lot about clearing jungle by riding the dozer.

A rocket skimmed the jungle canopy and struck near the peak of the snail's shell. That wasn't the target Meyer would have chosen for the round she'd started to arm, but the lack of result showed her it didn't make any difference.

The warhead burst with the usual blue-white flash and a spurt of dust blasted from the shell. The dust settled. One of the snail's teeth had shattered. The stump dropped from the socket shielded by the points of overlying denticles.

As the snail throbbed forward to take another bite from the jungle, the segments of its covering shifted and reformed. Meyer couldn't see any change from the normal chewing motion of the teeth, but at the end of it the shell showed no sign of damage. Denticles had moved forward from the back or sides. The creature's ability to shape its body beneath the armor meant that no part of its flesh would be unprotected despite C41's firepower.

Matt fired his stinger. Seligman heard the weapon's snarl and turned to see what Matt was shooting at.

"Holy shit!" the driver cried.

"Aim us at the thing!" Meyer said. "Raise the blade just off the ground. Maybe we can slow it down."

Seligman rotated out of his seat and jumped from the bulldozer before Meyer could stop him. The driver hit face down, splashing waterlogged dirt to all sides. He lay there while the bulldozer crawled away with no one at the controls.

Matt stepped into the cab. "I'll drive!" he said in a voice as bright and jagged as shards of glass. He adjusted the hand switches. The tractor bucked briefly. Matt had lowered the blade for a deeper bite instead of raising it as he'd intended. He corrected quickly and began swinging the vehicle to the left to face the monster.

There was no way to compare a machine twelve feet high and twenty feet broad with a living creature three hundred feet in either dimension. Driving into the snail wouldn't make any more difference than a fart in a whirlwind, but Meyer didn't know anything else to try.

Matt increased speed. Now the treads didn't need to maintain traction while shoving a load of vegetation and topsoil. The snail was only a hundred yards away. Six rockets hit it simultaneously. An instant later another sheaf hit the same points in the shell. At least some of the latter must have struck temporary gaps in the armor because flesh filtered the warheads' sharp radiance.

The snail continued its advance unaffected. One throbbing pulse after the volleys hit and the frontal armor again was whole. It was like trying to stop a Spook tank with 4-pound rockets.

Just like a tank. Meyer did know what to do.

Matt twitched his controls to avoid a hummock supporting a tree ten feet in diameter. That was the last obstacle between them and the snail.

Meyer leaned into the cab. "Matt, bail out!" she said.

He ignored her. The tractor's speed increased to a fast walk. Reeds and thin mud splashed to either side.

Meyer rapped Matt on the side of the head. He rolled from the seat, stunned by the armored gauntlet. Meyer grabbed a double handful of shirt and tossed him as far as she could.

Alone now, Meyer walked onto the left side of the quivering deck. The snail was fifty feet away, too close to see the huge body entire. It was like trying to view the building you stood beside. Rockets smashed against it like hail on a truck's cab, doing damage but no fatal harm. Meyer had armed her four, but it wasn't time to launch them yet.

An instant before she jumped down Meyer threw a fuel-air grenade to the side of the bulldozer. She fell flat, hitting just as hard as she'd known she was going to.

She hugged the ground for the remaining two seconds of the grenade's fuze train. When the bomb went off, the snail was so close that Meyer wasn't able to feel the shockwave. She scrambled to the wide crater and threw herself in. The cavity was already filling with water.

The bulldozer struck the snail head-on. The blade's hard alloy and the harder, more brittle denticles ground together in a curtain of sparks. The tractor's cab lifted. The treads continued to spin while the snail drove the blade into the soil.

The right support arm fractured. Denticles pulled pieces off the blade and ripped away the tractor's hood. Power cables shorted, showering electrical sparks among those of shell on metal. The snail resumed its advance, surging over the bulldozer's demolished remains.

The creature covered Meyer with a crushing darkness she knew would never lift. She shielded the rockets between her crooked arm and torso, letting the soft weight of the snail's foot squeeze her deeper in the swampy soil.

A thousand one, a thousand two— 

The foot rippled, driving Meyer into the back of the grenade crater as it propelled the creature forward.

A thousand three, a thousand four— 

Meyer couldn't see or hear, but she felt the motion change. She'd reached the mouth. She couldn't even be sure her rockets were still pointed upward, but perhaps the God that brought Matt into her life could take care of that too.

She fired all four rockets. The impulse of the trapped exhaust was an explosion in itself, rending her despite the hard suit.

Esther Meyer felt Matt's warm arms lift her toward the radiance at the end of the tunnel.

"Councillor Lock?" Abbado said. "The major thought we ought to bring you in before dark. He's worried it's still dangerous out here."

The civilian turned and glared at the strikers of 3-3. "It's not dangerous for Esther now, though, is it?" he said in a cold, angry voice.

Abbado grinned. He'd figured Lock was sitting here in quivering terror, afraid even to stand up and walk away. Angry was good. This kind of angry meant the fellow hadn't redlined after all.

"Come on, councillor," Abbado said. "She wouldn't want you to get your ass waxed now. Neither would we."

"Krishna! that was a big fucker," Caldwell said, looking at the snail's remains. "What's it doing, though? Melting?"

When the creature hunched itself vertical after destroying the bulldozer, Abbado'd thought the damned thing was going to jump right onto the strikers and retreating civilians. Instead it died where it was. It was an hour after things settled down that they'd figured out what Essie Meyer had done. Hell of a good striker, Essie was.

Lock sat fifty feet from where the snail collapsed. The hair on the right side of his head was matted with blood from a pressure cut and there was mud all over his back. He looked at Caldwell and said, "When I saw it swell over the trees I thought it must be pneumatic, a balloon. I even shot at it."

Matushek picked up the stinger lying on the ground near Lock. He began to wipe it down.

"I'll help you up," Abbado said, offering Lock his hand to prod the civilian into motion.

Lock rose to his feet unaided. "It expanded with water like a sponge," he said. "That's how it could lie flat until victims came in range. Now that it's dead, the water leaks out again."

The snail was still a huge mound, but it'd shrunk noticeably since its collapse. Teeth fell out as the flesh pulled away from the roots. Abbado hadn't made the connection with the water deepening into a pond around the corpse, though.

"Wouldn't have been hard to nail it from orbit," Horgen said. "When the Spooks were dropping asteroids, that's sure hell the first place I'd have dropped one."

"Wouldn't have worked," Abbado said. He put a hand on Lock's shoulder in a combination of support and guidance. They started walking toward the camp. "Well, it would've smashed our friend there to a grease spot, sure, but the Spooks wanted to get into the control room below. That's why they were here. Anything you could be sure of taking out the snail with, you'd bust up what they were looking for."

"Except what Esther did," Lock said.

Matushek nodded. "She had balls, all right," he agreed.

The sky was turning brilliant crimson. The strikers were going to have to switch to light amplification any minute now, besides having to worry that the civilian would manage to walk into something that hadn't gotten the word about humans being the good guys now.

"A lot of the folks're planning to camp down inside tonight," Abbado said, keeping the civilian focused on something other than what lay in a stinking pool behind him. There was no way in hell they'd be able to recover Essie's body. "There's no showers or anything, but at least it's inside. There's must be miles of corridor."

"Me, I'll stay above ground," Caldwell said. "I always thought the best way to deal with a bunker was fill it full of explosive and blow it inside out."

"Hard it is to find a faithful friend . . ." Horgen sang under her breath. She paused and asked, "Anybody know who built the place to begin with?"

"I asked the major," Abbado said. "He says maybe it was the Spooks themself half a million years ago. The place feels like Spook work, anyway. You know, the way the angles are all off."

It had gone from sunset to full dark in the time they'd been walking. Horgen was in the lead. Lock placed himself directly behind her and followed her steps precisely. A pretty bright guy, Abbado thought.

"What I want to know," Ace Matushek said, "is how we got in. My helmet said that bubble over the trap door would fry my brain if I walked into it. God looks at the thing for a few seconds, steps through, and opens the door to shut it off."

"Manager al-Ibrahimi is a Category Four civil servant," Lock said quietly. There was an undertone to his voice that Abbado couldn't identify. "The bubble would have been a Kalendru mental shield. It interferes with any electrical activity that doesn't match its settings—nerve pulses among them. Manager al-Ibrahimi keyed his brain waves to the requirement, so it passed him."

"Just like that?" Horgen said.

"Under normal circumstances, breaching a shield of that sort would require destruction of the entire base," Lock explained. "Category Fours have cybernetic implants coupled to their nervous systems. The manager—and his aide—could calculate the proper and relative motions of every star in the galaxy if they chose to."

"Jesus Christ," Abbado said.

"Or God, perhaps," Lock said with a slight smile Abbado hadn't expected of him. "I used to think that Category Fours weren't human. Well, I used to believe a lot of things that weren't true."

"We all do, snake," Matushek said, explicitly accepting Councillor Matthew Lock into the company of veterans. Essie would've liked to hear that. Ace chuckled. "That's how we manage to keep on going."

They were nearing the entrance to the ancient bunker. Electrical lights and a few campfires gleamed. The remaining bulldozer had enlarged the clearing.

"We should've camped back where the snail went through," Abbado joked. "Now, that was land clearing."

"No fucking thank you," Caldwell said.

Lock tensed and stumbled on a clod that'd dropped off the back of a track cleat. Abbado grimaced. "Sorry, councillor," he said.

The civilian looked back at him. "Don't ever be sorry for what you are, any of you," Lock said fiercely. "If you were sensitive gentlemen and ladies, we'd all be dead."

"Hey, we were all in this together," Abbado said, squeezing Lock's shoulder.

Groups of people, colonists and strikers together, were heating dinner. It always seemed to Abbado that the sludge went down better hot. He was sure looking forward to real food, though.

"Was there communications equipment in the base?" Lock asked, nodding toward the encampment. "Or do we still have to reach the intended site to send a message capsule?"

"We got to get to a capsule," Abbado said. "Well, somebody does. Blohm'll take out a team while most folks wait here till the flyers come. God says he turned off the jungle. That's the Category Four stuff you're talking about, I guess."

"You know it's going to be us going out with Blohm, don't you, Sarge?" Matushek said. "And I tell you, I don't trust it's going to be just a hike and a climb."

"Hell, Three-three's the experts, aren't we?" Caldwell said. "I didn't want to sit around twiddling my thumbs anyhow."

Steve Nessman and a group of civilians were lining a bulldozed pit with plastic sheeting. It looked like they were trying to build a bathing pool, though Abbado didn't know how they thought they were going to fill it.

"Hey, councillor?" Abbado said. "Want to eat with us? You spent as much time at the front of the column as we did."

". . . if you find one who is true," Horgen sang as she unlatched one of her bandoliers. "Change not the old love for a new . . ." 

Caius Blohm stood at the edge of the bulldozer cut. He pressed the muzzle of his stinger carefully against the resilient bark of a tree that towered almost two hundred feet into the nighted sky.

"Well, I will be," he said. "Look at that, sweetheart. Yesterday if I'd done that, a thorn would've stuck out a yard and a half. See the tip right there down in the bark?"

"You wouldn't have touched it, Caius," Mirica said with all a child's certainty. "You know better than that."

"You got that right, honey," the striker said. "But we're going to have to cut down a tree like this to get up the side of the crater. I wanted to make damned sure God was right when he said it'd be safe."

Blohm turned his head. His face grew still when he saw two figures watching him. "Who's your friend, honey?" he asked.

"Her name is Ljesn, Caius," Mirica said.

The children were as like as two peas. Of course Mirica was on the skinny side for a human kid.

At the bonfire twenty feet behind them, Seraphina Suares sat with her contingent of orphans. She saw Blohm and waved. "Come join us, Caius," she called.

"Leesin?" the striker said.

The other child covered her mouth and giggled. "Ljesn," Mirica said severely.

"Hey, cut me some slack," Blohm said, starting to relax. "I wasn't some base camp hero, I was a scout. When I needed to talk to a, a Kalender, I let my helmet do it. Leesn?"

"Ljesn," the Spook child said. She was wearing an orange apron like she'd had at Active Cloak, but this one wasn't scorched by the grenade blast.

"You'll have to practice, Caius," Mirica said. "But that's better."

"Guess I will," agreed Caius Blohm. "Now, how do you figure we're going to bring down something this big? Rockets at the base I guess, but I can't figure how we get it to drop in the right direction if we do that. Maybe . . ."

The three of them stood before the giant tree, contemplating the future.

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Framed

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Contents

The End

The vibration wasn't initially severe, but the pulses built and formed harmonics. Standing waves humped the swampy soil. An old woman near Farrell at the front of the column fell down.

The thing rose slowly, visible both through the relatively sparse trees and above the spreading canopy. The segmented outer shell was rusty maroon with yellow-gray blotches. It would have passed for a hill of the coarse rain forest limestone.

It had passed for a hill when the survey ship orbited Bezant.

"C41 to the front," Farrell ordered as he extended the tube of a 4-pound rocket. It wasn't going to be enough. Heavy Weapons Platoon, full-strength and fully equipped, wouldn't have been enough, but hell, you had to try. "Strikers who pass the trailer, bring all the extra rockets. Admin, get the civilians moving back fast. Throw all your gear away but don't leave people behind. Six out."

The creature advanced like a snail on rhythmic pulsations of its undersurface. Because of its size it moved as fast as a healthy man could walk on smooth ground. The shell slipped down with every forward pulse, then lifted again. The lower edge of each shell segment was pointed the way a snake's scales are. They gouged away everything in the creature's path like the bite of a shark whose teeth were three feet long.

The civilians weren't healthy and the bulldozer's path wasn't smooth. Only a fraction of the Kalendru expeditionary force had escaped the snail's attack, and they were crack troops.

Strikers jogged to the front of the column. Most of them carried rockets. They waited for Farrell's fire command. No point in wasting warheads on branches when you knew the target was going to clear you a field of fire in a moment or two.

"Major," Manager al-Ibrahimi said. "Don't throw away your personnel! You can't stop that creature but you may be able to escape."

"Get your ass out of here, civilian!" Major Arthur Farrell shouted. "This is a tactical decision and I'm in tactical command! Get your people back. We won't be able to hold it long."

We won't be able to hold it at all. But hell, you've got to try.

Seligman was so focused on the ground twenty feet in front of the bulldozer that he didn't notice the creature rising out of the jungle three hundred yards to the side. He increased power to the left tread by minuscule increments to avoid losing traction as he tore the blade through a root.

The ground was shuddering like a lake in an earthquake, but you didn't notice that aboard the tractor. Matt had seen the creature, though. Was it a snail?

Esther Meyer raised her visor's magnification to x64, as high as she could focus on the vibrating deck. The thing's teeth were the plates of its shell. They sawed from side to side as the creature advanced, grinding trees to bits the way a gear train chews twigs that fall in.

The snail must have a mouth on the underside, though, or there'd have been a wrack of destroyed vegetation to the sides of the path through the jungle. Meyer had wondered about that trail when she echoed Blohm's imagery. She'd learned a lot about clearing jungle by riding the dozer.

A rocket skimmed the jungle canopy and struck near the peak of the snail's shell. That wasn't the target Meyer would have chosen for the round she'd started to arm, but the lack of result showed her it didn't make any difference.

The warhead burst with the usual blue-white flash and a spurt of dust blasted from the shell. The dust settled. One of the snail's teeth had shattered. The stump dropped from the socket shielded by the points of overlying denticles.

As the snail throbbed forward to take another bite from the jungle, the segments of its covering shifted and reformed. Meyer couldn't see any change from the normal chewing motion of the teeth, but at the end of it the shell showed no sign of damage. Denticles had moved forward from the back or sides. The creature's ability to shape its body beneath the armor meant that no part of its flesh would be unprotected despite C41's firepower.

Matt fired his stinger. Seligman heard the weapon's snarl and turned to see what Matt was shooting at.

"Holy shit!" the driver cried.

"Aim us at the thing!" Meyer said. "Raise the blade just off the ground. Maybe we can slow it down."

Seligman rotated out of his seat and jumped from the bulldozer before Meyer could stop him. The driver hit face down, splashing waterlogged dirt to all sides. He lay there while the bulldozer crawled away with no one at the controls.

Matt stepped into the cab. "I'll drive!" he said in a voice as bright and jagged as shards of glass. He adjusted the hand switches. The tractor bucked briefly. Matt had lowered the blade for a deeper bite instead of raising it as he'd intended. He corrected quickly and began swinging the vehicle to the left to face the monster.

There was no way to compare a machine twelve feet high and twenty feet broad with a living creature three hundred feet in either dimension. Driving into the snail wouldn't make any more difference than a fart in a whirlwind, but Meyer didn't know anything else to try.

Matt increased speed. Now the treads didn't need to maintain traction while shoving a load of vegetation and topsoil. The snail was only a hundred yards away. Six rockets hit it simultaneously. An instant later another sheaf hit the same points in the shell. At least some of the latter must have struck temporary gaps in the armor because flesh filtered the warheads' sharp radiance.

The snail continued its advance unaffected. One throbbing pulse after the volleys hit and the frontal armor again was whole. It was like trying to stop a Spook tank with 4-pound rockets.

Just like a tank. Meyer did know what to do.

Matt twitched his controls to avoid a hummock supporting a tree ten feet in diameter. That was the last obstacle between them and the snail.

Meyer leaned into the cab. "Matt, bail out!" she said.

He ignored her. The tractor's speed increased to a fast walk. Reeds and thin mud splashed to either side.

Meyer rapped Matt on the side of the head. He rolled from the seat, stunned by the armored gauntlet. Meyer grabbed a double handful of shirt and tossed him as far as she could.

Alone now, Meyer walked onto the left side of the quivering deck. The snail was fifty feet away, too close to see the huge body entire. It was like trying to view the building you stood beside. Rockets smashed against it like hail on a truck's cab, doing damage but no fatal harm. Meyer had armed her four, but it wasn't time to launch them yet.

An instant before she jumped down Meyer threw a fuel-air grenade to the side of the bulldozer. She fell flat, hitting just as hard as she'd known she was going to.

She hugged the ground for the remaining two seconds of the grenade's fuze train. When the bomb went off, the snail was so close that Meyer wasn't able to feel the shockwave. She scrambled to the wide crater and threw herself in. The cavity was already filling with water.

The bulldozer struck the snail head-on. The blade's hard alloy and the harder, more brittle denticles ground together in a curtain of sparks. The tractor's cab lifted. The treads continued to spin while the snail drove the blade into the soil.

The right support arm fractured. Denticles pulled pieces off the blade and ripped away the tractor's hood. Power cables shorted, showering electrical sparks among those of shell on metal. The snail resumed its advance, surging over the bulldozer's demolished remains.

The creature covered Meyer with a crushing darkness she knew would never lift. She shielded the rockets between her crooked arm and torso, letting the soft weight of the snail's foot squeeze her deeper in the swampy soil.

A thousand one, a thousand two— 

The foot rippled, driving Meyer into the back of the grenade crater as it propelled the creature forward.

A thousand three, a thousand four— 

Meyer couldn't see or hear, but she felt the motion change. She'd reached the mouth. She couldn't even be sure her rockets were still pointed upward, but perhaps the God that brought Matt into her life could take care of that too.

She fired all four rockets. The impulse of the trapped exhaust was an explosion in itself, rending her despite the hard suit.

Esther Meyer felt Matt's warm arms lift her toward the radiance at the end of the tunnel.

"Councillor Lock?" Abbado said. "The major thought we ought to bring you in before dark. He's worried it's still dangerous out here."

The civilian turned and glared at the strikers of 3-3. "It's not dangerous for Esther now, though, is it?" he said in a cold, angry voice.

Abbado grinned. He'd figured Lock was sitting here in quivering terror, afraid even to stand up and walk away. Angry was good. This kind of angry meant the fellow hadn't redlined after all.

"Come on, councillor," Abbado said. "She wouldn't want you to get your ass waxed now. Neither would we."

"Krishna! that was a big fucker," Caldwell said, looking at the snail's remains. "What's it doing, though? Melting?"

When the creature hunched itself vertical after destroying the bulldozer, Abbado'd thought the damned thing was going to jump right onto the strikers and retreating civilians. Instead it died where it was. It was an hour after things settled down that they'd figured out what Essie Meyer had done. Hell of a good striker, Essie was.

Lock sat fifty feet from where the snail collapsed. The hair on the right side of his head was matted with blood from a pressure cut and there was mud all over his back. He looked at Caldwell and said, "When I saw it swell over the trees I thought it must be pneumatic, a balloon. I even shot at it."

Matushek picked up the stinger lying on the ground near Lock. He began to wipe it down.

"I'll help you up," Abbado said, offering Lock his hand to prod the civilian into motion.

Lock rose to his feet unaided. "It expanded with water like a sponge," he said. "That's how it could lie flat until victims came in range. Now that it's dead, the water leaks out again."

The snail was still a huge mound, but it'd shrunk noticeably since its collapse. Teeth fell out as the flesh pulled away from the roots. Abbado hadn't made the connection with the water deepening into a pond around the corpse, though.

"Wouldn't have been hard to nail it from orbit," Horgen said. "When the Spooks were dropping asteroids, that's sure hell the first place I'd have dropped one."

"Wouldn't have worked," Abbado said. He put a hand on Lock's shoulder in a combination of support and guidance. They started walking toward the camp. "Well, it would've smashed our friend there to a grease spot, sure, but the Spooks wanted to get into the control room below. That's why they were here. Anything you could be sure of taking out the snail with, you'd bust up what they were looking for."

"Except what Esther did," Lock said.

Matushek nodded. "She had balls, all right," he agreed.

The sky was turning brilliant crimson. The strikers were going to have to switch to light amplification any minute now, besides having to worry that the civilian would manage to walk into something that hadn't gotten the word about humans being the good guys now.

"A lot of the folks're planning to camp down inside tonight," Abbado said, keeping the civilian focused on something other than what lay in a stinking pool behind him. There was no way in hell they'd be able to recover Essie's body. "There's no showers or anything, but at least it's inside. There's must be miles of corridor."

"Me, I'll stay above ground," Caldwell said. "I always thought the best way to deal with a bunker was fill it full of explosive and blow it inside out."

"Hard it is to find a faithful friend . . ." Horgen sang under her breath. She paused and asked, "Anybody know who built the place to begin with?"

"I asked the major," Abbado said. "He says maybe it was the Spooks themself half a million years ago. The place feels like Spook work, anyway. You know, the way the angles are all off."

It had gone from sunset to full dark in the time they'd been walking. Horgen was in the lead. Lock placed himself directly behind her and followed her steps precisely. A pretty bright guy, Abbado thought.

"What I want to know," Ace Matushek said, "is how we got in. My helmet said that bubble over the trap door would fry my brain if I walked into it. God looks at the thing for a few seconds, steps through, and opens the door to shut it off."

"Manager al-Ibrahimi is a Category Four civil servant," Lock said quietly. There was an undertone to his voice that Abbado couldn't identify. "The bubble would have been a Kalendru mental shield. It interferes with any electrical activity that doesn't match its settings—nerve pulses among them. Manager al-Ibrahimi keyed his brain waves to the requirement, so it passed him."

"Just like that?" Horgen said.

"Under normal circumstances, breaching a shield of that sort would require destruction of the entire base," Lock explained. "Category Fours have cybernetic implants coupled to their nervous systems. The manager—and his aide—could calculate the proper and relative motions of every star in the galaxy if they chose to."

"Jesus Christ," Abbado said.

"Or God, perhaps," Lock said with a slight smile Abbado hadn't expected of him. "I used to think that Category Fours weren't human. Well, I used to believe a lot of things that weren't true."

"We all do, snake," Matushek said, explicitly accepting Councillor Matthew Lock into the company of veterans. Essie would've liked to hear that. Ace chuckled. "That's how we manage to keep on going."

They were nearing the entrance to the ancient bunker. Electrical lights and a few campfires gleamed. The remaining bulldozer had enlarged the clearing.

"We should've camped back where the snail went through," Abbado joked. "Now, that was land clearing."

"No fucking thank you," Caldwell said.

Lock tensed and stumbled on a clod that'd dropped off the back of a track cleat. Abbado grimaced. "Sorry, councillor," he said.

The civilian looked back at him. "Don't ever be sorry for what you are, any of you," Lock said fiercely. "If you were sensitive gentlemen and ladies, we'd all be dead."

"Hey, we were all in this together," Abbado said, squeezing Lock's shoulder.

Groups of people, colonists and strikers together, were heating dinner. It always seemed to Abbado that the sludge went down better hot. He was sure looking forward to real food, though.

"Was there communications equipment in the base?" Lock asked, nodding toward the encampment. "Or do we still have to reach the intended site to send a message capsule?"

"We got to get to a capsule," Abbado said. "Well, somebody does. Blohm'll take out a team while most folks wait here till the flyers come. God says he turned off the jungle. That's the Category Four stuff you're talking about, I guess."

"You know it's going to be us going out with Blohm, don't you, Sarge?" Matushek said. "And I tell you, I don't trust it's going to be just a hike and a climb."

"Hell, Three-three's the experts, aren't we?" Caldwell said. "I didn't want to sit around twiddling my thumbs anyhow."

Steve Nessman and a group of civilians were lining a bulldozed pit with plastic sheeting. It looked like they were trying to build a bathing pool, though Abbado didn't know how they thought they were going to fill it.

"Hey, councillor?" Abbado said. "Want to eat with us? You spent as much time at the front of the column as we did."

". . . if you find one who is true," Horgen sang as she unlatched one of her bandoliers. "Change not the old love for a new . . ." 

Caius Blohm stood at the edge of the bulldozer cut. He pressed the muzzle of his stinger carefully against the resilient bark of a tree that towered almost two hundred feet into the nighted sky.

"Well, I will be," he said. "Look at that, sweetheart. Yesterday if I'd done that, a thorn would've stuck out a yard and a half. See the tip right there down in the bark?"

"You wouldn't have touched it, Caius," Mirica said with all a child's certainty. "You know better than that."

"You got that right, honey," the striker said. "But we're going to have to cut down a tree like this to get up the side of the crater. I wanted to make damned sure God was right when he said it'd be safe."

Blohm turned his head. His face grew still when he saw two figures watching him. "Who's your friend, honey?" he asked.

"Her name is Ljesn, Caius," Mirica said.

The children were as like as two peas. Of course Mirica was on the skinny side for a human kid.

At the bonfire twenty feet behind them, Seraphina Suares sat with her contingent of orphans. She saw Blohm and waved. "Come join us, Caius," she called.

"Leesin?" the striker said.

The other child covered her mouth and giggled. "Ljesn," Mirica said severely.

"Hey, cut me some slack," Blohm said, starting to relax. "I wasn't some base camp hero, I was a scout. When I needed to talk to a, a Kalender, I let my helmet do it. Leesn?"

"Ljesn," the Spook child said. She was wearing an orange apron like she'd had at Active Cloak, but this one wasn't scorched by the grenade blast.

"You'll have to practice, Caius," Mirica said. "But that's better."

"Guess I will," agreed Caius Blohm. "Now, how do you figure we're going to bring down something this big? Rockets at the base I guess, but I can't figure how we get it to drop in the right direction if we do that. Maybe . . ."

The three of them stood before the giant tree, contemplating the future.

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