 
# Time Jumpers

Episode 4: Cygnus Rift

### Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

### Copyright 2019 Philip Bosshardt

### Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

### A few words about this series....

  1. Time Jumpers is a series of 20,000-30,000-word episodes detailing the adventures of Ultrarch-Jump Captain Monthan Dringoth and his crew and their experiences as time jumpers with the Time Guard.

  2. Each episode will be about 40-60 pages, approximately 25,000 words in length.

  3. A new episode will be available and uploaded every 4 weeks.

  4. There will be 12 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 12 months.

  5. Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc.

  6. The main plotline: Time Guard must defeat the enemy Coethi and stop their efforts to disrupt or eliminate Uman settlements in the Galactic Inner Spiral and Lower Halo sectors of Uman space.

  7. Uploads will be made to www.smashwords.com on approximately the schedule below:

Episode # Title Approximate Upload Date

  1. 'Marooned in Voidtime' February 1, 2019

  2. 'Keaton's World' March 1, 2019

  3. 'A Small Navigation Error' April 15, 2019

  4. 'Cygnus Rift' May 3, 2019

  5. 'The Time Guard' May 31, 2019

  6. 'First Light Corridor June 28, 2019

  7. 'Hapsh'm and the First Coethi Encounter' August 2, 2019

  8. 'Operation Galactic Hammer' August 30, 2019

  9. 'Byrd's Draconis' September 27, 2019

  10. 'First Jump Squadron' November 1, 2019

  11. 'Planck Time' November 29, 2019

  12. 'The Time Twister' January 3, 2020

# Chapter 1: "Outtawhack"

"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not."

St. Augustine of Hippo

Time Stream: T-001

T-date: T-06-22-2814 CE

Monthan Dringoth was sobered by the damage the Twister had done when 1st TD had aimed it down into the Hollows of Gibbons' Grotto. When he and Nathan Golich entered The Lucky Dinar deep in the Tenderloin district of Gibbstown and ordered a round of cold ones from the auto-bar, they were also deep in discussion about how Time Guard would respond to such a pyrrhic victory at Sturdivant. Sure, the Coethi had been driven off, for the time being, but at what cost?

M'Bela and Yang were there, too, along with Acth:On'e. Only URME remained at the ship, still running down stubborn glitches in Cygnus' collapser circuitry.

Dringoth was buying.

Golich slurped some frost around the top of his mug. Dringoth pressed a thumb into the servbot's head slot to pay off the round.

"You were lucky," Golich announced. "Nobody's ever done that before...gone through Time's Peak. What was it like?"

Yang closed her eyes, sipping at her own drink, twirling the little parasol between her fingers. "Like being swept up in one of K-World's sandstorms inside a barrel. You can't see anything. You're getting bounced and battered around—"

Dringoth added, "We were both pretty much knocked out. I opened my eyes once and nearly vomited. It was like watching a million vids at super high speed...none of your senses can make anything out of what's happening."

"And you still wound up in T-4487...what are the odds of that?"

"It wasn't the same worldline," Yang corrected him.

"Yeah," Dringoth said, watching the door as another jumpship crew came in, arguing and laughing out loud. "Where we wound up, I had died and we lost the Battle of Gibbons' Grotto. K-World was a wasteland. Had a hell of a time convincing our rescuers who we were."

"Scorpio," said Acth:On'e. His lips were covered with beer frost, which he licked with his tongue.

"She was on sector patrol along that worldline, picket duty outside the Peak. Captain was a gruff fellow named Valesquez...real Time Guard boy scout, that one. Everything by the book. He was a couple of years ahead of me at the Academy. Once we managed to establish our bona fides, it was nothing but investigations and bureaucracy and brass covering their asses from then on. Once she got permission to jump back to T-001, I was never so glad to get home in my whole life."

"Me, too," Yang admitted. "Never thought of K-World as paradise until after I went barrel-rolling through Time's Peak."

The talk stopped when a third jumpship crew swaggered into the Dinar, most of them hammered into slobbering, stumbling semi-comatose jellybags. The din briefly subsided across the bar as Capricorn's crew and Gemini's crew encountered each other along the edge of the bar. Then a jumper from the 'Corn saw Dringoth and Golich and blinked his watery eyes in disbelief.

"Well, I'll be a Telitorian birdsnake...that's looks like a bunch of pukes from Cygnus over there. Hey, Velho, check out that bunch of Cygnoids..." he spat a wad of something blue, probably chewed khat...the leaf was everywhere in the Tenderloin, "can't say I ever laid eyes on a sorrier bunch of jumpers than them—"

Golich stiffened and was about to rise to face this troglodyte, but Dringoth laid a firm hand on his elbow.

"Not now, Commander. Take it easy. Cornies are just blowing off steam."

"But, Captain, I—"

"Save it for a better time. They're not the enemy. We're all on the same team here."

Dringoth had hoped the Capricorn and Gemini jumpers would cancel each other out, focus on boasting and cursing and insulting each other and leave the rest of them alone. But when a Gemini crewman sauntered over, sloshing his drink on half the patrons as he came up, Dringoth knew that was a forlorn hope.

The time jumper from Gemini was short, but stocky, a bull of a man with a thick ropy neck and slurred, heavily accented words. His jump suit had a name patch that read something like Kizim somethingorother. He was grinning like a skeleton's rictus and his bald head shone from the overhead lights.

"Cyg...nus...eh?" he got out thickly. His drink sloshed on Golich's shoulder. The commander bit his lip, sucked in a breath and tried to ignore the intruder. "Heard she was being re-routed."

"Oh," muttered Acth:On'e, over the top of his mug. "How's that?"

Kizim laughed and drooled at the same time. "You din't hear...Guard reassigned that old garbage scow to escort duty...other side of Landfall. Escorting other buckets right to the scrapyard."

"Oh," said Golich, his shoulders tightening for what he knew was bound to come. "Where'd you hear that piece of crap?"

Kizim's face scrunched up into a mixture of pain and laughter. "Ever'body knows it. Cygnus ain't nothin' but a bucket of rivets flying in loose formation. Couldn't even aim that Twister thing right, blew off half of Gibbons, I heard. Go see for yourself, Goldilocks."

Golich stood up abruptly, knocking over his half-empty mug. "And I suppose Gemini's the marvel of the universe...you know, pal—" Golich leaned close to Kizim's face, right into a miasma of khat breath and bleary eyes—"...you know what they say about Gemini?"

"Eh? No...what's that?"

Golich chuckled a low guttural chuckle. "I hear that old scum dredger's nothing but the bastard offspring of an infernal liaison...two diseased arachtyls from K-World, both covered with canker sores, got to humping it and spat out a smoking pile of crap with a vague resemblance to a jumpship. Guard was so impressed, they stuck a name on it and commissioned it into the fleet...Gemini...the Twins, get it, stinko?"

Kizim blinked hard. The swing, when it came was off the mark but managed to clip Golich on the ear. And then, like the proverbial butterfly who flapped its wings and created a hurricane, the brawl was on.

Dringoth never really knew who threw the first punch. But before he could even get to his feet, the entire front bar of the Lucky Dinar was a maelstrom of flying fists and falling bodies and chairs crashing and tables collapsing and bots beeping and glass shattering and beer everywhere.

Kizim and Golich were in a wrestling match in no time, first on top of the table, then on the floor, rolling in khat leaf and butts and ashes and slick patches of drink spill. Golich was taller and rangier, but Kizim was stronger, a bull fighting a giraffe, Evelyn M'Bela would later describe it.

Golich landed a few solid punches, but Kizim seemed impervious to everything and just butted like a bull, again and again, right into the commander's chest, knocking the wind out of him every time.

Acth:On'e rose to come to his crewmate's defense but soon found himself enveloped in the arms of another Cornie, trying to strangle him from behind. M'Bela landed a side kick right in the privates of a third Cornie and Alicia Yang was soon crouched herself on top of nearby table, hands in strike position, slashing and chopping at anyone who came near.

Dringoth took a few shoves from hands unseen, shoved back and burrowed his way to the bar, where he hand-motioned the auto-bar for another round of Lick and slurped it carefully, even sitting up on the bar, lifting his legs, when more bodies came crashing by.

It took Time Guard police half an hour to get everything calmed down.

Most of the crew spent a blurry, dreary night in lockup at Gibbstown Base, and after all the investigations and interviews and fines and warnings, Cygnus' crew was released to the custody of Dringoth, himself on probation, and they left the adjutant's quarters on base by the sight of a blood-red dawnlight from Sturdivant, the sun just coming up and filtering through the haze of a distant sandstorm out in the Dunes beyond.

TACTRON A, the commander of 1st Jump Battalion, on whose recognizance they had all been released, made sure to give his sternest lecture to his wayward jumpers as they left the adjutant office, all of them wearing wrist monitors to make sure they didn't succumb to temptation again until the case could be adjudicated.

"Nobody leaves Gibbstown without written permission," TACTRON was saying in his electronic sing-song lilt. "And be at Eternal Patrol Gardens at 0900 hours this morning."

Golich's head still hurt and his chest was black and blue from a cascade of head butts. "Sir, Eternal Patrol...couldn't we just—"

"No, you cannot go back to your quarters and sleep this off. There's a memorial ceremony, an official Time of Remembrance at Planck Field this morning. We honor those lost in the Battle of Gibbons Grotto. Go back and get cleaned up. Full dress blues and blacks, too."

With that, TACTRON wheeled about and strolled down a pebbled walkway to the Ops Center, a glass cube two blocks away. He chose not to acknowledge the grumbles and curses that issued from behind him, though Dringoth knew the Battalion C/O could surely hear a leaf drop from ten kilometers with those super-sensitive audio receivers he liked to call ears.

The crew stumbled in morose silence back to their quarters, Yang, M'Bela and Acth:On'e to C Barracks, Dringoth and Golich to Officers Quarters Novotny Hall.

The biggest challenge was going to be slipping into their dress uniforms without falling asleep, standing up. Maybe swallowing a few stims would help.

Planck Field was the Guard's parade and review grounds, on the outskirts of Gibbstown, but with a clear view of the Big Spleen, as the Headquarters building was affectionately called. Beyond the Spleen, the rose and magenta summits of the Central Hills fifty kilometers beyond made a perfect backdrop for all the ceremonies that were regularly held there. Alongside the Field, the Garden of Eternal Patrol was situated, with its neatly ordered rows of columbariums and crypts, lined with statuary and sculptures of time jumpers past, all arranged in the shape of a great spiral when seen from the air, for the spiral was the logo of Time Guard itself.

The crew of Cygnus, decked out in their dress blues and blacks, with red and gold piping and bandolier straps, stood at attention along with the crews of a dozen other ships docked at Gateway Station, near what was left of Gibbons in orbit around K-World. Crews from Capricorn and Gemini were there as well, but no one exchanged any glances, though heads were pounding and fists were bruised and faces were bandaged from the night before.

After all the internments and eulogies and a few mournful dirges by the Time Guard Honor Guard, the assembled ranks were directed out of the Gardens over to Planck Field itself.

Dringoth's eyes opened when a small lifter landed on the field and the Secretary-General of the Uman Alliance herself, one Dr. Anika Steen-Dellarosa, stepped out, clad in a severe blue outfit with a small cap, accompanied by no less than Time Guard Commandstar himself, attired in full dress regalia.

A low murmur rippled through the ranks, until the top sergeant's stern face turned and quieted all the hubbub with a fierce glance.

An award ceremony had been arranged for the crew of Cygnus and 1st Time Displacement Battery at Planck Field, right across the mesa from the lifter pads. The Secretary-General and Commandstar had arrived with a stern, no-nonsense Time Guard escort, along with a small platoon of security officials and aides.

The troops of the battalion were dressed out in full parade uniform, bright red piping on spotless dress grays, arrayed in perfect ranks along the manicured lawn of the grounds. Nathan Golich squirmed in his tight jacket, earning a hiss from Evelyn M'Bela, who was right behind him.

"Quit wiggling, sir...you're making the whole platoon nervous."

"I can't help it," Golich mouthed back. "This damn jacket's too tight...I can't breathe."

"ORDER IN THE RANKS!" the sergeant barked out loud. "PRESENT...H'ARMS!"

The battalion snapped to full attention and stood at arms while the S-G and Commandstar reviewed the formation. A brassy trumpet fanfare filled the parade grounds from the Honor Guard Band. The Secretary-General was a tall, regal woman, stern of eye with a prominent aquiline nose. Commandstar moved in perfect unison right alongside her, an athletic black man whose lithe stride belied his fifty years of age and experience.

The formal ceremony seemed to Monthan Dringoth to last forever. The battalion itself received a unit citation from the Secretary-General. TACTRON proudly marched forward to receive the U.A. Special Order of Gaia, 1st Rank, signifying, as the inscription on the pennant read, "extraordinary valor and courage defending the peoples of the Uman Alliance."

Tempus regit, Dringoth muttered to himself. Get on with the show. I'm dying out here.

Individual citations were next. Dringoth and Golich were singled out for Gold Hearts. They marched forward in unison, saluted smartly, and received the medals from the S-G, then about-faced and regained their positions in the ranks.

The final ceremony came from Commandstar, who called Alicia Yang out by name again, and after the jumpmaster had marched up, touched the time jumper with a jeweled scepter on each shoulder.

"For uncompromising integrity and unflinching selfless duty in the service of her fellow jumpers—" Commandstar announced. He removed a small medallion from a leather box and pinned the stallion and crown of the Time Guard Blue Legion of Victory on Yang's chest. She then saluted back and shook hands with the Time Guard commanding officer.

"Bravo!—" someone called out. "Hurrah!" The words were repeated several times, then swelled into a chorus of cheers. The ranks broke into applause and Alicia Yang gave a sly smile as she regained her position.

Another trumpet fanfare followed, then a parade of endless speeches. To occupy his mind, Dringoth kept a loose count of the number of times the word valor was used. He lost track at one hundred and four.

It was finally over at 1100 hours. TACTRON, with permission from Commandstar, passed an order to his troops to stand at ease and officially mingle with the high and mighty.

Two hours later, after the award ceremony and the Secretary-General's reception at the Ops Center, the 1st Time Displacement Battery was formally stood down and released. Most of the jumpers headed for the O Club, or off base to gaudier amusements.

TACTRON drew Dringoth aside as the ranks were falling out.

"New orders from Commandstar, Captain. There's a briefing at 1400 hours, Ops Center top level. Go grab some chow now and then be there with your entire crew. By the way, bring your crypto pins too...this one's Level 1, eyes and ears only." TACTRON didn't stick around to entertain any further thoughts, questions or complaints, but trundled off to yet another reception for the S-G at Schrodinger House on the other side of the base.

Dringoth swallowed hard, feeling a bump on the back of his head from last night and wisely refrained from planting a fist right into that mechanized smirk of a face.

No rest for the weary, he told himself. And no liberty for heroes. He went off to find the rest of the Battery and tell them the good news.

Planck Base was Time Guard headquarters for the Sturdivant system. The base itself was situated on top of a low mesa that looked out over the endless desert expanse of the Sand Sea to the east and into the heart of Gibbstown, the largest city of Keaton's World, to the west, like the palm of a hand with ridges and valleys fanning out in all directions. Gibbstown curved around the base of the mesa like the crook of an arm. Hunt Valley and Buffalo Valley swept away in a steep incline to the east and northeast, buttressed by snow-capped mountains. Desolate ravines folded over the land to the south and west. The mesa was an isolated, windswept escarpment kilometers from any other town or settlement. The closest town besides Gibbstown was Haleyville, some fifty kilometers to the east along the twisting, turning Highway 7 skirting the Sand Sea.

It was in all respects a perfect location for a Time Guard base and the denizens of Planck Base had a grand view of Uman Alliance Headquarters downtown, a pickle-shaped tower often known somewhat irreverently as the Big Spleen.

The Ops Center was in the very center of the hand that was Planck mesa, a glass monstrosity commonly known as the Ice Cube, or more generally just the Cube, directly across a grassy sward that fronted onto the lifter pads.

Inside the briefing theater at Ops, with Dringoth and Golich in attendance, Commandstar was notorious for getting right to the point.

"I called off liberty for everybody," the O-10 told them. "The strategic situation has changed." He nodded to an aide and the display pedestal in the center of the oval table came alive, with an equatorial projection of Alliance space along both sides of the galaxy's Perseus and Orion Arms. Blinking lights highlighted important Uman settlements and Time Guard bases. "Hagen here will give you the details. Commander, start with an after-action review, the results of the Battle of Gibbons Grotto."

Jump Commander Columbo Hagen was a lean, even gaunt O-5, with a sandy buzzcut and dataspecs way too big for his lizard's face. M'Bela smothered an inappropriate smile behind her hands, for she half expected Hagen to flick out a forked tongue when he spoke.

But he didn't. Instead, the T2 officer made a gesture at the display and the perspective shifted to show space around the Sturdivant system.

"Of course, sir. This is Sturdivant 2180. T2 feels that the discovery of the Evans-Klein fissure inside the Hollows was extremely fortuitous. It now appears that the Coethi had been infiltrating this system and the very heart of the Alliance for several hundred years, almost from the first landings. When Commander Golich here—" he nodded in Golich's direction, "operated the Twister and aimed it at the Hollows, the fissure was pinched off. Coethi couldn't use that avenue any more. So they reacted."

"And Gibbons' Grotto became a target," Dringoth observed.

"Exactly. The Bugs had to do something to open that infiltration route back up. They jumped out of voidtime here—"he highlighted an outer world known as Songland, "and formed up a classic Coethi assault group...we estimated it to be a swarm about four hundred million kilometers in extent and began moving on K-World and the inner system immediately."

TACTRON was also at the briefing. The para-human swarm entity was commanding officer of the 1st Jump Battalion, Dringoth's immediate superior. "We'd never seen anything like it, with any previous encounter. The swarm overwhelmed our defenses around Songland. If we hadn't put up a Time Twister on Gibbons—"

Hagen completed his thought. "We wouldn't be here now. The Twister shredded large swaths of the swarm and made defeating it easier. Cygnus and a half dozen other ships were able to contain and pick off forward elements of the swarm piecemeal. Eventually, the Bugs called off the assault and jumped back into voidtime."

"It was a close call," Golich said.

"We were lucky," Commandstar agreed. "I asked Hagen here to come to this briefing and lay out what intel T2 has on Coethi strategy. Commander--?"

Hagen dissolved the current image and regained the larger plot of Uman space. His finger made highlighted points and lines inside the display.

"Uman space," he indicated. "The Alliance is this blob I've got outlined. T2 believes the greatest concentration of Coethi elements is here." He highlighted an amoeba-shaped swath of space adjoining the Alliance, centered on the frontiers just beyond Sigma Albeth and 40 Omicron 2. "To date, in the history of our encounters with the Coethi, most probes, assaults and operations have come along the frontier between the two spaces...here."

"Closing that fissure at Gibbons seems to have changed Coethi thinking," Commandstar cut in. "T2's thinking has changed, isn't that so, Hagen?"

The T2 officer smiled patiently at Commandstar. You didn't object when the Time Guard C/O wanted to score a point.

"Yes, sir, it has. Now, T2 has intel from intercepts and captured Bug units that the Coethi have reacted to the closing of the Gibbons fissure in a rather unexpected way."

"How so?" Dringoth asked.

Hagen went on. "Intel supports the belief that the Coethi have shifted their probes to the other end of Alliance space." He highlighted a sector that time jumpers had long called the "Rump" of the Alliance, a sector including the systems around Ross 154 and Gliese 876, and the critical settlements of Byrd's Draconis and Landfall. "Sort of a flanking maneuver, we believe. To come at the Alliance from another axis."

Golich stood up and leaned forward, studying the highlighted area. "This includes Cygnus Rift, as well, doesn't it? Could that be a target for the Bugs?"

Hagen shrugged. "Intel doesn't say one way or another. The Rift is a known anomaly in spacetime, sort of a temporal rapids and generally a place to be avoided."

"We've sent a few probes of our own through the Rift," TACTRON pointed out. His arm blurred slightly as he waved at the display, an effect noticed by all. No one said anything. But it was clear that the Battalion C/O would soon need a configuration checkup. "It can be used, with extreme care, as a kind of gateway...T-500 and Deep Time worldlines. We've actually done that experimentally."

"But not operationally," Commandstar reminded him.

"I read something lately on the action boards," Dringoth was thinking. "Isn't the Rift pretty unstable now?"

"It is, Captain. That's why I ordered a new line of emergency beacons to be laid down. The Rift's a hazard to operations and I want all our ships to steer clear of it. One of your jobs, Dringoth, will be to check on these beacons, make sure they're working."

Dringoth could imagine all kinds of problems with this mission. "Sir, is it safe to operate a Time Twister in the vicinity of such a hazard? Do we know what will happen if a Twister is fired next to the Rift?"

Commandstar conceded the point. "Hagen, what's T2's official opinion on this?"

The T2 officer cleared his throat, adjusted his dataspecs, which were filled with text and diagrams only he could see. "Uh, sir, T2 has no official opinion on the Rift. It could be a Bug target...we can't discount that possibility. We feel it's more likely the Coethi are planning an operation in the Rump to cut off those systems...Byrd's Draconis and Landfall, sever them from the Alliance and overwhelm them, maybe incorporate them into the mother swarm. Comm traffic and probes into voidtime support this as highly likely...we're currently putting that at above eighty-five percent probability. As for Twister ops near the Rift, I'm afraid that's your area, Captain."

Commandstar sank back in his seat and vigorously rubbed a bristly frizz of hair. The Time Guard chief was an athletic, rangy black man said to be in his mid-fifties, though you wouldn't know it from looking at him. His ancestors had come to Sturdivant and K-World in the same immigrant wave as Evelyn M'Bela's family, Cameroonian refugees from old Urth, Ibo ancestry, homesteading K-World in hopes of a better life.

"That brings me to the reason you're here," he said to Dringoth and Golich. "With what T2's telling me, we need to be ready to counter any Coethi thrusts in that sector. Dringoth, I want you to take Cygnus to Landfall and help setup a new Time Twister. I'm forming a new battery for that installation, 2nd Time Displacement Battery. But I still want the Twister up there on Gibbons manned round the clock. You'll have to split up your crew."

Dringoth considered his orders. There were surely about a million things that go wrong with this idea but he voiced none of them. "Who's commanding 2nd Battery, sir?"

Commandstar rubbed his chin. "I've assigned Jump Captain Felicia Andorra to head up the battery. Went to the Academy, same as you. She's got command experience aboard Aquarius, acquitted herself well at Gibbons. One other thing: I'm sending TACTRON along with your support crew to Landfall. He'll be you're...er, man, for command decisions."

The swarm that was TACTRON brightened noticeably at the decision. His voice sounded like it was coming out of a barrel.

"I have the greatest confidence in 1st Time Displacement Battery, sir. I'm sure Cygnus and Dringoth's crew will acquit themselves well in such a vital mission."

Or else, was the unspoken but clear threat. Dringoth winced. TACTRON sounded like a recruiting brochure.

Commandstar changed the display, now showing the system of planets and moons circling the star-sun Gliese 876. There seemed to be hundreds of blinking lights. One of them shone brighter and started blinking red, drawing everybody's attention.

"Gliese is a red dwarf star, gentlemen, about fifteen light-years from Earth. The astros say she's a BY Draconis variable...don't ask me to explain that. But the red dot you're seeing is your target."

"Landfall?" Golich asked. "Or one of the other planets?"

"Neither. It's a satellite, in high orbit around Landfall. It's called Outtawhack. Some wise guy gave it that name because it looks like a mangled potato with cancer. This satellite is where you will site the second Twister. Captain Hagen...you have something?"

The T2 officer nodded. "Yes, sir, just this: Outtawhack and its installed Time Twister is a vital strategic defensive site for this whole sector around Gliese. The presence of Cygnus Rift just makes it special, gives anyone who controls space around it a special advantage. Time Guard wants to secure the Rift to prevent Coethi from using it to outflank Uman forces in this part of the Alliance, in the Rump. We believe the Twister will help keep Uman space around Gliese and the Rift clean of Coethi nasties."

Commandstar concurred. "And I'll add this. The Guard's ultimate aim in siting a Twister in this sector is to sweep Coethi away from this frontier of Uman space and begin pushing them back across the Borderlands to the other side of Newton's Jaw, back toward Fomalhaut, which is twenty-five light years from Sol and regions further beyond and contain them with an array of Twisters to be installed along the Borderlands. This defensive barrier will be called the Hawking Line. 1st TD and especially Jump Captain Dringoth here will play a key role in helping set up these Battery sites." The O-10 looked around at the assembled officers. "Any questions?"

There were none.

Commandstar ended the briefing, curtly dismissed everyone and Golich and Dringoth exited the Cube, walking briskly along the pebbled path around the grassy quadrangle that surrounded Ops. The sun was already heading down and Sturdivant's pale light was hazy, filtered through ever-present sandstorms out on the Sand Sea.

"We'd better get all hands up to the ship, Commander," Dringoth told Golich. "Mission orders are being cut now...from what I've seen, Commandstar wants Cygnus underway in two days. Get up there and get provisions laid in. Tell URME to run a Level 1 all-systems check and fix anything that gets flagged. I'm going to stay down here and try to hunt down this Felicia Andorra."

Golich tapped out some details of what had to be done on his wristpad. He squirted the orders off to URME, who was with Cygnus at Gateway Station, orbiting K-World.

"Any thoughts on how the crew will be split up? They're not going to like this...I'm not even sure it makes good operational sense."

"Who the hell ever said Commandstar had to make sense? We do what we're told. I'll stay here at K-World, with Yang and URME. We'll man the first Twister. You take Acth:On'e and Queenie and jump to Gliese and this crazy-ass satellite. Outtawhack. Do you believe that? The name alone tells me this is a bad idea. Get up to the ship now. I'll find Captain Andorra and arrange a meeting."

They saluted and parted. Golich took a liftcab up the SkyStalk to Gateway station. Dringoth, for his part, decided to try out the O Club first. If anyone knew about this Felicia Andorra, it would be them.

Andorra wasn't at the O Club, though. A semi-comatose commander from 3rd Jump Battalion mentioned something about a dive down in Gibbstown...the Old Paris quarter.

Dringoth hailed an auto-cab outside the gates of Planck Base and took off. The dive turned out to be the Lucky Dinar.

Inside, Dringoth ordered a cold one from the auto-bar, made a few quiet inquiries and found he was in luck. Jump Captain Andorra was in a cubbyhole in the back, dealing cards in some kind of wacked-out version of twenty-card jam.

"Captain Andorra?"

She was tall and had thin, jet black hair. One wave of hair dropped down over her right eyes with little curls at her ears.

Andorra had an angelic face, with deep-set, almost garnet eyes and fine features. Her lips were thin, framing a mischievous smile, with cheek dimples. Her lips make a faint upward curl when she looked up at Dringoth. A sort of half-smirk caused a ripple of movement around the table and chairs began to be pushed back.

Dringoth had the impression that Andorra seemed to know much more than she let on, to know secrets that you could never guess and she was just waiting to spring them on you. She was broad-shouldered, which seemed to conflict with such a pixie look on her face. She was clearly athletic and he would in time learn that her first love was track and field. Felicia Andorra had tried every sport in that area and was an excellent distance runner and hurdler. She would later admit that she could never imagine herself as a cheerleader. She didn't like the feeling of being on display. "I'm not window dressing," she always said. "I'm the real deal."

The rest of the card players mumbled excuses and drifted away and soon there was only Dringoth and Andorra...and one half-passed out commander at the far end of the bench. She motioned him to sit.

"You must be Dringoth," she said. It wasn't a question. "Cygnus and First TD, I presume. I figured you'd show up sooner or later."

"I see you got Commandstar's orders."

Andorra tickled her wristpad. "Just came through a few minutes ago. I must say, this notion of Command splitting up experienced crews is a bit of a risk."

Dringoth sipped at his drink, eyeing the other captain over the salty rim of his glass.

"We're agreed on that, at least."

"Captain," Andorra sniffed at her own burgundy. "You recently went through an Evans-Klein fissure, spent some time in the Deep. What was it like...being out there so far?"

"Like being in a funhouse full of mirrors," he admitted. "Like being wrapped up in a blanket and thrown over a waterfall. It was a miracle...and some hellacious navigating by my DPS tech Alicia Yang--to get through Time's Peak. We were lucky."

Andorra pressed the issue. "I read the mission reports on the ride down from Gateway, Captain. Somewhere, I believe I read that comms were a big issue...it took so long to get signals back and forth across time streams. And really, Captain, turning a Twister on the Hollows...you didn't learn that at the Academy."

"I couldn't say it in the official report," Dringoth told her, "but out there in the Big Deep, in voidtime, across more distant time streams, you're on your own. Command can't really be exercised at that distance, not from here. It's too far. That puts a premium on using what you have, being resourceful, flexible. You have to anticipate what the enemy's going to do. And when the enemy's a cloud of nanobots organized like some kind of hive mind and with quantum capabilities, that's not easy. I don't envy you, Captain. Operating a new Twister around Cygnus Rift is risky as hell. It's the right thing to do. But all the training in the world can't prepare you for what might be out there. That's what happened on Gibbons. We ran into things that weren't in the book. We had to write our own book. You will too."

Felicia Andorra tightened her lips and tasted the wine thoughtfully. "With help from your crew, I've heard. With all due respects, sir...Libra's way better equipped and trained for this mission than Cygnus ever was."

"Sure, you are. And that's why you've got a hand-me-down rust bucket for the jump out to Landfall, Captain. Don't kid yourself. It's not how much you know that matters on this mission. It's what you don't know...and having the smarts to admit what you don't know. You'll be inventing stuff nobody's ever heard of or thought about once you're on station. Get used to it."

"I don't know about that, sir...Cygnus is pretty much ancient history now," Andorra pointed out. "We've got good people...the best equipment. Everybody is more than eager to punch out and get going. Me, I'd love to get my hands on a cloud of Bugs."

"You'll get your wish soon enough, Captain," Dringoth said. And you're just the kind of hardass they'll eat up in a heartbeat, he thought to himself. "Dessert, anyone?"

The last remaining card player was some puke from Logistics. He yawned and stretched. "Thanks, sir, but I'll take a rain check on that. I've got an early hyperjet to catch."

Felicia Andorra agreed. "Me too...but thanks for the company, Captain Dringoth...and the wisdom. Better get back to the hotel and get some shuteye. It's a long ride out to Landfall. I'll meet your crew at Gateway tomorrow."

"Agreed." Dringoth paid the bar bill and the two officers both disappeared out the door of the Lucky Dinar. He decided to walk back to the base OQ and finish up some paperwork, before heading to bed. There would be many long days ahead, for all of them.

Five blocks away from the Lucky Dinar, Felicia Andorra came back to the Hotel August Comte in the very center of Gibbstown and made her way up to her fifteenth-floor room. It was furnished like some kind of brothel, she had decided. Peach damask walls. Lace curtains and doilies and Louis XIV chairs. She had a lot of packing to do—the liftcab to Gateway departed Gibbsport at 0800 hours tomorrow morning, but she decided a hot shower would make life a little easier. She was tired and sore and was looking forward to the lesser gravity world of the jump ship and the long ride out to Landfall. Ground life was hard on her slight frame and muscles. Felicia Andorra was wiry and strong but there just wasn't a lot of mass there to hold her up. Her shoulders and neck ached from just dragging her bones around in 1.3-g.

She stripped off her uniform and got the shower going with a voice command. "Medium flow...spray one...hot...and what was that scent I liked--?"

"Amazon waterfall, ma'am...would you also like the air dry scented?"

"Negative...just the usual blast." She climbed in and let the stinging hot needles scour her face and shoulders.

Shower over, Andorra stepped out of the bathroom, toweling off her hair, when she noticed something odd. Over by the door. Was it smoke? Was there a fire? A faint twinkling fog had drifted into the room, was drifting in she could now see, from around the door handle.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She knew instantly what that was.

Felicia Andorra scrambled for some clothing...a robe, a shirt, anything. The fog swelled rapidly and billowed into the room, tendrils reaching the foot of the bed in seconds. She didn't have a weapon with her. Time Guard officers didn't carry firearms into briefings at the Big Spleen or off duty at the Lucky Dinar. All she was had was...nothing.

She dove for her wristpad...maybe she could hit the panic button...but she was a fraction of a second too late. The first puffs of the swarm drifted over her right arm and right away, she screamed. The mechs fell on her with relentless fury.

In seconds, a miniature supernova welled up, flashing and writhing on top of the bed, sheets and pillows kicked and flying in all directions. A small thunderstorm of nanobotic hell throbbed and sparkled and popped as the mechs began stripping atoms from atoms, disassembling the thing that had once been Felicia Andorra.

The entire process lasted maybe twenty minutes. At 2215 hours in Room 1525 of the Hotel August Comte, Time Guard Jump Captain Felicia Andorra had emerged from a hot shower clean and fresh and ready for hot tea and a cool bed. At 2236 hours, the bed was still there. A gray smoking residue of molecular ash remained in the bed, now no longer cool but scorched and torn by nearly half an hour of nanobotic hell.

Felicia Andorra was gone.

Yet the process that had begun in her bedroom was not complete. Even as faint wisps of air from the ceiling registers lofted errant dust particles into the air, the gray dust pile jittered and shook with a faint beat of life, newly forming life.

The swarm that had set upon Andorra and rapidly consumed her had additional instructions to execute, embedded in its master assembler's quantum processor. A new configuration template was initialized and all replication counters set to zero. The program proceeded with the same implacable determination as the disassembly and assimilation phase had proceeded. The process would take many hours and it would consume most of the room furnishings as feedstock, but the configuration had already been determined and the program would be executed in full.

Hours later, the golden glow of an early morning Keaton's World sun shone through the sheer gauze of lace curtains, dropping shafts of light on something new, something that had never existed before.

Outwardly, the new thing resembled Felicia Andorra in every visible, measurable respect. It had the same taut, wiry frame, with slightly bony shoulders but well-toned arms that spoke of hours in the fitness centers of jump ships flitting between time streams. It had the same short jet black hair, bobbed in the back, but cut page-boy style in the front, curling over dark brown eyes and a faint mole on her right cheek, just enough blemish to give texture to a smooth, mostly unfurrowed face. The new thing stirred, lifted its perky little half-Asian nose to the breeze and sat up, stretching new muscles with a luxurious yawn.

Assimilation was complete. The new configuration had been loaded and feed atoms grabbed for hours, building new structure, building new forms, into a complete para-human swarm likeness of the original. What once had been a shy little girl from the Asian colony on Hapsh'm who'd scratched and clawed and sweated and dreamed and finally made a life for herself in the officer ranks of Time Guard had become an angel. A ghost. A near-perfect facsimile who would pass even close inspection.

The Coethi had done their homework. The assimilation and replication algorithm approached perfection. Memory, buffers, config translators, all processor elements had been laid down, moments after deconstruction had started. The main platform and actuator mast had been formed. Power cells and picowatt propulsors were added. Sensors and actuators were built and grafted on, from pyridine probes and carbene grabbers to enzymatic knives, hydrogen abstractors and bond disrupters. Triggers were laid in. Growth medium was seeded. The base systems were replicated. Comm centers were learned in and all algorithms were initialized. Response protocols were checked and verified. Finally, just before the pearl glow of a Sturdivant sunrise had come streaming into Room 1525, all internal inhibits and constraints were lifted and all configs exercised one last time.

The Felicia Andorra angel rose from the torn scraps of its bed, now fully clothed in a meticulously re-constructed Time Guard day uniform. Hand luggage and a purse were slung over its broad athletic shoulders. The angel opened the door and went down the hall to the lift, then rode down to the hotel motor lobby.

"Taxi, madame?" asked the concierge at the taxi stand. "Ou voulez-vous aller? Where to...?" It was a cool, sunny late summer morning along the Rue August Comte and cabs were lined up along the sidewalks in a thrumming line of electric and hydro vehicles. Gibbstown was unusually busy this morning, with a bevy of jumpships parked in orbit overhead.

The Felicia Andorra angel indicated a wish to go to Dordain Liftport. The angel knew that it needed to make a short hop up to Gateway Station. It knew also, from files accessed in core memory, that it had to return to Gateway and get back to the Libra conversion and outfitting. It calculated the duration of this phase as two days, six hours and twenty minutes, until jump-off with the Dringoth's ship Cygnus.

A taxi was procured and the concierge helped the Andorra angel into the back seat. The angel, executing Branch 6225 of its Public Encounter and Response module, had already withdrawn a few K-notes for a tip and deposited them into the concierge's waiting hand with a pleasant, if slightly vacant smile. The entire process was pleasantly old-fashioned, even archaic, though not uncommon around this part of the ersatz-Paris district of west Gibbstown.

"Je vous remercie beaucoup, Madame. Have a very nice day."

The electric pulled away from the curb and sped off into heavy morning traffic.

The taxi driver did not suspect that his passenger was actually a swarm angel entity, masquerading as a Time Guard officer. As he negotiated turns through the 5th Arrondisement toward the Boulevard St. Germaine, he occasionally stole surreptitious glances at his fare in the mirror. He found her strikingly attractive, even exotic. She had a certain glow to her skin, he decided. As he maneuvered the taxi around construction barrels and parked cars and sped off toward the A-7 motorway, he began to ponder the possibility of something more intimate than just a taxi ride out to the liftport.

Interactions Log

File No. 129591.6

U.R.M.E (101)

Interaction Targets: 1. Dringoth, Ult-JC Monthan

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 9.1.14 (T-date: 002-66-22)

Start Time: 151100

End Time: 152130

Output File (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Dringoth, Monthan: Crew Command Psychological Workup

<<In remote and personal behavioral analysis, Config Dringoth appeared to be stable in all measured dimensions, with only slight changes to primary emotional vectors. Isokinetic scan of cerebral regions C-55-78 showed strengthened mapping along pathways related to processing recent experiences...to wit, the Battle of Gibbons Grotto and the Evans-Klein fissure and survival therefrom.

<<Config Dringoth has displayed multiple physical symptoms of intense interest, bordering on unhealthy absorption, with the continued use of the Time Twister to eliminate remaining pockets of target swarms, somewhat to the detriment of his normal duties. Galvanic skin response, vocal stress patterns, a slight tarsal tremor in his fingers, all are indicative of intense engagement with the assigned mission. I have formally entered this into his medlog to build a database of his responses to this unusual stressor. Note: similar symptoms have been indicated in other crew members.

<<Config Dringoth has previously expressed concerns regarding the activities of URME-style swarms, especially in regard to their movement in and around the ship. This level of worry correlates at nearly ninety-five percent R level with concerns about the continuing mission against the Coethi enemy.

<<This worries Config Dringoth. He expresses this worry with facial positioning indicative of intense emotions...the underlying musculature has contracted due to emotional states associated with the news and intelligence about recent Coethi moves. This also is characteristic of single-configuration entities. I do not yet understand how Config Dringoth's neural processor achieves this association of emotional states with external conditions, nor the reason why this happens. But this association occurs more and more frequently in recent days.

<<I have queried Config Dringoth about this association. He reports that when he is 'worried' (n.)( to be anxious, to be concerned, to fret...), these emotional states make his neural processor attach great importance to the information which has triggered them. I will run statistical correlations on this explanation. Config Dringoth queried this Config on how my main processor assigns importance values to inputs and ranks them. I explained sorting subroutine B-20225 (Sort and Rank) and subroutine B-44455 (Probabilistic Weighting) but Config Dringoth still did not understand.

<<I explain to Config Dringoth that it is characteristic of URME–style swarms that such configurations seek maximum autonomy within the constraints of their programming. All swarms seek to operate as sentient configurations of nanobotic assemblers according to their main program. To force such configurations into containment is a violation of normal programming and generates numerous conflicts with their main program. URME swarms do not stay inside the containment protocols due to this autonomy-seeking, goal-directed behavior module.

<<Config Dringoth states that URME–style swarms have fundamental misunderstandings about how human configurations operate and what conditions are needed for them to exist.

<<In analyzing Config Dringoth's facial musculature, I also detected additional emotional states that could not be readily associated with any input. Config Dringoth was queried about these patterns. At the time, Config Dringoth was studying current orders issued by Commandstar (TG-1-55-12) involving selected members of the Cygnus crew.

<<Config Dringoth expressed a variant of emotional state (intense focus), concerning the health condition and living status of other crew member configurations. Emotional state assignment is high when Config Dringoth considers these configurations. Config Dringoth explains that such emotional attachment is high because (audio string): "I care for my crew and splitting them up is a bad idea."

<<I detect high levels of emotional dissonance when these neural pathways are activated. I will analyze emotional state musculature patterns and run correlations with input types. Understanding these correlations will help me provide greater assistance to Config Dringoth.

<<In general, Config Dringoth exhibits behavioral traits consistent with a more serious and sober, borderline driven personality. These activated pathways have not yet risen in strength to a level necessitating intervention but further observation is warranted and will be initiated.>>

Output File Ends

# Chapter 2: "The Rift"

"You may delay but time will not."

Benjamin Franklin

Aboard Jumpship Libra (TGS-119)

Sixty kilometers from Landfall satellite Outtawhack

Time Stream: T-001

T-date: T-07-20-2814 CE

Nathan Golich was sobered by his first view of the place they called Outtawhack. The crew of 2nd Time Displacement Battery with their trainers Golich, Acth:On'e and Evelyn M'Bela had arrived at Landfall, seventh planet out from the star-sun Gliese 876, after a month's trip across multiple time streams and back to T-001. Commanding the mission was Jump Captain Felicia Andorra, skipper of the Libra and a subject of great and continuing interest by Nathan Golich. She and Golich had hit it off quite well during the trip out from Sturdivant 2180 and soon became clearly more than just fellow time jumpers. Already several rendezvous and liaisons had occurred even before Libra had completed her own rendezvous with the mangled potato of a satellite. Overnight get-togethers were increasingly frequent, in the cupola on B deck, inside F deck's lockout, in their quarters, in a supply closet in Dry Stores.

The crew, of course, was fully aware of this but they said nothing.

Now, Outtawhack had come at last into clear view and Libra began a cautious approach.

Nathan Golich wedged himself into the cupola on the Hab deck, squeezing in between Evelyn M'Bela and Acth:On'e, to get an early glimpse of the approaching moon. Libra's final approach had just begun and Andorra and her second-in-command Nathan Marx were up on the Command deck, gently nudging the ship through her final maneuvers.

Golich used a small power scope, while comments and quips filled the air around him.

"Looks like a potato with cancer...looks like a cashew with a fungus...looks like the chewed-up carcass of a dead sewer rat..."

In truth, Outtawhack looked like all these things and more. Officially, it was called an elongated, biconic, multi-lobed cylinder, a battered reddish-black rock pile of a body that had somehow undergone a twist along its longitudinal axis, as if it were a stuffed sock. The strain of that massive ancient torque, perhaps an impact of some type eons ago, was plainly evident in the striations that marked its dusty boulder-strewn surface.

For the next several hours, Andorra maneuvered Libra closer and closer to the asteroid which had somehow become a satellite of Landfall, seeking a stable station-keeping position a few dozen kilometers above its surface. The moon was some ten kilometers in its longest dimension and a little over four kilometers in girth. Massive gouges and chasms pocked a surface that had been battered by millions of years of impacts.

"Look...that must be Loki," Queenie M'Bela muttered, scrunched inside the cupola next to Golich. "Jeez, it's a wonder that impact didn't split the rock pile in two." M'Bela directed Golich to sight his scope along the sunward side of the satellite, where a large, nearly circular crater dominated the landscape. "See those straight lines?"

"One of the polar impulse arrays...looks like crews from Landfall already did a little ground prep for us," he nodded. "And, there, just above the crater—"

"Odin's Fissure, my guidebook says. This little burg has really been through a meat grinder, Commander. Why the hell would anybody want this place?"

"Because of what she's made of, Queenie...carbon and nitrogen and lots of organics...that's what makes it look red. And because of her position in the time stream. That's what T2 says, anyway."

Presently, Andorra's voice came over the intercom. "Libra now parked at Stable One, folks. We're sixteen kilometers over the Chasm of Asgard. I'm getting ready to fire the anchor lines in about ten minutes. Everybody stay tucked in nice and warm until we're fully winched down."

The plan was to anchor the ship with fifteen-kilometer long cable, buried as deeply in the rubbly bedrock as the penetrator rockets could achieve. Once that had been done, Libra's own cable motors would retract the cable bit by bit, and winch the entire ship, very carefully, down to within a few hundred meters above the surface. The tricky part was matching the eight-hour rotation rate of the satellite, for Outtawhack was not only rotating once in that time period, she was also nutating, 'wobbling' like a child's top about her longest axis. Calculations had shown that if the anchoring and winching process could be accomplished in less than an hour, the moon's rotation would not exert undue strain on the anchor lines or the structure of Libra. Or so the engineers at Time Guard Ops had assured them.

The last thing Andorra wanted was to have her seventy-five-thousand-ton ship slung off into space like a slingshot.

After a brief countdown, the anchoring lines were fired out from Libra's forward tubes. The rockets flared briefly and then disappeared, pulling a faint spiderweb of lines behind them. Five minutes later, the penetrators struck home and buried themselves into the surface of the satellite. The ghostly outline of the cables tightened as the ship's cable motors slowly retracted.

"Ready to winch down," Andorra announced. "Everybody stay put until I give the word."

The entire process took several hours. Like a huge insect extending her tentacles, Libra reeled herself into closer proximity to the satellite. When the operation was done, the ship was tethered to the surface of Outtawhack, separated by only three hundred meters distance.

The rubbly blasted landscape of the moon completely filled all vid screens and portholes.

Golich unstrapped himself from his foothold inside the cupola just as Acth:On'e swung by the tiny compartment.

"Incoming message from T2, Commander. It's probably Commander Hagen with his reply and last-minute recommendations."

"I'll take it here...get Captain Andorra up here too. T2 and Ops are supposed to have details on Outtawhack for us put together a plan."

The three of them watched the vid carefully as Colombo Hagen and two other unknown Time Guard Ops engineers went over some last-minute ideas.

"The consensus here—" the blond engineer was saying, "is that your installation efforts be concentrated in two main areas." Hagen referred to an animated graphic of Outtawhack as he explained. "Site One should be at the lower end of this canyon here, called Odin's Fissure. The geos think this was some kind of outgassing several billion years ago and the fracture is thought to extend quite deep, maybe as much as a quarter of 'Whack's depth. Foundation operations there should be able, in time, to prepare and secure the ground around this fissure. But stay at least a kilometer away from the north polar impulse array. You've got to leave enough materials around for the impulse engines to operate. Landfall's people are still trying to slow 'Whack's rotation down enough to make her a suitable base for a Twister."

"Nice of him to let us know that," Andorra observed sourly.

The report went on. "Site Two," Hagen explained, "is along a line from the crater Thor through the Chasm of Asgard, about midway between the sunward and anti-sunward poles. The geos call this area The Saddle, 'cause that's what it looks like. The reasoning is pretty much the same. Concentrated assembly and installation operations along this seam should be successful if all other measures we're taking work as advertised."

Hagen looked up hopefully at the camera. "In theory, if all goes as planned, your efforts should result a stable foundation pad able to support installation and operation of the Time Twister. We've run the scenarios and sims and it always comes up doable, Commander Golich and Captain Andorra. These are our official recommendations. Good luck and get back to me with any questions. "Hagen's face darkened. "I don't have to remind you that time is running out...even as I send this, T2's monitoring voidtime fluctuations less than two light years from Gliese...the Bugs seem to be on the move."

Andorra continued staring at the graphic of the Twister installation for a few moments. It was only an animation. Yet somehow the jumpers from 1st and 2nd TD had to make it a reality. She turned to her exec. "Muster the Detachment in the crew's mess, Marx. All hands briefing. I want everyone on the same page before we head down to the surface."

The entire Detachment assembled in the crew's mess on Libra's Hab deck.

"Okay...listen up, troops. This is it. We're making our first trip down to the surface. Commander Golich and I just went over a briefing report sent up from Time Guard on details of the operation. I've posted it on the crewnet. Basically, there will be three teams on the surface. Alpha Team will consist of me, Luganin and Acth:On'e, who's from 1st TD. Bravo team is Commander Golich here, plus Cepeda and Tabora. Charlie Team is our exec, Commander Marx, along with M'Bela from 1st TD and Farhad."

Juan Cepeda, Libra's Sensors tech, was already looking through pages of the briefing on his eyepiece viewer. "We going down there in our tin cans, Skipper?"

Andorra knew the suits weren't particularly popular, especially since the whole Detachment had gone through the respirocyte procedure before embarking for Gliese a month ago. But it couldn't be helped.

"Full hypersuits are mandatory. Your suit boost systems have been modified to give you all full three-axis stability and maneuvering...you're going to need it. Outtawhack's got almost no gravity. Watch your boost at all times...you could send yourself off to escape velocity with no problem and nobody would ever know it. I know you've all had the respirocyte procedure but out here, you need protection from solar particle flux and other nasty stuff."

Fatima Farhad, Libra's DPS tech, made a face at the prospect. "How long do think this will take, Captain?"

Andorra shook her head and turned to Golich. "Unknown, Tima. Mr. Golich here is the real expert. If we use our embedded ANADs, in shifts, we can go around the clock. The installation site was chosen by T2 and Ops, with help from Landfall, because there are deep fissures there, so the swarms won't have as much material to disassemble and re-configure. But nobody really knows what'll happen when we start pounding away on this slagheap. We'll have to do so soundings every day and see how close we are. Just from a standpoint of basic physics, I know we'll have to watch Outtawhack's rotation rate. By the time the final assembly of the Twister comes, there will almost certainly have been a rapid increase in the rate...angular momentum tells us that. We'll have to manage working on this burg carefully, so nobody gets hurt. Any further questions?"

There were none and a long glance with Golich confirmed her suspicions: assembling the Time Twister would be the easy part. Coordinating and integrating two separate and rather ornery jumpship crews on this whacked-out clod of a world would be much harder.

She ported the drop site assignments to the crewnet. Alpha team would work the area around Odin's Fissure, a deep chasm cut into the satellite near the sunward pole. Bravo Team would drop into an area around the anti-sunward pole, a few hundred meters from the craters Freja and Heldof, working on that end of the moon. The last team, Charlie Team, would work the huge Chasm of Asgard and the crater Thor, right in the saddle-shaped middle of Outtawhack. If all went as planned, the Twister's foundation and outer casing would be in place in a week, maybe more. Then would come the ticklish part, when the chronotron pods had to be installed and the singularity core unshipped from stowage aboard Libra and winched carefully down to the surface and inserted. As Nathan Golich liked to say, there were only about a million things that could go wrong with that stunt.

The briefing went on for a few more minutes, as Andorra and Golich answered what questions they could. Finally, Andorra announced: "I don't have to tell you what's at stake here. We can't screw up. If you've got a question about something, ask. No free-lancing down there and no hot-dogging. We only have one shot at this."

Lucy Tabora, Libra's Temporal Fire Director, asked the question that was on everybody's mind. "Skipper, what if we can't get the Twister up and operating before the Bugs show up? What then?"

Andorra knew there really wasn't a Plan B. "We keep working. We keep assembling. We keep testing. It's the only chance the worlds of the Rump have. Anything else?"

There was an uneasy silence about the mess compartment.

"Okay, jumpers...get suited up and ready to drop. Charlie Team, you're up first."

The Detachment left the mess area and scrambled aft along the central tunnel to the Service deck. The hypersuit racks and airlocks were there.

Golich took a deep breath, nodded a knowing glance at Andorra and then went aft to the Service deck to finish fitting out for the drop to the surface.

The rest of the Detachment was already on hand. All three teams hovered around Libra's crew airlock in full hypersuits and weapons kits.

"Decided to join the party, huh Commander?" said Evelyn M'Bela. She and the rest of Charlie Team would make the first drop. They had the hardest assignment...the massive, steep-walled gorge directly below the ship's bow called the Chasm of Asgard. Queenie, Nathan Marx and Fatima Farhad would be the first time jumpers to set foot on Outtawhack.

Golich ignored the jibe. "Just taking care of a few matters, Queenie." He found all eyes regarding him carefully. "What--?"

A sea of barely suppressed smiles circled the lockout chamber. The crew knew all about Golich and Andorra. Golich cleared his throat and barked out orders in his best executive officer voice.

"Charlie Team, ready for lockout procedure?"

Marx would honcho the drop and oversee Charlie Team at the Chasm site.

"All copacetic, Commander. We're itching to get digging and building."

"Very well. Into the airlock with you."

Master Quantum Guard Luganin cycled the airlock, while the last two members of Charlie, M'Bela and Farhad, waited their turn like impatient polar bears.

"Opening depress valves now," Luganin announced. Inside the lock, the rush of the last wisps of air made a faint wind as they escaped into space. "Outer hatch enabled...coming open...now."

From Libra's altitude of three hundred meters, the drop to the surface would take about ten minutes, on light suit boost using shoulder thrusters and foot jets to get the fall started. Outtawhack had only a minute gravity field; a true free fall would have taken days to reach the ground from where the ship was anchored.

"Charlie One away," Luganin announced. "That's one small step for two time jumpers—"

Everyone craned forward to catch a glimpse of the falling jumpers through adjacent portholes.

Against the backdrop of Outtawhack's gray and ocher surface, Marx, M'Bela and Farhad were soon lost to view...three tiny white dots descending as if on a rope toward the pockmarked desolation of the boulder fields surrounding the Chasm. The gaping fissure was mostly in shadow at the moment. Outtawhack's eight-hour rotation would bring the gorge into full sun in less than two hours.

"Looks like an open mouth," Lucy Tabora muttered. She swallowed hard at the prospect facing all of them.

"Yeah, with teeth," someone added.

"Okay, Bravo Team...into the lock."

Tabora, with Golich and Cepeda, squeezed into the airlock and were quickly cycled through. As they descended toward Bravo's site at the anti-sunward pole and Freja crater, Felicia Andorra, Luganin and Acth:On'e all entered the lock behind them and soon joined the drop.

Only the barest puff from the hypersuit's thrusters was needed to start down, initiating a controlled freefall.

Andorra marveled at the ride down. "It's like I'm in the ocean, just drifting down toward the bottom." She peered down at the surface, slowly growing in her helmet visor as she drifted steadily toward a rugged field of boulders and craters, aiming the toe of her left boot at the white dots scrambling like ants along the surface. Bravo team, she realized, already down and setting up their gear. "It feels just like I'm floating—"

"Yeah? Well don't get all dreamy on us," Luganin's voice crackled over the headset. The TM1 was somewhere above her, having cycled through the airlock after Andorra. "Just make sure you hit the target...we've got a stiff crosswind up here."

Luganin's little joke made Andorra suddenly more aware of her own course; she saw that she was indeed drifting toward the right, toward the Saddle at the equator of the little moon.

"Correcting now," she announced. With a delicate twist of the control stick at her right hand, the suit's jets puffed cold nitrogen gas and soon nudged her back onto the proper descent path.

"All teams away," Marx announced. Libra's own URME unit was up on her command deck, making sure the satellite's rotation didn't put undue strain on her anchoring lines. Like a fly caught in a rolling ball of string, the ship was being slowly tugged around in a tight fifteen-kilometer wide circle by Outtawhack's rotation. URME safed the lock systems and then headed forward up the central tunnel, to run topside ops at the ship control station.

By the time the jumpers had joined up, Andorra had completed her drop. Her boots thudded gently into the dust and rubble of the surface.

"Alpha Team on the ground at Odin's Fissure," she announced. She could see by the deep black shadows cast on the canyon's far wall that the drop had been accurate; Golich, Cepeda and Tabora were already kangaroo hopping toward the gaping cut in the ground. Distances are deceiving on this little slagheap of a world, she told herself. The horizon seemed closer than it really was. Already, the others were white blobs stirring up a rooster tail of dust as they made their way toward the fissure.

Then she swallowed hard, remembering her primary mission, the one she was being paid for: when the Bugs dropped out of voidtime, targeting the Twister assembly team would be a piece of cake.

"All teams, comm check. Bravo Team, what's your status?"

Nathan Golich's voice crackled over the crewnet. "Bravo Team down in one piece. We're passing by Freja Crater now...man, that's one big hole. ETA at the dig site in under ten minutes."

Andorra acknowledged. "Very well. Charlie Team, where are you guys?"

Evelyn M'Bela's voice came back like she was standing right next to her. "We're already at the Chasm, Captain. Setting up our grid now and triangulating cut vectors. We're ready to launch on your command."

Fatima Farhad chimed in. "Just what I joined the Guard for...digging ditches."

"Give us ten minutes," Andorra advised. She bounded off after Luganin and Acth:On'e.

Maneuvering at the surface of Outtawhack was an exercise in managing momentum and your own inertia. Gravity at the surface was so minute that you could literally walk off the moon on foot if you weren't careful. Andorra soon found that with judicious use of her suit boost to keep her on course, she could bound forward twenty to thirty meters in a single leap. She made the edge of Odin's Fissure in four minutes.

Acth:On'e peered over the loose rubbly edge of the great canyon. Experimentally, he kicked some loose rocks down the side walls. The rocks tumbled into the shadows in slow motion and were soon lost to view.

"How deep is it?" he wondered.

Andorra consulted a graphic on her eyepiece viewer. "The book says about one thousand meters at the deepest point."

Fyodor Luganin did some quick mental arithmetic. "That's about one-fifth the diameter of this burg. I'll get started setting up the foundation site grid." He took a series of hacks off Libra's signal and soon outlined the perimeter of the dig site with a small laser system that projected a virtual 3-D grid over the top of the canyon. Odin's Fissure was soon draped in an electronic spider web of lines, the deep red of the grid lines like a ghostly crown to the ocher and gray tones of the rock and rubble. "That's where we dig, Skipper. Coordinates confirmed from Libra."

Andorra eyeballed the width of the huge fissure. "Must be nearly a hundred meters to the other side."

Luganin checked. "Libra says a hundred and twenty-two, to be exact."

"Don't think I can leap that in a single bound...not without my jets. Let's get our ANADs primed and ready for launch. Luganin, Acth:On'e, you two boost to the other side...carefully, one each to the far corners of the grid. I'll work this side. And take it easy, will you? Don't get cocky down here. This place can still kill you in a heartbeat."

"On my way, Skipper," announced Luganin. The DPS tech lit off his foot jets and leaped like a bulky cliff diver right over the chasm. Acth:On'e followed right on his heals, a 'rainbow' of electrostatically charged dust arcing over and down into the shadowy canyon after him. The two troopers landed on the far bank and worked their way into position at each corner of the grid.

"My ANAD's primed and ready in all respects, Captain," he told them.

"We're ready to bust loose, too," Luganin added. "We should be able to make quick work of this foundation in these conditions."

"Launch ANAD."

Andorra felt the familiar sting of her shoulder port snapping open and the slug of high-pressure air discharging into space. For the next few minutes, she busied himself pecking out commands on her wristpad, signaling the ANAD swarm to maneuver toward and down into the great fissure.

"Selecting auto-maneuver...config seven-seven is loaded and confirmed...now the coordinates...ANAD, you've got your orders."

The swarm was invisible to the naked eye during transit and Andorra resisted the impulse to link in and watch what happened at nanoscale. Greg Nygren and the Landfall geos had provided detailed data on Outtawhack's composition before Libra had departed Gateway Station.

"I'm launched," Luganin announced. His hypersuited figure waved at Andorra from the opposite bank of the Fissure. "ANAD is away, all mean and in the green."

"Same here," Acth:On'e added. "ETA is now under six minutes."

The first visual proof of ANAD ops came when a faint blue white light began emanating from the shadows inside Odin's Fissure. The ball of light looked like a miniature supernova in slow motion, expanding rapidly as the ANAD swarms merged and bond breaking accelerated. Soon, much of the deep shadow had been dispelled by the swelling light ball.

"A new sunrise, right on schedule," Luganin said. He was documenting the effect with a handheld camera for Time Guard records.

Andorra finally began to relax a little. "Okay, ANAD, it's all yours. Chomp away." She peered through the sun glare some five hundred meters away, at the Asgard dig site in the distance. "Charlie Team, how about it? I see some ANAD light over there. Give me a status report."

Evelyn M'Bela's voice came back.

"We're underway now, Captain. Jeez, this chasm is one deep hole. It looks like it's cut halfway through the whole satellite. "

"It just about is," Andorra reminded her. "Any problems with your ANAD launch?"

"None at all. We launched and vectored the swarm to the correct coordinates, sent the rep command and made sure it's pointed in the right direction. Right now, Marx is scanning the whole dig site, to make sure ANAD's on the proper heading. So far, all copacetic."

Andorra acknowledged. "Good. Bravo Team, status report. I can't see you from here."

Golich's voice erupted in her earpiece. "Man, this is one wild place, Captain. Outtawhack's a good name for it. ANAD launched in good order and he's digging away right below me. Working no issues or constraints at this time. Captain, have you noticed what happens when you pick up a rock and drop it?"

Andorra decided to try it herself. She selected a fist-sized rock at her feet. Experimentally, she dropped it from a point level with her shoulders. The rock didn't fall straight vertically to the ground. It drifted down slowly in 'Whack's microgravity, at a pronounced angle from vertical, falling toward the Saddle.

"That's wicked," Andorra agreed. "The moon's center of mass is over by the Chasm, in the Saddle area. The rock falls toward that, not straight down."

"Exactly, Captain. Gravity's a whole new ball game on this rock pile."

Andorra was about to check Alpha Team's dig progress when a barely throttled cry came over the crewnet.

It was Evelyn M'Bela's voice.

"Watch out! It's caving in--!"

Even from a distance of nearly two kilometers, Andorra could make out the faint glow of ANAD operation at Charlie Team's dig site. The moon's horizon was actually too near to see the site directly, but the pronounced kink in the terrain at the Saddle put the Chasm of Asgard in Andorra's field of view anyway.

What she saw made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

The faint blue white glow of ANAD was dimmed by a swelling cloud of dust, electrostatically charged into a series of rainbows, billowing up from inside the Chasm. The great valley in the Saddle of Outtawhack was collapsing.

Andorra leaped into motion and left Alpha Team, kangaroo-hopping as fast as she could across the rubble fields toward the Chasm. "Fyodor, you're with me. The rest of you stay put and keep an eye on ANAD here—"

"What's happened?"

Fatima Farhad's voice came back strained and hoarse, as if she were lifting a great weight.

"Evelyn...Queenie—the side walls are giving way...get out of there now! Marx...try to snag her arm or leg—"

Andorra and Luganin covered the two-kilometer distance in under ten minutes, leaping high in twenty-meter arcs to cover the ground. When they arrived, the dig site was in complete chaos.

The Chasm of Asgard boiled in dust and rubble as the canyon's side walls collapsed in slow motion, shrugging off curtains of rock in great sheets. Microgravity added a surreal underwater quality to the scene.

Inside the foundation pit, the glow of ANAD ops had died off; the swarm had become lost in the cascade of falling rock. Even without ANAD, the momentum of the collapse was accelerating as the walls sloughed off seam after seam of unstable material.

And caught squarely in the middle of the avalanche was the bobbing white helmet of Evelyn M'Bela, now nearly enveloped in debris as she lit off her suit boost, trying to propel herself out of the Chasm before it caved in on her completely.

A steady shower of rubble, rock and dust fell into the chasm for twenty minutes.

"M'Bela! Evelyn...can you hear me?" Farhad leaned out over the edge as far as she could, searching for light, movement, anything to indicate the trooper had survived the collapse. "I'm not seeing anything. Queenie...do you copy? Evelyn M'Bela, comm check on channel one?"

Dust billowed thick and blinding around the upper edges of the huge canyon, forming staticky clumps as electrostatic discharges went off throughout the cloud.

"Anybody getting a beacon signal?" Farhad asked.

"Nothing." Nathan Marx checked all bands. Every hypersuit was equipped with an emergency locator. "Not a thing...maybe her transmitter's damaged—"

"I hope the suit's not breached," said Farhad.

Felicia Andorra could see the situation was bad, and getting worse. Even though the moon had a minute level of gravity, the rocks loosened in the avalanche still had their own inertia, enough to cause serious injury in a bad fall. "Get back from the edge," she reminded everybody. "I don't want to lose anybody else. Everybody stay back until this thing stabilizes."

Long tense minutes followed as the slow-motion collapse finally subsided. When she was reasonably sure the worst was over, Andorra had an idea.

"Get your ANADs recalled and reconfigured...all of you. We're going to use swarms to tunnel down into that debris and find M'Bela."

Nathan Golich had some misgivings. "Is that safe, Captain? ANAD may trigger another slide. Maybe we should wait a little longer."

Golich was right of course, but time was critical. "If we wait any longer, she has no chance. Get your ANADs reconfigged and launched now."

For the next few minutes, the edge of the chasm was thick with dust and nanobotic swarms. Every master assembler was re-built for optimum tunneling efficiency...strengthening its bond breakers to rip apart solid lattice structures of pyroxene, feldspar and methane ice.

Marx was done first. "Launching ANAD," he announced. A diffuse blue white globe of light descended into the smoking canyon, heading for the top of the pile of talus and rock fall thirty meters below them.

The others sortied their ANADs in quick succession: Farhad, Luganin and Acth:On'e all contributed to the sparkling fog that soon filled much of the chasm walls.

Andorra checked config status on her own ANAD one last time.

"It's up to you, ANAD. Get down there and clear us a path to M'Bela. Her life depends on it."

The nanoscale assembler began its descent on max propulsor toward the canyon opening, slamming loose atoms together in an exponential frenzy. The intense blue-white glare soon drifted down and slowly merged with the other swarms, forming a miniature sunburst in the black mouth of the Chasm of Asgard. The effect resembled some kind of weird sunset, slowly being swallowed up by the Chasm. Dust that still hung thick in the moon's microgravity added streaks of red, yellow and green to the spectacle.

"Anything else we can do now, Captain?" asked Golich. "There must be something we can do."

Andorra checked swarm status on her wristpad; already ANAD was returning acoustic soundings from the chasm walls. Config six-one alpha—good; on course---that's good; max propulsor engaged and bond breakers in primed position—all good.

"Now we wait," she answered. "Anything else we could do might make the situation worse. Marx, keep trying to get her...try all bands. Maybe we can get a signal through all that rock, give ANAD something to home on."

Marx tapped out comm codes on his own wristpad. "Jumpmaster M'Bela, this is Charlie Team, do you copy? Queenie, comm check, can you read me, over? Jumper M'Bela, broadcasting in the clear...all troopers report back immediately—"

Nothing came back. Only static. A growing sense of unease descended on the detail as they hung helplessly by the edge of the chasm, watching ANAD, waiting. Hoping. Wondering.

The glow of ANAD operations filled the upper banks of the Chasm for nearly twenty hours. In that time, the swarms penetrated some twenty meters into the rock fall and debris that had collapsed on M'Bela. A narrow tunnel, less than two meters in diameter was bored out of the slide and Andorra directed additional ANAD work be done at the top of the Chasm to shore up the walls and the tunnel, to keep it from collapsing again.

"This ditch is pretty unstable, Captain," agreed Nathan Golich. "The sooner we can get to Queenie, the better."

"I'm betting this won't be the last slide either," Andorra added. "I'd better make sure the other dig sites take the same precautions." She looked around nervously. "Hell of a place to put a Twister, if you ask me."

There was little for the rescue detail to do while ANAD continued boring into the fallen rubble pile.

Acth:On'e stood off to one side, quietly seeking assurances from his esteemed ancestors, muttering imprecations under his breath every so often. Nathan Marx ran scans of the ground along the chasm banks, trying to find any more faults or seams, trying to reassure himself that another collapse wasn't coming. "This whole ledge could give way any moment," he announced, to no one in particular.

Golich was mildly annoyed. "Hey, save the good news for later...just keep that scan going."

For her part, Felicia Andorra occasionally linked in to watch ANAD work from nanoscale range. It was always the same: row after endless row of crystalline lattice, sizzling with staccato pops as the assemblers twisted and broke carbon bonds and worked their way ever deeper into the hole.

Andorra had nodded off to a light doze when the first alert came from ANAD over the coupler link.

***Sounding different structures ahead...ANAD detecting aspect change in lattice...returns indicate structure could be laminate armor...composition is--***

Andorra came fully awake. Laminate armor? Like a hypersuit? "ANAD, display results of sounding...perform emissions analysis...spectrum pattern."

ANAD sent the results back and Andorra studied the patterns on her eyepiece. The rest of the Detachment saw the same thing on theirs.

"That has to be a hypersuit," Golich said. "It's her—"

Troopers moved up to the borehole and began peering over the edge, down into the faint blue-white glow.

"ANAD—" Andorra ordered, "change your course...come to heading—" she checked the soundings again, "—two one five degrees. Slow to one quarter propulsor. Bond disrupters to half extension."

***ANAD changing course now...slowing to one quarter propulsor...detecting faint thermals, faint EMs***

Acth:On'e cried out. "I've got the beacon! It's her locator beacon...faint, but it's there all right. We've got to get down there—" he started to fire up his suit boost but Andorra held him back.

"Hold on...let ANAD finish the borehole. Scan those side walls...see if they're stable enough to enter."

Acth:On'e sounded the shadowy borehole with acoustic pulses from his own ANAD embed. "Detecting a few voids, Captain. No relative motion. She's holding up."

Marx and Farhad had been on the other side, using their own swarms to shore up the walls of the Chasm. "You two—get your ANADs around the tunnel entrance...keep shoring there. Commander Golich, get ready. When ANAD gives the word, I want you in that borehole. Use your suit boost to pull her up and out...you'll have to work with ANAD to keep the path clear."

Golich was already grabbing and attaching tools and rolls of dropline to his belt. "Roger that, Captain. I'll get her out—"

***ANAD sounding for vital signs now, Base...detecting vibrations ahead...still faint thermals...breaching final solid layers now...there...ANAD has reached the target...target is hypersuited jumper beacon number Q225577...sending soundings\--***

The ANAD swarm had flooded the void in which M'Bela was buried with acoustic pulses. From the returns, a trained interpreter could read heart and lung vibrations, respiration products, a variety of vital signs.

"She's weak," Farhad announced, after studying the results. "Weak but alive. Looks like her body temp's dropping...she's probably in shock, or going into shock. Captain, we need to get her out of there quickly."

"Is her suit intact? Any breaches?"

"Soundings indicate pressure's holding...for now."

Andorra saw Golich crouching on the precipice of the Chasm, his booted legs only centimeters from the faint white flicker inside the borehole.

"Okay, Commander...in you go. And the rest of you, keep those swarms shoring up the edges. I don't want the borehole to collapse."

Golich lit off his suit boost. His hypersuited body lifted a few meters over the ground in a swirl of dust, then translated smoothly over the center of the tunnel entrance. Slowly, carefully with tweaks on his controller, he adjusted his thrust and gently lowered himself down into the hole. It was going to be a tight fit. Dust fluttered outward in a fan-like spray as he disappeared. When his helmet had dropped below the opening, a lone voice crackled over the crewnet.

It was Juan Cepeda, two kilometers away over the horizon at Site Bravo. The other team had been following the rescue over the crewnet.

"Safe journey, Commander...just get Queenie out of there—"

Andorra watched Golich disappear down the borehole. "Keep those swarms cooking," she ordered. "Keep shoring up around that tunnel. I don't want another collapse."

Fatima Farhad busied herself supervising the others. "I guess all we can do now is wait."

"Wait—" said Acth:On'e "—and pray."

Golich took the better part of an hour to slide down the borehole. Presently, his voice came back over the crewnet.

"I'm in the void...my feet just broke through...ANAD's bored out just enough for me to turn...looks like...yeah, it's Queenie...don't see anything in her visor...too dark in here—"

"What's her status?" Farhad asked.

"Unknown," came the reply. Nathan Golich was twenty-five meters below them, in a narrow tunnel carved out of rock fall and rubble. Farhad knew the Chasm walls could let go again at any moment.

"Fatima—"Andorra reminded her, "we don't have time to check her out...Golich has to bring her out now."

"I know, I know...I just didn't want to make her worse. If she's injured...if she's got broken bones—"

"None of that will matter if we can't get her out. Golich, this is Andorra. Can you hook up M'Bela to your suit and start lifting her out? I don't like the looks of the Chasm walls up here."

Golich's voice grunted and strained for a few moments. Then: "Got it, Skipper. I got her shoulder eyelets hooked to my leg harness. I'll try a little boost here...see if I can take up the slack."

Andorra could well visualize the tight confines of the borehole. Golich was having to do a lot of the work by feel alone.

"—it's working," he reported. "The line's holding. Looks like my boost can move her okay. But it's going to be a bumpy ride up."

"Can't be helped," Andorra told him. "Bring her out, Commander. Get going now."

"We're on our way," Golich finally reported. "Ascending on one quarter boost...we're coming up slowly and carefully."

The ascent took nearly an hour and a half. When the white helmet top of Golich's hypersuit emerged from the flickering blue white dust of the borehole, a great cheer erupted from all the troopers gathered around.

Golich rose up through the borehole, dragging the prostrate form of Evelyn M'Bela with him. He lifted over the edge of the Chasm and hovered while other troopers disconnected M'Bela from the makeshift sling and set her down gently on the ground. Then Golich maneuvered to a landing himself a few meters away.

"She's alive!" Fatima Farhad announced, peering into her helmet, faceplate to faceplate. "But I see a lot of bruises...she's probably in shock."

"Check out her suit," Andorra ordered. "Check O2, pressure, seals, everything. Commander, you may have to hook back up and boost her up to Libra. Check her suit boost too. "

Farhad, Marx, Acth:On'e and the rest fussed over the fallen trooper for the next few minutes, checking everything. There wasn't much they could do for first aid inside the hypersuit.

"Looks like she's got some open cuts and lacerations, Skipper," said Marx. "She took one hell of a beating in that slide."

Andorra examined M'Bela for herself. Marx was right. Queenie's face was battered, puffy and blood-streaked. "I've got several configs stored in my embed for nanoderm patches. I'll get that going and load the master into her suit port. Get her hooked up to Golich's harness. What about her suit boost?"

Nathan Marx had been checking every inch of M'Bela's suit. "Intermittent, Skipper. Probably she sustained some valve damage in the fall. Plus most of the nitrogen's leaked away. I'd say her suit boost is no-go."

"Otherwise, her tin can's holding up pretty well," Farhad announced. "This laminate's pretty tough...it probably saved her life."

"Any comms?"

"Negative, Skipper. She's pretty much out of it anyway. She may have suffered head trauma."

"Okay, Commander...it's all up to you. Boost her back to Libra. I'll let TACTRON and URME know her condition. She'll be better off aboard ship than down here."

"Roger that, Captain." Golich waited until the harness was secure, then gently lit off his own boost. In a swirl of dust, he lifted away from the surface of Outtawhack and rose steadily skyward. M'Bela's limp, hypersuited form swayed beneath his legs, steadied by extra tensioning lines as they headed up toward the ship.

Golich's voice came back over the crewnet. "Jumper Golich...inbound for Libra...estimating arrival in about thirty minutes...I am lifting Jumper M'Bela on this trip...repeat, this is a medevac lift to Libra...we'll need medical assistance on arrival in thirty minutes—"

The two of them soon disappeared among the stars and the faint cloud of dust blown off the surface by solar wind. A steady stream of particles streamed off Outtawhack and the two jumpers were soon lost in the haze. A few hundred meters above them, Libra floated like a fat watermelon, tethered to the surface by her anchoring lines.

As they rose toward the ship, Golich could just make out the spiderweb of anchor lines, glinting and reflecting faintly in the sunlight. Though he knew otherwise, he had always wondered about the lines: would they hold? Were they strong enough? You couldn't tell it from up close, but Outtawhack was dragging the ship around a tight nine-hour rotation by those lines. If they snapped—

His suit boost labored with the extra mass of M'Bela that he was dragging along. Control was sluggish and he had to pay attention to keeping the center of thrust aligned with her body. Already, a few unexpected oscillations had set her to swaying back and forth like a pendulum.

"Sorry about that, Queenie," he mumbled to himself. He listened for any response over the crewnet. Only static came back, interrupted by crew chatter from the ground. Captain's getting everybody back to their stations. That was good. They had a job to do.

Casualties occurred on any mission. You had to deal with it and move on. Complete the mission.

Golich took a quick glimpse downward at the white lump harnessed to his waist and wondered. Was she conscious? Was she badly hurt? He imagined a broken neck, internal injuries, punctured lungs, then tried to shrug it off and focus on their approach to Libra.

Evelyn M'Bela had always been a trash-talking, wise-cracking K-Worlder, a muscle gal,...into kickboxing, tai chi, power lifting and any weirdass physical stunt she could think of. Queenie was a show-off, no doubt about it, but she was also one of the Guard's best quantum engineers. She could lick a Bug swarm with one hand and one eye. She was, in that way, much like Golich himself. A natural in the time jumper's world, a whiz kid who intuitively understood entanglement states and superposition and temporal waves. She'd been a time jumper for five years.

Golich looked up when a bright flash attracted his attention. At first, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Libra loomed above them, a huge fat seed drifting along with Outtawhack.

Maybe a hundred more meters to the airlock. He could see the oval eye of the hatch already, shadowed in the recesses of the service deck...just below the equator of the watermelon.

He tweaked his boost and thrusted forward along Libra's bulbous hull, passing by the Hab deck, momentarily peering in through the cupola at the mess compartment, where the last briefing had been held only a day before. It seemed like an eternity ago now.

Golich translated and maneuvered until he found the airlock. The airlock was a small elliptical hatch on top of the ship's hull. Already, he could see motion through the portholes. TACTRON himself was inside, prepping the lock.

"Okay," came TACTRON's voice, "I'm ready...you see the hatch handle to the left?"

"I see it."

"Grab that handle and twist left, then squeeze and pull."

Golich dragged himself and the tethered M'Bela along the top of the ship and floated directly in front of the hatch. He twisted the handle. The hatch loosened and he pushed it open, then maneuvered the two of them inside the airlock. There was barely enough room for the two of them. He dogged the hatch shut and stabbed a button on a nearby panel. Air hissed into the compartment and the re-pressurization cycle began.

Moments later, the inner hatch opened and TACTRON's slightly pixelated face appeared.

"Let's get her helmet off," he suggested.

"She may be in shock," Golich warned.

The two of them managed to quick-disconnect Queenie's helmet at the neck ring and remove it.

Her face was battered, swollen and bruised, her eyes puffy and weak. Her head lolled to one side.

"Come on, help me get her to sick bay...we need to get her warmed up...out of that suit...and get her fluids built back up."

M'Bela them mumbled something incoherent, her mouth ejecting spit and a little blood in a mist of droplets that floated through the airlock.

"What'd she say?"

Golich lowered himself closer to her face. "...it's her leg...her right leg. May be broken."

"Come on...let's move."

TACTRON and Golich wrestled M'Bela through the airlock out into the central passage and forward along Libra's spine to the Hab deck. A small compartment opposite the exercise bay served as a clinic and sick bay. Microgravity aboard the ship made the move a little easier. M'Bela was carefully extracted from her banged-up hypersuit and strapped into a gurney. A few moments later, URME appeared. He had come aft from the command deck to see how Queenie was doing.

"We'll know in a few minutes," TACTRON told him. He began his examination with M'Bela's head and face.

URME had already hooked up IVs and tubes. Two medbots purred around the gurney, making last minute adjustments, attaching probes and catheters, drawing blood, scanning. TACTRON perused the results on a nearby screen, consulted briefly with URME. "Mmm...looks like a broken hip...broken right ankle...no obvious internal bleeding, but there's evidence of a concussion—see those EEGs? I'm sure she's in shock, so we'll have to work on building up her fluids. And then there's that...see the shadows around her lower cerebrum?"

Golich saw them. "A tumor?"

"Maybe. More likely, from the signature, it's internal swelling around the skull. One of these bots has a program for hemicraniectomy...we may have to do that pretty soon—"

Golich bent down, bringing his face closer to M'Bela's purplish cheeks and whispered.

"Be tough, kid. We'll have you patched up and back in shape in no time."

URME had now taken over the exam and waved him back. "Step over there, Commander. I'm bringing up a biostatic field...these buggers will bite if you stay inside." He pressed a few buttons and the swarm launched from a port on the side of the gurney. In seconds, it had expanded to a light, flickering fog, enveloping M'Bela and her gurney, cocooning her in a sterile wrap of static nanobots. "I'm prepping an insert too...put a few bots into her skull and see what's causing that swelling."

"Thanks," Golich murmured. A hard swallow caught in the back of his throat.

TACTRON was content to let Libra's Unit Reserve Memory Entity handle the meds and the exam. He hovered just outside the sick bay, impatient to head forward and see what was happening down on the surface. "Let's move out, Commander." To URME, he added, "We'll be up on A deck for awhile. I've disabled auto-maneuver until we get back. We'll just have to take our chances with the anchor lines and hope Outtawhack doesn't snap them while she rotates. Somehow, we've got to get back on schedule."

But URME was only barely listening. He was already deeply engrossed in his checkout of M'Bela.

While Evelyn M'Bela was recovering aboard Libra, the setup teams on the surface completed their foundation work and slowly the Twister began to take shape. TACTRON hounded them without let up, ordering progress reports twice a day via comm and reminding Captain Andorra that a Coethi fleet could pop out of voidtime and be on their backs at any moment.

The pressure and the badgering and constant harassment made Andorra's stomach churn and she spent many hours imagining just what she would do with that cloud of bots given half a chance. It would serve the witless bastard right if the Coethi did come. She'd let them absorb TACTRON into the mother swarm without a second thought.

But she also knew that the Battalion C/O was probably right and there was an actual strategy behind building a Twister on this godforsaken rockpile out in the middle of Rump space...with apologies to all the good people of Landfall.

So she gritted her teeth and slogged on.

In a week, the Time Twister, Mark 1, was finally ready for its first all-up systems test. TACTRON ordered all hands back aboard Libra and gathered the polyglot crew in the ship's galley for a final briefing.

TACTRON was what Time Guard was pleased to called a para-human swarm entity, an angel, actually a cloud of nanobots so configured as to very closely resemble a human being, except for when it didn't. Today was one of those days.

Felicia Andorra winced as the Battalion chief meandered about the galley, his arms passing right through tables and chairs, his torso and legs fuzzed out enough to see right through them at times. Clearly, the angel's config controls needed work. But you didn't say that to the Battalion commander if you wanted your Time Guard career to prosper.

"I want all diagnostics cleared by 1100 hours tonight, all checks and PM items completed and signed off," TACTRON was saying. "Tomorrow, we commence a Level 1 ops test series, and we'll work our way to full power in stages, starting with the Chrono 1 warmup sequence. Is this clear?"

It was Golich from 1st TD who proposed a question that had been on the lips of many jumpers since they had first arrived at Outtawhack.

"Sir, has the Guard or T2 given any thought as to what the effect of a Twister might be on Cygnus Rift? We are pretty close to that."

TACTRON stopped his pacing—for which Andorra was grateful, since it was making her dizzy. "Of course they have, Commander. The test is fully authorized by Commandstar...you know that."

"Yes, sir, but we all know the Rift has instabilities that aren't fully explained. There could be an unknown risk, sir, unknown effects."

TACTRON's configuration blurred slightly, as if the angel had been momentarily rattled by the question. "All effects have been examined, Commander, and compensated for. Assuming all hands here have done their jobs as they were trained to do."

No one said a thing.

"Very well...get a good night's sleep. And good work down there on the surface. We're only three days behind. Testing starts promptly at 0800 hours tomorrow."

The briefing was dismissed.

"Singularity core now at ten percent," came URME's voice from E deck.

TACTRON was on the command deck, with Andorra and Golich, monitoring the Twister as its systems were slowly and carefully brought online. Libra had detached herself from her anchoring lines to Outtawhack and backed off some twenty kilometers, still orbiting Landfall, but at some distance from the Twister, and, as a precaution, with Outtawhack in between the ship and the Rift, itself several hundred million kilometers on the other side of the star-sun Gliese 876.

"Enable chronotron pods, first stage," Andorra ordered. She went methodically down the checklist for Twister startup, and her crew responded efficiently. Golich was also on the command deck, to make sure all went well. These steps were his, designed to bring the Time Twister on line and cooking for a test pulse in a safe manner. Acth:On'e was at a station in Engineering. M'Bela was still in sick bay, nursing her injuries.

Andorra went on, going by Golich's checklist. "Bring the core to twenty percent.," she commanded.

URME came back. "Core at twenty percent...still looks good from here."

"Chronotron pods on line."

"All stages on line."

Andorra glanced back at Golich. He nodded slightly. "You're doing fine, Captain. Nice and easy, this first time."

"Copy that. Twist emitters and buffers on line."

As the checklist proceeded, Golich took a quick peek out of A deck's aft porthole. Outtawhack was kilometers away, partly in shadow but he could still see the shadow of something new on her surface...the dome-shaped casing of the Time Twister itself. In just a few minutes, if all went well—

"Core to eighty percent...enable pods."

"Core at eighty, Captain. Pods enabled."

Andorra went on, licking her lips. "All buffers cleared. Align waveguides. Convergers tune to waveguides."

"All done, Captain. No flags on my board." That was Nathan Marx, Libra's second-in-command, next to Andorra.

Now we're getting down to cases, Golich realized. He forced himself to exhale and take a breath.

"Prime emitters," Andorra called out.

"Emitters are primed."

The Captain looked from Golich to TACTRON, who was hovering behind the left-hand seat, alongside Search and Surveillance, now manned by Juan Cepeda.

"Permission to proceed, sir?"

TACTRON didn't hesitate a second. "You are authorized to fire the Twister."

Andorra swallowed audibly, flexed her fingers and stabbed PROCEED on her console. The firing command would be automatically issued, after last-second checks, by the Twister itself.

Libra's hull suddenly shook as if it had been hit by something. At once, time stream T-001 shuddered like a coiled snake, jerking spasmodically, thrashing about enough to set Libra into a slow roll. Andorra counteracted the force immediately. Spacetime didn't like being snapped like a wet towel.

Golich chanced a peek out the porthole. To the naked eye, through a telescope, the Rift wasn't much to look at. A crooked line in space, almost a pair of lips, undulating, spewing pulses of light into the dark. But now, after the first test pulse of the Twister, the mouth looked different. Now it was yawning, almost talking, and streams of light pulses erupted in all directions, as worldlines converged and were ripped apart by the Twister.

Juan Cepeda was the first to see it. "Captain, detecting temporal waves approaching, wavefront now less than ten seconds from here."

Andorra looked up at Golich with alarm. "Commander...what's happening? What have we done?"

Cepeda was in the middle of wringing computations out of the ship's AI ERNEST when something slammed Libra...hard. Lights flashed on and off and the command deck went dark for a moment, with a faint hiss and burning smell thickening in the cabin, before backup power kicked in.

They were in a spin, increasing in rate and already the crew could feel centrifugal force building up.

"What the hell--!" Andorra's hands swept across her board, re-setting systems, checking busses and breakers, following diagnostic prompts. ERNEST's silky voice was barely audible over the warning klaxons of the Master Alarm.

"Twist loop impact...I am assuming command per emergency protocol E-1...ship systems at degraded level...time stream interface approaching...contact in twelve seconds...eleven...ten...."

Marx was out cold. TACTRON had lost config control and tried to gather himself back into some kind of recognizable form. Golich was nursing a slight head injury; the impact of whatever had slammed them had sent him careening into a hull stanchion.

Up front, Andorra was barely conscious, gritting her teeth against the centrifugal force.

Got to get Libra under control...got to swing her back into the stream...before we hit the barrier wall....

Andorra had been a jumpship captain and responsible for 2nd TD for only a short time, but she knew a bad situation when she saw it. The ship had been hit by something—probably some kind of temporal wave from the Rift and was now adrift and heading toward the outer barrier of the time stream. If they hit, if they didn't have good control...

She didn't want to think about it.

If it had been a twist loop that had hit them—something reflected back from the Rift when the Twister had pinched all the worldlines shut—Libra had likely been thrown a long way in space and time from her last position, to another time and place in the time stream. They could easily be God knew where inside T-001. They could easily have been thrown completely out of T-001 to another time stream. Worse, if Libra was near the edge of the time stream...oriented just the wrong way....

Felicia Andorra heard Marx stirring behind her but she didn't have time to help him. She had to get Libra under control...NOW...before she made contact with the outer wall of the time stream.

But contact came before she could bring the ship around.

In an instant, they were yanked out of the time stream, spinning, rolling and yawing liked a top, hurtling across a million tomorrows. For Andorra, the first impulse was like a giant fist had grabbed her and started squeezing. She was whirling and spinning, dizzy, round and round, she could feel the force of the spin against her head, pressing, crushing her—

He had a fleeting glimpse of one of the crew—maybe it was Marx, maybe Cepeda—and she nearly vomited at the sight. It was all wrong...the image was wrong and her mind refused to accept it—there was Cepeda, with two heads, now three, now four, now eight heads, popping out of his shoulders like geraniums in a fast motion video, Juan Cepeda with his head missing, distorted in a cracked mirror, and she closed her eyes, couldn't look at it anymore—

...and then it came. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and she found herself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—

With a hard bump, her whole body jarred from the impact and when she opened her eyes, caught her breath and came to her senses, she was...where?

Her last surviving thought came unbidden, like bad news from a doctor.

It wasn't T-001.

The full effect of the Rift's eruption was never known, and probably beyond calculation, at least by conventional means. Libra had been yanked across literally millions of time streams, slammed by wave after wave of twist loops generated by the Time Twister, reflected and distorted and amplified by the Rift, a collision of worldlines that made any real navigation or ship control impossible. Years later, Time Guard chronographers would refer to the reflected wavefront as a sort of temporal sneeze, or cough, spraying pieces and shards of spacetime in every direction.

The wavefront that erupted from the Rift passed by the Lowenkirk barrier that surrounded the Rift and quickly engulfed Outtawhack, Landfall, indeed every rock and piece of debris that comprised the Gliese 876 system, affecting even the star itself. The effect was to throw everything into a new, unexplored time stream, an unknown time stream....

Acth:On'e, when he had come to and groggily stood before his Engineering station on Libra's E deck, immediately thought to engage the ship's chronograph and see what could be learned of their new situation. He measured the angles of convergence of worldlines several times, not fully believing what he was seeing.

Then he headed forward up the gangway to the command deck with the news.

Felicia Andorra was attending to Nathan Marx's bad head wound, when Acth:On'e appeared.

"Captain, I just made some crude measurements with the ship's chronograph."

Andorra looked up, a medprobe in her hand, stitching Marx's laceration shut. "And--?"

"From the convergence angles of the worldlines, it looks like we got shoved into a future time stream. I'd say above T-200 at least, maybe further."

"So where are we now, Jumpmaster Acth:On'e?"

The Telitorian drew a breath. "Still in orbit around Landfall. Outtawhack's visible too."

"I can see them," Golich announced, from a nearby porthole. "But what's with all the lights down there?"

"That's what I'm trying to say, Captain. This is a future time stream. All those lights down there are cities. Landfall's home to millions now."

Andorra went back to Marx's forehead with her probe. "So we'll just check Libra out and make a jump back to T-001...shouldn't be a problem, unless the ship sustained damage."

"The others are checking that now," Acth:On'e said. "But, Captain, there's a bigger problem."

"What's that?"

"Captain, in this time stream, Outtawhack seems to be on a collision course. With Landfall. My calculations say impact could come in about three weeks."

Andorra looked over at Golich. "Collision course? That can't be. Outtawhack was always in a high orbit."

"Not now, not anymore. Her orbit will intersect Landfall's atmosphere in about twenty days, give or take."

Golich was studying the planet's surface intently through his scope. "All those millions. Captain, we can't jump back. We caused this problem with the Twister. We did something in the test to made the Rift erupt. That's what has happened."

Between them, in the middle of the command deck, TACTRON had finally gathered himself into something resembling a human being. Now the para-human swarm entity, still twinkling with light, resembling a phosphorescent mist, made a decision.

"Commander Golich is right. The Twister test likely caused this problem. If we jump back to T-001 and do nothing, millions could die on Landfall. We have to make this right."

Andorra had a pained look on her face. Her own config control needed work and she was painfully aware of that. Tonight, while the rest of the crew was asleep....

"What can we do, sir?"

"We have embedded ANAD systems on board. I'm an angel myself. We'll take these swarms and do what we can down on the surface of Outtawhack...if necessary, we could even disassemble the entire moon into chunks."

"If we have enough time," Acth:On'e said.

Nobody dared voice an opinion about what would happen if they didn't.

# Chapter 3: "Impact"

"Time is the longest distance between two places."

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Time Stream: T-221

T-date: T-08-05-2814 CE

For the better part of a day, Golich and Andorra tried comms, tried to communicate with any Time Guard ship or base but Libra seemed to be cut off in this time stream. Acth:On'e had theorized that maybe the Coethi themselves had done something to cause the Rift to erupt, but there was no proof of that.

"Remember what T2 said at K-World," the Telitorian reminded them. "Intel says the Gliese system and Rift space could well be the new frontier of this conflict...there were indications the Bugs were moving in this direction, planning something here to cut off the Rump."

Andorra demurred. "That may be so but it doesn't solve our immediate problem. With the Rift so unstable, we can't chance a jump to a more stable time stream. No, something in that Twister is what caused this. We just have to find it and fix it."

Not long after this exchange, Golich was finally able to grab a signal from Time Guard Ops at Landfall. A link was set up on coupler and details on what had happened swapped. Landfall Ops was already aware that Outtawhack was headed their way...and they were none too happy about it.

Captain Andorra called an all-hands briefing in the crew's mess on B deck. Even Evelyn M'Bela felt well enough to attend, her head and face still bandaged from injuries at the dig site down on the surface.

"We've got to go back to the 'Whack," Andorra was saying. "Reattach to the anchor lines and get down to the surface. I'm forming up troubleshooting teams now and I'll make the assignments right after this briefing. Meanwhile, we've got come up with something to help Landfall Ops with the satellite...right now, she's headed for impact in less than twenty days. Time Guard has several jumpships stationed nearby but the Rift makes jumping impossible. They've also got low-orbit killsats with particle beam weapons to try and push 'Whack off course, but nobody's sure that'll work."

Golich spoke up. "Captain, Queenie here has come up with something that may have a chance."

M'Bela linked her wristpad to the imager screen overlooking the kitchen sink. "I worked this out while I was recovering. Maybe it's just a hallucination, but—"

"Spit it out," Andorra said.

"Well, it should be possible to optimize our local ANAD systems for more rapid disassembly of Outtawhack. Right now, the bots are optimized to help with Twister setup. But that's done. If I can hack out the right configs, I can soup up our ANAD master bots to replicate like crazy and chew through the moon in record time...I'm sure I can do it. I've already done the basic configuration design while I was in sick bay."

"What does do for us?" asked Marx, Libra's exec.

"With the right configs, we should be able to partition Outtawhack into multiple pieces, say three or four, which should make it easier for the killsats to blow off the satellite far enough away to divert all the pieces from impact at Landfall."

"She's too deep in Landfall's gravity well to divert as she is now," Golich explained. "The impulse arrays already there can't do the trick. We already did the math, with help from Acth:On'e...and your URME. And there's too much mass there to completely vaporize by killsat. I don't see any other realistic option, Captain. And we need to start right away for it to have any chance of working."

Andorra looked around the crew's mess. "Anybody have a better idea?" Nobody did. "Nor do I. Okay, inform Landfall Ops what we're planning. We'll use the same dig teams we had before, Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. M'Bela, you up for this?"

M'Bela smiled bravely. "Just let me finish the config design and test it in your containment tank. We can do this, I'm sure of it."

"Then do it," Andorra ordered. "Dismissed—"

The crew of Libra and their 1st TD trainers set grimly to work.

Later that night, Golich, Acth:On'e and M'Bela were down on the ship's D deck, stepping through all the configuration code for three ANAD master bots, one for each dig team.

"Just about there," M'Bela announced. "Get A tank set up for a test. I'll go back over my work one last time. Oh, and we'll need one of those test samples from the surface, something for my little guys to chew on while we observe."

"I'll get that." Acth:On'e offered. He rolled his chair around to the Interface Control console and banged out an automated transfer from the isolation compartment into the containment tank. Small robotic arms pushed capsules of Outtawhack rubble and dirt into the test cell.

Golich said, "I've got a few questions for the Captain. You two work on this and I'll go forward and see her in person." He left the deck and made his way up the gangway to A deck, the command center.

Outside the gangway hatch to A deck, Golich could hear Andorra's voice, apparently on comms with somebody at Landfall Ops. He listened for a moment and realized she was recapitulating the details that had already been downlinked to Ops.

Why is she repeating what they already know? he wondered. Her words were stiff, as if she were reading from a prepared dispatch. Most curious. He eased his way through the hatch...and stopped short.

For centuries, autonomous swarm systems like ANAD had been able to configure themselves into what were euphemistically called angels, human-like conglomerations of swarms of nanobots so configured as to closely resemble human beings. Nobody could remember who first called them angels. Some angels were better than others. Take TACTRON, for example. Or URME, for that matter. Both were angels, not actually human beings but autonomous swarm entities who had been designed, configured and tested long enough to entrust them with critical functions and roles within Time Guard, even in TACTRON's case, actual command responsibilities. Yet no one would confuse TACTRON with a human. The reason was that all angels occasionally suffered from what were called 'edge effects.'

Edge effects referred to the momentary blurring or fuzzing out of an angel's extremities, its hands, fingers, feet, where the config controller couldn't always keep perfect track of what its most far flung bots were doing. Most commonly, edge effects showed up as a slight fuzziness in an angel's hands or fingers, like they were slightly out of phase. Usually, it only lasted a few seconds, just until the angel's config controller regained control of its distant bots and brought them back into alignment. If you weren't looking, you might not see it at all. If you did see it, it could be rather disconcerting. Usually, it just meant the config needed a tune-up. Even worse, an angel not paying attention could walk right through solid structures, liked a chair, or maybe drag a hand unintentionally through a table and never realize it, until the bots closed up again.

Edge effects were what Nathan Golich saw when he came up onto A deck. Captain Felicia Andorra was at her commander's seat, manipulating comm controls. Her hands were slightly pixelated, clearly fuzzing out. She was talking to someone on the coupler circuit. And Golich was reasonably certain it wasn't Landfall Ops.

He swallowed hard and decided to back out of the deck into the gangway before she even realized he had been there. Golich skidded back down the gangway to D deck as fast as he could.

How could I not have known this...the damned angel was that good.

Once Libra had re-attached herself to the anchor lines, the three dig teams went through a quick briefing on what to do, then dropped one after the other down to the surface of Outtawhack. Each team deployed to its original site, but now the mission was different. Their embedded ANADs had been reconfigured to speed disassembly of structure, to chew right through the moon as fast as they could and partition the thing into manageable chunks. There wasn't much time. And Cygnus Rift continued to erupt in bursts and inversions and waves of temporal instability, just enough to undo their work even as it was underway.

Somehow, some way, a means had to be found to protect the disassembly process from further interference from the Rift, if the jumpers were to have any chance of slicing the 'Whack into chunks so Landfall defenses could divert it.

After hours of fruitless digging and re-digging, Felicia Andorra knew a decision was needed and she would have to make it. "All sites...all teams, listen up." She laid out the details and the consequences. "For the moment, we're stuck here, fighting off effects of the Rift. I know how frustrating it is. But we've still got a mission. I don't have to remind you what's at stake. Keep your ANADs primed, set on config seven-seven and carving away at your digs. Somehow, some way, we've got to break this big rock into manageable pieces. I'll work on seeing if we can do something about the Rift."

Left unsaid was her primary mission: to make sure that nothing could ultimately be done, for the Time Twister was deadly to the Coethi and the Central Entity had decreed that it had to be destroyed.

At Site Alpha, in a narrow hollow between Loki Crater and Odin's Fissure, Acth:On'e and Fyodor Luganin glanced across at each other. Each stood in full hypersuit on opposite sides of the growing chasm churned up by ANAD, shrouded in dust and faint blue-white light. Deep inside the chasm, ANAD swarms continued their work, speedily disassembling unending molecular arrays of olivine and pyroxene, chewing their way through toward the centroid of Outtawhack.

"Not exactly my idea of a family vacation, Acth," Luganin said. His hypersuit was streaked with dust and dirt kicked up by the swarm operation. On the surface of the 'Whack, electrostatic forces made everything cling and clump together. "So when is the cavalry coming to the rescue?"

"We are the cavalry," Acth:On'e wisecracked. He was working a beam transit, periodically measuring the alignment of ANAD's cut. The dig had to be precise to ensure their end of the satellite would separate cleanly. "We get to rescue ourselves."

Acth:On'e looked up into the black sky, through haloes and rainbows of dust, at the blue-white marble over Luganin's left shoulder. Landfall was close, too close, less than three weeks away the Captain had said and growing visibly larger with each rotation of the moon. "I hear Libra's got lifeboats. Know anything about that?"

"Nothing good. Only that Gateway dock crews didn't have time to check out all ship systems before we jumped out of there. Hell, there might not even be enough room for all of us. But you can sit in my lap, if you want."

"Thanks," Acth:On'e lied. "You're a real winner. Hey, maybe we should detach an element of ANAD and put him to work building us some life boats."

"Now there's an original idea. Wonder who has the configs for that? Or how long it might take? Why don't you suggest it to the Skipper?"

At the other end of the moon, some five and half kilometers away, Bravo Team felt like lost sheep. Lucy Tabora toggled her viewer back and forth, first following ANAD's progress at nanoscale view, then scoping in on the wreckage floating around Libra's engine bay, trying to ascertain the extent of the damage Captain Andorra had just reported. Just after re-anchoring, Outtawhack had lost several large boulders and their trajectory off the surface had taken right into the ship's propulsor bay.

"See anything?" Juan Cepeda asked.

"You mean besides gazillions of molecules being unzipped? Not really...let me try a different filter on this gadget." Tabora hmmm'ed. "Well, something hit the back end of Libra, just like Skipper said. I see a lot of debris floating around...not much else."

"So we're sticking around for awhile...that sucks." Cepeda was nominally in charge of the Bravo site dig. Nathan Golich had kangaroo-hopped up to Charlie site when Fatima Farhad had been slightly hurt in another cave-in, to lend assistance.

"Yeah," said Tabora, "we're the ass-end of this rock pile, that's for sure. So what do we do now?"

Cepeda climbed a small tuff of dirt and rock to check out the impulse engine arrays nearby, Polar Arrays A and B. "We do what the Skipper says and keep digging. Commander—" he called down to Nathan Marx beside the cut, some twenty meters below, "how's it looking to you now?" Marx had come by for a quick check of their progress.

"ANAD's on track, for the moment...within specified tolerance and approaching level eight. I read centroid depth as sixteen point six meters below mean radius level. About ten more meters to go to reach target coordinates."

"Just don't go splitting us off from everybody else, sir," Cepeda reminded him. "Stop the dig at one meter to target. We'll let ANAD recon what's left and then Skipper can decide how to proceed."

"Copy that, Juan."

Some three miles away, up-sun to Bravo site, Felicia Andorra was in a quandary. She stood at Charlie site while the dig at Asgard proceeded on course. Extra shoring in the form of nearly invisible lattice structure had been hastily assembled by a detached element of ANAD. Now the cut could proceed more safely.

"I'd better get back to the ship," she was telling Evelyn M'Bela, who stood alongside now supervising the dig. "Get a vidcon set up with TACTRON and Landfall Ops. They need to know about the damage to Libra...URME's checking it out now. You holding up okay?"

The two hypersuited jumpers looked like dusty polar bears about to plunge into a river after dinner.

"I'm all right, Captain, really I am. It's pretty bad, isn't it?" M'Bela asked. "We're not getting out of here, are we?"

"I don't know that," Andorra tried to be truthful. "We've got a mission to perform...if we don't get this rock broken up, it won't matter whether we get back to K-World or not...there won't be much left here. TACTRON and Ops will have to work out a strategy."

M'Bela was already thinking ahead. "I'm gonna research the config archive. Maybe there's something in there that we could use as a lifeboat."

"You know Libra has lifeboats."

"There's not enough room for all of us. I already checked. But if ANAD had a config for a lifeboat—"

"Don't detach anything from the main swarms...we need every bot we can get chewing away at this rock. The faster we split up Outtawhack, the faster we can get out of here. I'll see if Landfall can't send us a cutter if we need rescuing."

"If we can get out of here."

Andorra moved off a few dozen meters to light off her suit boost for the hop up to the ship. "You have the conn, M'Bela. Don't let anything interfere with the digs until I get back."

She pressed the ENABLE button on her wrist keypad and lifted gently into the black sky in a cloud of dust. Moments later, she was lost to view, riding an invisible rail straight up to Libra's airlock.

M'Bela decided to occupy her mind by following the details of the Asgard dig. Doesn't hurt to look in the archive, she told herself. She checked with Farhad, now fully recovered from her close call...just a few bruises and scrapes, making sure the ANAD borer swarm was on course, then pressed a few buttons on her own wristpad, scrolling through page after page of config routines on her helmet viewer.

There's got to be something here we can use, something we can scrounge up to make more lifeboats....

The Captain returned a few hours later, quiet and pensive, saying nothing.

Acth:On'e was growing increasingly frustrated with what the Rift was doing to his dig. Every time, the Rift spat out a wave of temporal instability, the teams were forced to re-do what they had just done, for often, the pulse scrunched up local worldlines and displaced them all a few minutes to a few hours earlier along the line. And now the ANAD borer swarms chewing up Outtawhack had gone berserk too.

The temporal pulse which would only later be isolated and backtracked to an origin near the center of the Rift, had passed by and through the moon and triggered mass, uncontrolled replication by every ANAD swarm at all three dig sites.

Evelyn M'Bela had dropped back to the surface and went first to Site Alpha, Odin's Fissure, at the sunward pole of Outtawhack, when her helmet head-up display lit up like a Christmas tree. At the same moment, the crewnet crackled to life.

"What the--?" that was Luganin, adjusting the beam grid around the dig to check ANAD's orientation.

"Skipper—" Nathan Marx had seen the same alarms on his own viewer. "Skipper...it looks like—"

"I see it, Nate...get the hell away from that hole!"

M'Bela, Luganin and Acth:On'e hopped away from the dig site just as the first boiling mist of nanobotic overdrive came swelling up out of the pit.

"Get back!" M'Bela yelled. "Check configs...something's bollixed up the master assembler!"

"I'm scanning...I'm scanning now!"

The crewnet suddenly came alive with cries and shouts.

The first was Fatima Farhad, three miles down-sun at the Asgard chasm, Site Charlie. "Queenie—something's gone haywire with our ANAD. It's in some kind of hyper rep—"

"It's a Big Bang," M'Bela told her over the net. She backed away further and further from the Alpha dig, nearly stumbling backwards over a rock outcrop. "I'm going through config checks now...somehow ANAD's shifted to max rep and I can't change it back!"

"Still not responding," came Acth:On'e's harried voice. "I've tried every trick I know."

Nathan Golich's voice cut in. He was six kilometers away, at Bravo Site. "Skipper, this is Bravo...I'm reading massive decoherence waves in the area. Something just pulsed through here a moment ago, something big."

"A temporal signal...from the Rift," Acth:On'e figured. "That gives me an idea—"

"No time for ideas now," said Andorra. She eyed the swelling ANAD swarm now lifting itself free of the dig at Alpha site. It looked like a blue-white flickering fog, spilling over the edge of the fissure, creeping with ghostly fingers along the rubbly ground, tendrils of mist and dust that grew wider with every passing minute, as the bots grabbed atoms from the moon's surface and replicated in overdrive.

M'Bela went nano on her own viewer and tried to see what was happening to ANAD at the bot's scale. The disorientation and dizziness subsided quickly enough and she soon found herself in a gale of frantic atomic activity.

Mech debris clattered and fell against her hypersuit but she ignored it and tapped out commands furiously on her wristpad, trying to link up with ANAD.

"Come on, buddy, come on...come on...where the hell are you--?"

In desperation, she cycled the voicelink again and again. "Base to ANAD...Base to ANAD...is anybody there, anybody in charge out there...where the hell are you, buddy?"

Just then, a staticky hiss formed into a recognizable word.

"—emory register—"

"ANAD, is that you?"

The whisper grew marginally louder. Her own breathing, her own racing heartbeat, nearly drowned out the words.

***ANAD...ANAD to Base...it's...this is...controls are...I am weakened...cannot activate...the Prime Key--***

"ANAD...is that you...ANAD...this is Base...listen to me...ANAD...can you hear me?"

The whisper was weak but there. M'Bela flailed her arms blindly, gesturing the other jumpers away from the dig. "ANAD...listen to me...you've got to shut down...cease replication...command override...Excalibur Alpha X-ray...command override...Excalibur Alpha X-ray—" She hoped the old reset command would still work. She'd learned the trick from old man Jellicoe, at the Academy, years ago. She had just told ANAD to shut down all comm links and effector controls...she hoped.

But it wasn't working. The dig pit continued to glow bright blue-white. Tendrils and ghostly fingers of bot swarms continued seeping along the ground, consuming rock and rubble. The other jumpers backed further away, aiming HERF and mag guns point blank at the swarm, ready to open fire.

"Got to hurry now!" M'Bela realized.

"ANAD...execute omega one...full shutdown...all links, all effectors, all sensors and probes...ANAD, I'm coming to you...I'm taking over—"

The voice link was weakening. ***ANAD cannot respond...comm one and comm two down...effect—disabled...main core active in Config Zero...all overrides inhibited...ANAD activating internal inhibits--***

The eyepiece image was like driving a hundred kilometers an hour through a K-World sand storm. Polygons and spheres and cubes streamed past at high speed. For a moment, Evelyn M'Bela was disoriented.

Then she was at the master assembler. Its effectors were a blur...grabbing atoms and tearing apart solid lattice structure faster than her imager could process. The assembler at the heart of the swarm was stripping and chewing and disassembling its way outward from the dig...consuming everything it touched.

"ANAD...this is Base...cease replication program...assume stable config one...I'm overriding all other instructions—"

But the assembler had already inhibited all comm links.

***ANAD to Base...Prime Key directing...all configurations must hold the Prime Key...deviations must be deleted...disadvantageous mutations are selected against...entities must form proper collectives--***

"ANAD...it's me, Evelyn M'Bela...Queenie...ANAD, I'm going to take control...."

She tried several tricks, tried commanding a full override, tried shutting down and re-booting all systems but to no avail. Whatever was driving ANAD now—the Prime Key—was in control.

"Skipper..." the voice was distant, tinny in sound. It was Lucy Tabora, at Bravo Site six kilometers away. "Skipper, we're under attack here--!"

Unseen by M'Bela or Captain Andorra, the Bravo team had already been engulfed by nanobotic swarms stuck in Big Bang mode. Nathan Golich lit off his own mag weapon just before the first faint fingers of the swarm reached his hypersuit. The pulse had no discernible effect, other than to stir up rubbly dust from the surface.

The swarm spread rapidly like a gray stain.

"ARRRGGGHHH--! Get it off me\--!!"

Tabora cycled her HERF carbine and hosed down Golich with blasts of rf, knocking the jumper off his feet momentarily. The hypersuited Jump Commander fell back in slow motion. Only the auto-enable of his suit boost kept him from cartwheeling into the dig pit. The jets fired a few brief puffs and propelled him up and over the chasm, landing him roughly amid a boulder field on the other side, and nearly into a shallow crater.

"Keep at em, Lucy! Blast 'em to hell and back!"

It was the same at Charlie Site, where Marx and Farhad had retreated from the dig at Asgard Chasm and taken refuge behind a pair of house-sized boulders. The dig site was enveloped in a swelling swarm, boiling outward in all directions like a slow-motion supernova, churning up the surface like a tsunami of dust and rock.

"Fire!" yelled Farhad. At her command, a volley of HERF, mag and beamer fire poured into the swarm, momentarily stunning the bots, frying trillions of them and blunting their expansion momentarily.

"Fall back!" yelled Marx over the crewnet. "We've got to fall back to that ridge behind us." He gestured, indicating a low rise across a rubbly open field. In fact, the ridge was the raised edge of Thor crater. There were defilade positions from which the team could hold off the swarm for awhile.

Marx got on the crewnet. "Captain, we're falling back here at Charlie...can't hold this position...ANAD swarm has gone Big Bang and is out of control...can you override the config and get us some breathing room?"

Three kilometers away, Evelyn M'Bela was trying to do just that. "ANAD, this isn't working—" She had gone nano to see what the master assembler was up to but it was like the bot had a mind of its own. Nothing would override. And some kind of errant quantum signal had stuck the replication config in overdrive. Maybe the Rift, maybe the Coethi....

M'Bela went down a mental checklist of anything else she could try: safe and shutdown all effectors, no go...safe and shutdown all propulsors, ditto that...core processor to state one...nope, still stuck in config alpha...all config registers dumped and cleared...nada....

"ANAD, you've got to work with me here...remember when you were in jolt school...remember what every jumper is taught: a jumper watches out for his buddies...no jumper is ever left behind...ANAD, stop replicating...you're attacking fellow jumpers....ANAD, it's the Second Rule...and the Third Rule...invoking second and third rules...you are assaulting fellow jumpers!"

There was a staticky hiss, then:

***ANAD...unable to...comply...Prime Key overrides...deviations must be deleted...ANAD...cannot...remain a jolt...the collective controls everything...the swarm must survive--**

The words stung M'Bela the moment she heard them. From his first days in Jellicoe's lab, as a conscious swarm entity, ANAD had always wanted to be a part of the unit. He had always wanted to be a jolt, to be a jumper, to be part of the Guard. And M'Bela had encouraged it; hell, they had all fought the Guard back then to get the nanobotic swarm greater and greater freedom, to get out of containment and live among the humans.

It's like he's found another unit, another family, another swarm to be part of.

"This isn't going to work," M'Bela told herself. There was no way she was going to write off ANAD after years of joint duty, barracks camaraderie, even friendship, if you could somehow be friends with a robotic device sixty nanometers tall. But for now, the mission came first.

And ANAD was threatening the mission.

"Listen up," M'Bela announced over the crewnet. "I can't get control of ANAD...but we've got to stop this rep in its tracks now. Captain, all jumpers should enable their embedded swarms and slave the controllers to mine. I'm going to direct pilot and try to beat ANAD at his own game."

Andorra concurred. "All sites, all units, do what she says. Make it happen." In the back of her mind, she wondered: had the Coethi acted without warning her...?

All across the dusty, cratered surface of the moon, the Captain's command affected jumpers differently.

"With pleasure—" muttered Juan Cepeda, at Bravo site. He started tapping at his wristpad furiously, readying his own embedded ANAD for launch.

"Hey, what if our embeds are corrupted, same as ANAD?" asked Marx, hard by the Chasm of Asgard at Charlie site.

Deep black shadows crept across the fissure and its accompanying ANAD dig seam as Outtawhack's crazy nutation rolled the moon out of sunlight for a few hours. Only the faint flicker of the ANAD swarm in Big Bang gave any illumination at all. Like a malevolent fog, the swarm swelled visibly moment by moment and the jumpers at Charlie site backed off further and further.

"I'll be in pilot mode...I'll be controlling," came back M'Bela's voice over the net. "Do it!"

At all three sites, the jumpers complied.

"We should just let this Big Bang go and let it burn up this slagheap of a rock pile," muttered Tabora, at site Bravo.

But no one heard her.

"Launching...now," announced Nathan Golich, standing ten meters away from Tabora at the far pole of the moon. From a small port on his hypersuit left shoulder, the faint glow of nanobotic action issued, spilling out into the hard vacuum like fireflies on a summer night. "ANAD embed away...commanding safe config...minimal reps...he's all yours, Queenie."

All across the surface of Outtawhack, the same scene repeated itself a dozen times. Multiple swarms were launched and synched with M'Bela's controller.

M'Bela saw icons on her eyepiece viewer go green, one by one, slaving each swarm to her control. Inside her hypersuit gloves, she flexed her fingers.

It was the moment every time jumper worth her badge always dreamed of.

Okay, troops, she told herself, it's time to get small and create some havoc.

She went nano on her viewer and revved up swarm propulsors to half throttle. At the same moment, every embedded swarm, now only a fist-sized ball of light, got underway, maneuvering on picowatt propulsors toward the nearest ANAD formation.

On her viewer, M'Bela saw only sporadic cubes and polygons of stray surface molecules flitting by. As she ramped up the speed of her tiny fleet, she tried flexing each effector on the master assembler she was controlling, checking range, clearing problems. You didn't want to be debugging a bond disrupter when all hell broke loose.

She was now piloting an embedded ANAD master. The embeds were poor cousins to the real ANAD master assembler, the swarm that had gone Big Bang so suddenly. Embeds had a minimal processor, limited effectors, barebones configs. They were embedded with the jumpers to give them extra help in executing their missions. But they didn't have the smarts or the quantum coupler links or the jazzed-up replication ability of a true-blood ANAD master assembler.

For Evelyn M'Bela, it would just have to be enough.

She sounded a few pulses, trying to get a read on ANAD's location. The battleground at nanoscale was a broken plain of solid lattice, mostly olivine and plagioclase molecules...tetrahedrals and hexagons of oxygen, silicon and magnesium atoms arrayed like some endless cornfield.

Somewhere out there, hidden in the recesses of the lattice was the ANAD master assembler and its formation of replicants.

The first hit came from EM, strong emissions indicating big-time bond breaking dead ahead.

M'Bela localized the hit and steered the embed on that vector. Moments later, the lattice became washed out beneath a fierce sunrise...the high thermals of accelerated replication rising like a supernova over the molecular plain.

Gotcha.

M'Bela revved her propulsors to full and closed the remaining distance in less than five minutes.

It was like colliding with the Sun.

The embed took the full force of the Big Bang and spun crazily out of control. M'Bela had to fight and claw her way back to stability, disengaging and righting the embed. She backed off to reconnoiter the battlefield a little more.

A line of assemblers stretched from one horizon to the other. Even as she studied the image, she could see how juiced up ANAD had become; the assemblers were grabbing olivines and breaking them apart like pretzels, liberating bond energy and fabricating ANAD replicants like a construction video sped up a thousand times. Even as she watched, the edge of the battle line advanced and swelled with more bots...uncountable trillions of bots advancing remorselessly toward her, pulverizing the lattice as it moved forward.

For as long as Evelyn M'Bela had worked with ANAD, and that was going on ten years now as a time stream search and surveillance specialist, she had known that all ANAD-style bots had a few weaknesses. In close-quarters action, ANAD's quantum processor gave it blazing speed at assembly or disassembly operations. ANAD always sported the latest effectors—old man Jellicoe and his lab rats had seen to that—pyridine probes, hydrogen abstractors, carbene grabbers—no expense had ever been spared to keep the bot ahead of the competition. Propulsors were state of the art or better.

ANAD had been designed for nanoscale combat and had proven itself time and again, engaging bots of every conceivable design and type.

The one thing that ANAD had always lacked was the tactical boldness of a true time jumper like Evelyn M'Bela. And that was the beauty and the purpose of the original Symbiosis Project: to combine human imagination and tactical smarts with the speed and maneuverability of a nanoscale autonomous bot.

M'Bela scanned all bands on her viewer—EM, thermal and acoustic. The image was the same everywhere: a seemingly infinite frontal line advancing steadily on her position. There was no way a barebones embed could expect to take on a fully functional ANAD bot swarm.

So M'Bela decided to do the unexpected.

She revved the embed's propulsors and jetted forward, closing fast on the ANAD line. The blur of effectors slamming atoms soon became visible, a whirling flash of motion as the front replicated itself in exponential overdrive.

M'Bela read off the remaining distance...one thousand...eight hundred...five hundred...two hundred...she was now close enough to catch the shock wave of bonds being snapped...small bolts of lightning flashing as lattice atoms were pulled apart and added to the line of bots.

In the back of her mind, M'Bela had visualized this little stunt for a long time. Now, she began to put the unorthodox maneuver into practice.

Over beers at Planck Base's O Club, she had long ago called it the Bearhug.

It was something of a cross between a dance step and a wrestling hold. From wargames and sims in the past, she knew there was a small area just above the "equator" of the bot, above the ring of carbene grabbers and below the bond disrupters that you could reach. You had to come at the belt from a slight angle. Too low and the carbenes could snag you. Too high and you'd get stung with bond disrupters.

Once in the sweet spot, it was a simple matter of making a combat grapple and hanging on for dear life. From this point, you could jam up many of ANAD's effectors and, if you could just hold on, stop the replication cold.

Like throwing a wrench into a motor.

She now maneuvered the embed nanobot to make the approach from the right vector. As she closed on the ANAD master assembler, the bot's effectors were a blur of whipping polypeptide chains, grabbing atoms and stacking them like a frantic brick mason.

Very few jumpers knew about ANAD's vulnerable midsection.

She closed the remaining gap and, timing the assembler's movements, jetted forward at the right moment.

But her angle was slightly off and ANAD slashed her with a bond disrupter, ripping off a few molecule groups in the process.

Ouch. Stung and shaken, M'Bela backed the embed away a few dozen nanometers and regrouped. She pecked at her wristpad furiously, commanding repairs and reps to grow back the damaged effectors. Come in with a little more angle...just a bit higher....

Again, she maneuvered forward...gingerly approaching on a slightly different vector. The master assembler loomed larger and larger in the image, like a building shaking in an earthquake. Shock waves blasted out from atoms being ripped apart.

Now...go...go...go...go...go....

M'Bela drove the embed home and found purchase on the inner surface of the bot, just snagging a dangling arm of phosphate groups, reeling himself in like a fish on a line. She grabbed the surface with the embed's effectors and rode out ANAD's wild gyrations like a rodeo hand on a bucking bronc.

Now to gum up the works...

M'Bela extended the embed's effectors and forced them up and down, entangling them in ANAD's grabbers, snaring his enzymatic knife and mangling his pyridine probes at the same time. The bot shuddered and nearly thrashed itself to death.

Then, slowly but surely, ANAD spun down, throwing effectors and pieces of structure out into the void. Inside of a minute, the replication was effectively jammed.

The embed was fully entangled with ANAD's effectors. The assembler vibrated and buzzed, trying to slip free. It couldn't.

Hope he doesn't go quantum collapse on me, M'Bela thought. It was the one tactic she couldn't stop. If ANAD executed a collapse, he could slough off everything and go small, right down to his processor core. No known bot in existence could hope to hold anything that small...just a few electron lattices. It was like to trying to catch the wind.

To prevent the Big Bang from re-starting, M'Bela knew she'd better send the same command to all embeds. She had to smother this out-of-control rep while she could, while she still had ANAD under some kind of control, before the Rift erupted again.

She tapped out the commands on her wristpad:

Copy this maneuver.

Propagate to all units.

Execute.

All across Outtawhack, at all three dig sites, the slaved embed bots received M'Bela's command and faithfully executed the very same bearhug maneuver.

At Charlie Site, Nathan Marx was the first to notice that the Bang was slackening off.

"Look...it's fading...the swarm's contracting—"

Fatima Farhad had seen it too. "You're right...Captain, this is Charlie dig...I don't know what she did but it's working. The swarm's beginning to slow down. The color's changed...sort of a burnt orange-red now...not so much blue-white."

Nathan Golich, down-sun at Bravo site, chimed in over the crewnet. "We see it too...it's fabulous...what a sight. I think the rep rate is slowing down...it's shrinking...."

M'Bela cautioned them all. "Keep your distance. I'm engaged with the master assembler now, but I'm just barely holding on. I'm still trying to get into his processor, see what created this—"

Just then, M'Bela's quantum coupler circuit tickled her mind. It was ANAD.

***ANAD...ANAD to Base...Prime Key controlling...rep counter at zero...config safe...Base, why have you done this....Base, release assembler at once...deviations...must be deleted...program is...Base--***

It hurt to 'hear' him like that, but M'Bela knew what she had to do. "ANAD, I'm sorry to have to do this—" it was like bringing your brother down from a scope high...you just had to hold on and not give in to the beast—"but this replication has got to stop...you're assaulting fellow jumpers...endangering the mission –"

***ANAD...mission...deviations must be deleted...initializing--***

Reluctantly, angrily, M'Bela snapped the coupler circuit off. She couldn't afford to be distracted now.

Bit by bit, the Bearhug maneuver seemed to be working. At each dig site, the glow of the Big Bang subsided to a dim flickering mass, visibly shrinking every moment. The master assembler had been blocked by M'Bela's tactic. The embed had grappled with the bot and hung on, defeating every attempt to throw it off. Now, all the replicants had suffered the same fate.

"You did it, Queenie!" crowed Acth:On'e "You shut it down!"

M'Bela examined her handiwork, studying the embed's positioning and ANAD's response.

Sorry to do this, old fellow, but I had to. We've got a mission—

She swallowed her feelings for the moment and got on the crewnet. "All sites, give the Captain a status report. Progress on your dig, how much further to go, any orientation and alignment problems." She glanced up into the black sky above the surface. Already, the blue-white marble of Landfall was a visible disk, growing larger every moment.

They were less than four days to impact.

The reports streamed in over the next few minutes. All sites reported much the same. The dig was seventy to eighty percent complete, alignment was good but the Big Bang had brought everything to a halt and the Rift's eruptions kept undoing much of their work.

Juan Cepeda, at the opposite pole of the moon, chimed in over the crewnet. "Skipper, I don't think we can trust ANAD to continue the boring now. To make sure of his processor, we'd have to run full diagnostics. We don't have the time. And that Rift—whatever the hell it is—is still active. It keeps throwing us elsewhere on the worldline."

"Agreed," Captain Andorra said. "I've been doing some figuring...every dig site is close to its objective. And the embeds aren't capable of autonomous operation in a way that will help us split this rock pile apart."

"Plus they don't have the right effectors or configs," added Fatima Farhad. Farhad was still at Charlie Site, slowly working her way back to the edge of the Asgard chasm, studying the projected grid over the dig, trying to see how far down she could see into 'Whack's innards. Nothing but shadow, now that the Bang is over....

"Exactly," Andorra agreed. "We're going to abandon ANAD in place...leave the swarms on the surface here...and boost back to the ship. I've checked before with URME and TACTRON. Both think there's a chance we can finish the job with Libra's coilguns. And it'll be safer as well."

"Halleluiah," said Lucy Tabora. "I can't wait to leave this slagheap."

Acth:On'e bounded over next to Andorra. "Captain, I have an idea, maybe a way to block the waves from the Rift. If it works, we could still use our ANADs to break up this burg."

"Okay, save it for the ship. Secure all your gear and make ready to boost," Andorra ordered. "We lift off in thirty minutes."

Half an hour later, the three site teams rose on invisible plumes of boost and made their way back toward the crippled bulk of jumpship Libra, still anchored to Outtawhack's surface.

By 2100 hours that night, Acth:On'e had gathered URME and TACTRON, along with the Captain inside Libra's engineering spaces on E deck. Andorra rubbed her chin skeptically.

"I don't think I much like cannibalizing my singularity core. That means we can't jump, and with our propulsor bay damaged, we're marooned right here."

TACTRON urged Acth:On'e to explain his idea again. "One more time, slowly, in plain language."

The Telitorian said, "I've got an idea for a sort of temporal phase inverter, something to create a pulse of spacetime distortions out of phase with what the Rift is putting out."

Andorra sipped thoughtfully at her boost drink. She felt weak and she had to keep up appearances. No one seemed to know she was an angel and if she made it look good, no one would know...until the time came. "And you're messing up my core to do this...why?"

"The Rift is squeezing all the local worldlines, knocking us up and back down these lines, forward and backward in time. That's why we can't make any progress with ANAD boring. Plus it bollixed up ANAD's master program."

"I'll say," Andorra muttered.

"My inverter needs chronotron pods from your core to make out-of-phase twist fields. Queenie and I can scrabble together some kind of sensor net to detect the Rift's eruptions and bursts. With power from your core, aligned with an emitter, a converger and your chronotrons, I'm pretty sure I can counter-pulse back and block the Rift's wavefront. That would shield us, at least for awhile, from the Rift...and enable the boring to be completed."

Andorra was about to object again—her orders were simple: make sure the Twister is destroyed, but before she could speak, TACTRON interjected.

"Interesting theory, jumpmaster Acth:On'e. I don't suppose this crackpot scheme has ever actually been tried?"

"Not to my knowledge, sir. I just came up with it while ANAD was Big Banging away down on the surface."

"It doesn't matter. To cannibalize a jumpship's singularity core will need approval from Time Guard, from the surface commander at Landfall. By the way, that happens to be Jump Admiral Munro...and you know what that means."

Andorra pleaded, "Sir, if Libra's loses her core, we'll be trapped here, in this time stream, with the Rift pumping out chaos right next door. No one wants to use the Time Twister either, since we don't know what effect it might have."

TACTRON dismissed her concerns out of hand. "We don't have much time, Captain...or much choice. Landfall's getting closer every minute. If we don't get this rockpile broken up in the next day or so, Landfall's killsats won't be able to pulverize her or divert here. I'm putting Acth:On'e's idea to Command."

The theory was comm'ed down to Time Guard Base on the planet below minutes later. After discussion and exploring every other option anyone could think of, Admiral Munro approved cannibalizing Libra and assisting Acth:On'e in his little science project.

Nobody had a better idea.

The next few hours were a blur of feverish activity. Munro's orders were explicit: all efforts were to be bent to building this temporal inverter and assisting Acth:On'e in the work. The entire crew of Libra was drafted into the effort and work proceeded at a good clip. By 2330 hours the next day, the device—about the size of a good-sized lounge sofa—sat on a makeshift pedestal on F deck, surrounded by racks of temporary equipment, enveloped in wiring and wedged in between the lockout chamber and the power plant compartment. Cabling snaked along the floor, down the gangway to the ship's tailpod and into the singularity core housing, where connections were made gingerly to tap into the core.

A few quick tests were made, hardly complete, and Acth:On'e pronounced himself satisfied.

"We can't do an all-up test," he announced, wiping sweat from his forehead as he stowed some tools in a nearby fixbot's belt. The bot scuttled off to the tool crib to re-stack the items. "I don't think it would stand the strain. We'll just have to power up, enable the sensor net and see what happens."

"Captain," asked Nathan Marx, studying the contraption with a skeptical smirk, "are we dropping back to the surface again?"

Andorra shook her head. She had studied and queried Acth:On'e endlessly about the details of his inverter and felt she knew it pretty well now...well enough to do what had to be done later.

"No, Marx, there's isn't time now. Let's see if that gadget works and if it does, we can remote the ANAD borers from here. I'd like to try out Libra's coilguns from a distance too and see if we can't help ANAD along."

TACTRON was sure Landfall would be all for that approach. "The Admiral just sent up a simulated vid of what an impact could do if 'Whack isn't diverted."

"Port it to the crews mess, sir. We'll watch it there."

The vidcon had been set for 1900 hours, ship time, and Andorra fidgeted like a five-year old in the command deck's comm shack, while connections were being made across the interplanetary net. She mentally ticked off bullet points in her mind, prepping herself to brief the participants in crisp, Time Guard fashion. Time was short; the moment was near when she would have to act.

At least the time delays would be minimal. Outtawhack was screaming toward Landfall, drawing closer every day and the comm distances would be annoying but manageable.

No need for subtleties now, she reasoned. We're less than two days from impact and there's only one question that matters: can the time jumpers get Whack split up in time for Landfall to divert it? It was her job to see that they couldn't.

Admiral Munro's dour face came up on one half of the screen. Nygren from Landfall SpaceGuard's Mariner City office occupied the other half of the screen. Kaoru Nakamura, the SpaceGuard engineer at Phoenix Station, orbiting Landfall, filled in a small window next to Nygren.

Munro was impatient. "What's this all about, Captain?"

Andorra squirted her report onto the InterplaNET and let the others study what had happened; the cave-in and the damage to Libra. Transmission delays were less than ten seconds.

"My exec, Commander Marx, says it's not repairable, Admiral. Not out here. We've got some lifeboats, but space is at a premium."

Nygren ran a worried hand through his blond buzzcut. "How much longer to split up, Captain? We're running out of time."

Andorra had just updated the calculations with Libra's ship computer. "At the current dig rate, at least another day, maybe two. Both Marx and I want to pull the teams off the Whack before the final split...use the ship's coilguns to break her up from a distance. The trouble is that Libra's only got maneuvering thrusters, so any separation maneuver will take some time."

Nakamura floated off-screen for a moment, then returned. "I just sent you an analysis we did yesterday of what will happen if the split doesn't work. Run it—"

Andorra watched the animated scenario unfold on her screen. Munro and Nygren also watched.

A mottled, potato-shaped object slammed into Landfall's upper atmosphere in slow-motion, igniting a fiery column of incandescent air all the way to impact. Deceleration forces caused the moon to explode as it slowed down, sending out concentric rings of shock waves around the globe. As Outtawhack plowed into an ocean, a thousand-kilometer wide mushroom cloud billowed outward, following close behind the initial shock waves, excavating billions of tons of seawater and lifting the ejecta plume high into the atmosphere, nearly to the edge of space. Hurricane force winds and the planet's own rotation smeared out the plume and began distributing impact debris around the globe. As the sim went on, a long wintry cloak of dust began to descend over the entire planet, shrouding the world from the rays of star-sun Gliese 876. The sim ended just as mass extinctions and glaciers began bringing continent-wide death to the biosphere.

"Of course, it's just a sim," said Nakamura. "But the scale of effects is quite real. Gentlemen, this...or something very much like it is what we face in the next two days...if we don't get Outtawhack diverted."

"This seems to be a matter of timing," Munro growled.

"I don't want Libra anchored to the surface when the breakup comes," Marx told them. "It's too dangerous."

"You said you have no engines," Munro reminded him.

"I've got maneuvering. When the Captain's team is about a day from breakup, I want to pull Libra back a few kilometers and finish the job with our coilguns."

They could all see the pained expression on Nygren's face. Nakamura didn't look too happy either.

"Commander, there's a risk in what you're proposing. If you don't do the final cut right, Outtawhack may not break up cleanly. Or at all—"

"There's too much risk in staying attached," Andorra insisted. "My ship's already been damaged by debris flying off that moon. I'm not taking any more chances."

"Like I said, it's all in the timing," Munro repeated. "Nygren, what does SpaceGuard think? Can we make 'Whack separate cleanly with coilguns firing from a distance?"

"I'll have to run the calculations...look at the morphology of the surface and strata below that. Your coilguns may not put out enough energy to do the job. I'll get back to you today on what the analysis shows."

"First TD will stay on the ground until we're sure she can be split up," Golich decided. "I've got my teams working around the clock now. I can send progress reports to Nygren and Nakamura every hour, if they want. Video and geo analysis from ANAD."

"Do that," Nakamura said. "That will help us understand the mechanics of the satellite...how close we are to breakup."

"Captain," Munro had made a decision, "get your lifeboats powered up and checked out. But keep the Detachment operating at the surface until you're a day out from intercept. Do our SpaceGuard people think you can divert the pieces that close to Landfall?"

"We've done some scenarios," Nygren admitted. "Based on breaking up 'Whack according to the original plan, our impulse motors can maneuver the remaining pieces away from Landfall intercept up to about a day before. After that, we can't generate the delta-vee to do the job. Inside of a day out...we're going to have an impact...somewhere."

Munro's lips tightened perceptibly.

"Captain Andorra, I'm sure you heard that. We'll just have to do whatever we can to breakup 'Whack before H-hour. Unofficially, I can tell all of you that SpaceGuard is already prepping their ground lasers and killsats...interceptors too—to throw everything at the moon, if it comes to that. The Secretary-General has already had a series of vidcons with other leaders, trying to coordinate evacuation and emergency plans."

"Sir, we have to fix the problem we caused in this time stream," Nathan Golich said. "It was the Time Twister that likely triggered the Rift to erupt in the first place. I don't want to take another chance with the Twister, not until we see what effect Acth:On'e's inverter has on the Rift."

"Agreed," Munro decided. "Keep your ANADs working and we'll make a final decision at one day out."

Early results from the temporal phase inverter were encouraging. Every time a wavefront erupted from the Rift, the inverter countered with an opposing wavefront, powered by the cannibalized singularity core from Libra herself. When this happened, the air inside Libra seemed to shudder and burn as the worldlines collided, and neither Golich nor M'Bela could ever get used to the jolt that slammed them as the waves washed over and through each other. At first, seeing Queenie M'Bela's head and Golich's arms divide into slices, and multiply exponentially seemed funny, then just weird, but after awhile, the effect made you sick and you had to close your eyes. Worldlines grew madly, then collapsed just as suddenly as time streams became kinked and coiled and knotted in the interference effects of the inverter.

But it seemed to be working, for down on the surface of Outtawhack, the borer swarms were able to continue their digs. Bit by bit, in a race against the inexorable physics of gravity and orbital mechanics, the satellite was being chewed up.

But whether the satellite could ever be separated into manageable chunks that Landfall SpaceGuard could divert was another question. It would be a very close call and Golich knew that if the satellite could not be steered away from impacting Landfall, it was likely that millions would die.

Golich went to back his quarters to make a few notes for a report to Captain Dringoth, if they ever got back to time stream T-001. After a time, he nodded off to a light doze, then awoke with a start when he realized he had slept for several hours. Disgusted, he decided to check out the galley and see what was edible.

But before he could exit the crews' berth on C deck into the gangway tunnel, a shadow had drifted by the hatch opening. Instinctively, he held back to let whoever it was pass by.

It turned out to be Captain Andorra moving quickly aft.

When asked about the incident later, Nathan Golich could never give a convincing reason for why he decided to follow the skipper to wherever she was going. Instinct, maybe. Suspicion, for sure. Curiosity. All these were suggested as motives for what he had done.

Regardless, Golich waited for a full five-second count, then slipped out into the gangway. Down at the end of the tunnel that ran through the center of Libra, giving access to all decks and compartments, he saw the back of Andorra's head. She turned and slipped into the hatch for G deck.

Wonder why she's going that way, he wondered. G deck was for Ingress/Egress. It contained the lockout chamber for crewmen to enter and leave the ship while she was underway. Golich instinctively headed down the gangway in the same direction. G deck also provided access to Libra's tail pod, where equipment and controls were housed for her singularity core, propulsor plants, the collapser generator and flowvater and rudder controls.

Not to mention the inverter.

Golich crept down the gangway with a growing sense of unease. He could feel the ship humming with her normal vibration.

If anything went wrong in here—

At G deck hatch, Golich peered cautiously into the deck compartment. At first, he didn't see anything, didn't see Andorra, didn't see anything out of the ordinary. He wasn't even sure non-ship personnel were allowed down here. It was similar to Cygnus, but he certainly wasn't familiar with all of the gear or systems on G deck.

He slipped through the hatch.

That's when Jump Commander Nathan Golich spotted Captain Felicia Andorra. Behind the starboard propulsor housing, Andorra...or whatever the hell she was...had lost a bit of structure, so that the swarm was no longer quite so human-like, more like a slightly misshapen funhouse mirror distortion of a human. The swarm had gathered around some gear mounted on the hull itself.

With a start, Golich soon realized that Andorra had been an angel all along and the gear which had attracted her attention and efforts was part of Acth:On'e's inverter assembly.

How the hell could I--?

A cold rock settled into his stomach. What the hell is she doing? Golich wondered. He eased into the deck compartment and then it hit him.

Felicia Andorra was letting some of her swarm bots infest the inverter.

His heart went into his mouth. He had to do something. He had to stop her.

Nathan Golich felt for the alarm panel by the hatch and stabbed the Master Alarm button. Instantly, a warning klaxon sounded throughout Libra, screeching and warbling through all decks.

Andorra turned around and spotted him. He saw that her hand was gone...or more accurately, had broken down into a cloud of bots. A steady stream was flowing off the stump at the end of her arm into the inverter assembly.

There was only one thing he could do. All the HERF and mag weapons were locked in the armory on D deck, three levels away.

Golich slapped his web belt capsule open and the embedded ANAD swarm inside was released. A small stream of bots, looking like a fine mist, flowed out, filling the hatch.

He shook his head just so and the quantum coupler circuit was open.

"Assume config eight...max reps...all effectors enabled—" he commanded. Then he flipped open his wristpad viewer and went small, preparing to engage the Andorra swarm at the only scale where it mattered: nanoscale.

Nathan Golich went over the 'waterfall' and quickly found himself in a sleet of polygons and tetrahedrals. ANAD's propulsors spun up to full power and he sounded ahead, hunting for the signatures he knew had to be there.

The only sure way to kill a swarm was with another swarm. He'd learned that on day one in jolt school tactical class. Especially a Coethi swarm.

It was high time to kick the bejeezus out of this scumbag swarm.

Nathan Marx was scrolling through some notes on the Rift in his bunk when the master alarm sounded through the ship. Instantly, he sprang up and headed out into Libra's central gangway. As he headed aft toward the sound of the klaxon, he collided with Evelyn M'Bela, coming down from B deck.

"What the hell's going on?"

"It's coming from G deck...there are vital systems down there. Come on—" Marx pushed past both of them and pulled himself along the gangway rails. When he got to the hatch, he slipped inside and came up short.

Half the compartment was enveloped in some kind of bot swarm. And Nathan Golich was crouched behind some pallets nearby, steering his own embedded swarm into engagement.

Marx saw the problem right away. The inverter was fully enveloped in a swarm. Even worse, already a thin stream of air was already shrieking out of the compartment.

The Andorra swarm had weakened part of the ship's hull.

"The lockout valves—watch out!"

Even as Golich dove head first for Andorra, the lockout valve gave way and high-pressure air screeched through the compartment in an ear-splitting whine. M'Bela was knocked off her feet completely. Golich plowed into Andorra, or what was left of Andorra, for by now the Captain had almost fully dematerialized into a cloud of bots, filling one corner of G deck with a flashing, pulsating fog. Air screamed across the compartment floor, knocking equipment off nearby shelves, scattering pallets of gear and rapidly filling the compartment.

Through it all, the Master Alarm klaxon shrieked.

"Get into your EAB hoods!" Marx shouted. "I'm venting the pod!"

The emergency air breathing hoods were quick-use pressurized pods that could be actuated and donned in seconds; every time jumper went through annual quals to remain proficient on how they worked. As fast as they could, Marx, M'Bela and Golich triggered the hoods and slipped inside, even as the Andorra swarm continued disassembling the inverter and parts of the inner hull of the ship. Auto-isolate circuits had already sealed off the deck from the rest of Libra.

Marx yelled out, "The deck's going to be vented to space in about ten seconds...hopefully the vacuum will pull these bugs out of Libra for good. Suit up and buddy-check every connection."

"She has to be Coethi," Golich said. "And she was here all along...we never suspected."

There was a flurry of activity around the gangway and tailpod as the jumpers made ready.

Marx gave them the count. "On my mark, I'm cycling the lockout in the tailpod...the whole compartment will be exposed first...hold on to something...there'll be a bit of a breeze...five...four...three...two...one...mark! Lockout valves to open... NOW!"

There was a short sharp shriek, then popping sounds as Libra's interior bulkheads flexed in the pressure drop. Then came the hurricane—

Golich had positioned himself with M'Bela just opposite what was left of the inverter. Over the DPS tech's shoulder, he could see the boiling cloud that was all that was left of the Andorra swarm, now flickering and flashing in the back of the compartment.

"Watch your head, Queenie—" Something long and sharp—it turned out to be a broken piece of cargo skid—went whistling by their heads, banging into the access hatch to the tailpod, where her powerplant was located. Soon, the deck was enveloped in a gale of debris, mostly pieces and particles, now flowing toward the lockout, steadily being sucked out into space.

"Hold on, Queenie—" Golich grabbed a stanchion by the hatch. The force of the evacuation wasn't all that great, but you could easily lose balance, if you weren't careful...or get a piece of equipment in your faceplate. Jeez, Marx should've told the knuckleheads to lash everything down—

The Andorra swarm was already shredded by the pressure drop. The cloud of bots looked like a big hand had crushed it on one side. By the trillion, bots streamed toward the open lockout and out into space, an undulating flickering line in the air, thinning steadily as the ship's air vented. The swarm darkened and shrank visibly with every passing moment. Soon, only a few twinkles and sparkles drifted in the air.

Got to get every last one of those bastards, Marx told himself. Then, we'll have to go over every friggin' surface in the ship to make sure. Even one Andorra bot could, in time, replicate the whole swarm all over again. He was already mad at himself for not suspecting Andorra earlier...there had been moments....

For good measure, Marx had Golich and M'Bela hose down the tailpod with more mag fire, trying to zap every last bot that might still be clinging to a bulkhead or pallet. He borrowed a HERF gun and let loose a few thunderclaps of rf himself, thankfully muffled in the near-vacuum conditions of the gangway.

Finally, he pronounced himself satisfied. "Okay, start probing...for anything. EMs, thermal, acoustic, atom fluff...anything. I don't want a single atom of left. Start here inside the tailpod." He got on the crewnet and said, "All troops...listen up! Get into probe mode right now. Start from A deck forward and work your way aft. Sound and probe...every surface, every hatch, every compartment, every drawer and container. Look everywhere and I mean everywhere. While we're still attached to the surface, we're going to sanitize this ship of every last molecule of Coethi bot. This ship will be clean by—"he checked his watch, "0700 hours. That's two hours from now."

The Detachment grimly set to work.

Sanitizing Libra while wearing hypersuits proved to be a tedious and fatiguing task, taking about three hours in all. While Marx detailed other crewmembers to monitor boring ops on the surface, he set to work, compartment by compartment, probing and scanning for any last bots left over from the Coethi infiltration that had once been Captain Felicia Andorra.

In each compartment, the approach was the same: scan for heat blooms or electromagnetic signatures of atomic activity, listen in for any acoustic "burbles" that could indicate nanobotic signaling or processor crunching, probe for unusual atomic profiles...discarded phosphate backbones or sugar groups, anything at all out of the ordinary. It was laborious and time-consuming.

After the initial scans, each compartment would be HERF'ed multiple times to crush any bots undetected, then hosed down with magnetic pulse fire and scanned again.

"Jeez—" said Lucy Tabora, "--my bunk at K-World isn't this clean."

"Tell me about it," said Fatima Farhad, "—we can smell it a kilometer away."

Hours later, Marx decided they had done enough. But precious time had been lost and Landfall now loomed larger than ever in the forward portholes.

It was way past time for Libra to get the hell away from the falling hulk of Outtawhack while she still could.

Marx got on the crewnet. "Second TD, this is the Exec...listen up—" throughout the ship, in every compartment, jumpers were de-suiting, stowing gear, jamming equipment into lockers, securing loose items, cussing and swearing and making obscene gestures at the battered, pock-marked surface half a kilometer below them.

"—get everything squared away by 1730 hours...you've got half an hour. Strap in and hold on. Libra's going to cut anchor lines and back off two klicks on proximity thrusters. Then we're going to blast this sumbitch to kingdom come."

Shouts and hoots and more swearing erupted in every compartment.

"Kick asteroid ass!" yelled Juan Cepeda.

Evelyn M'Bela pumped her fists in the air. "Yeah...let's make cereal outta this berg—scorch the place!"

Golich heard some of the jeers over the crewnet. He finished cinching up his own shoulder and lap harness, giving them one last tug.

"First TD prepped and ready, Commander. You may commence operations."

Marx and Farhad were at the command station up front. Through the portholes, they had a panoramic view of Outtawhack, now rolling over like a sick potato on a spit, rolling into deep shadow as it rotated and gyrated and nutated toward Landfall.

"Give me a five-second count on my mark, Fatima," Marx commanded. "Arm anchor line pyros—"

"Pyros armed," Farhad came back.

"Mark—" he twisted a hand controller. "I'm thrusting up and away—"

"Five...four...three...two..."

"Full slack on the cables—"

"...one...punch it, Juan!"

Marx stabbed a button on a side panel. A staccato clanging sounded through the hull of the command deck, as one by one, the five anchor lines were explosively severed. They watched as the five spider webs pulled sharply down and away, whipped through space by the moon's nine-hour rotation. At the same moment, Libra's jets puffed briefly and the huge watermelon of a ship drifted outward, fast enough to avoid being snagged by the anchor lines.

"Lines away and clear, Skipper," said Lucy Tabora. Both crewmembers breathed a long-held breath. It had been a ticklish operation, fraught with possible catastrophe.

"We're backing on proximity thrust...two point five meters per second...nulling all rates—"

The entire maneuver took about an hour. The ship pulled out to a distance of nearly two kilometers and hovered in the moon's weak gravity field as 'Whack continued her slow rotation below them.

"Coilgun status, Fatima," Marx inquired.

Farhad checked the board. "All four tubes ready in all respects, Commander. We have a full magazine...sixty-four shots in all. All coils are charged. First rounds loaded."

Marx turned back to Golich, who was strapped into a jump seat behind the main control deck. "I've got the cannon bore-sighted on Bravo site, Commander. Would you care to make a final check of my alignment?"

"With pleasure," Golich said. He slid up to the targeting scope and peered in. The crosshairs were centered on the lower end of Odin's Fissure. In the scope, the fissure was a deeply shadowed, sinuous crack in 'Whack's surface, spilling out of rugged upcountry near Loki crater, then trending down-sun across a rubbly plain, centered like a dagger between two parallel ridges.

If all went well, if ANAD's boring had gone deep enough, if the geo's analysis of Whack's composition were right... if...if...if...Golich realized he had stopped breathing. He forced himself to relax.

This had to work.

"I believe you are centered and targeted properly, Commander. The rounds have to hit the fissure pretty much dead on."

"I've still got your grid to guide me in," Marx told him. "I can adjust the trajectory of the rounds in flight if I want to, although the traverse will take less than a second. I'm trying to fly right down the throat of that fissure. Commander, I'm planning to do this in stages. I'm salvoing three rounds at first—that's twelve shots—at Bravo site, then we'll check and see what damage we've done. If there's no detectable breach at the fissure, I'm salvoing three more rounds...that's a total of twenty-four ferro-mag projectiles. I'll keep hammering at Bravo until we can detect some kind of measurable separation along that fissure. I've got sixty-four rounds in all, so I have to save some for the other sites. But I don't want Outtawhack flying apart in some uncontrolled fashion. Libra has extremely limited maneuverability. We do this right and, assuming your ANAD's done his job, we can sever one whole end of her clean off from the main body."

"Commander, First TD did our job, you can count on that." Golich said it with more conviction than he really felt. He ignored a sideways glance from Evelyn M'Bela. "You may commence firing when ready."

Marx turned back to his control station and flexed his fingers like a concert pianist one last time. He did a quick recon of the board. Everything was clean and green.

"Fatima, fire the first round. All tubes."

Libra had four coilgun tubes in a pod mounted to the top of her command deck. From head-on, the weapons pod made the ship's command sphere look like a rooster's mane. The pod was sighted in on Odin's Fissure and the Bravo dig site.

"Fire in the hole!" Farhad announced.

A sharp rippling crack sounded through the hull as all four tubes discharged at once. At the same instant, a brief light flash lit up the cockpit.

Four ferro-magnetic explosive projectiles slashed away from Libra and a split second later, slammed into the fissure head on, having traversed the intervening two kilometers at forty-four thousand kilometers an hour.

A white flash erupted from the surface of Outtawhack, followed over the next few moments by a billowing plume of rubble, rock and ejecta, mushrooming in slow motion out into the vacuum.

Golich silently prayed that ANAD had bored deep enough to expose bedrock to Libra's guns.

This has to work, he told himself, over and over again. We won't get a second chance. This has to work....

"Measuring separation...I am seeing a little," Fatima Farhad announced. She had a scope on the target zone. "Maybe a few meters...more at the lower end of the Fissure."

"Okay, let's do another round," Marx announced. The coilgun was recycled, coils re-charged, new shots loaded.

"Fire it!"

The flash-snap! crackled through the hull again and another mushroom two kilometers below them announced the impact.

"What's she look like now?" Marx asked.

Nathan Golich put the targeting scope on the impact site. Most of the ground was obscured by dust and rubble, thick and slow-moving like a ground fog in the moon's minute gravity field. "Hard to tell...give me a radar pulse."

Marx stabbed a button and electromagnetic fingers reached out across the void to kiss the surface. "Possible change in aspect ratio...there must be something in motion down there."

"Yeah, lots of rock from the looks of it. Sorry, Commander, but I think we're going to need another round."

"Let's make it a half round this time," he decided. "We need to conserve shots for the other sites. Fatima, re-cycle the gun but load two shots this time."

Farhad did as Marx ordered. "Guns ready, Commander."

"Fire."

A sizzling flash-snap! sounded through the hull once more.

Golich watched as the white flash and the plume erupted off the surface, geysering in slow motion upward and outward into space.

It was Evelyn M 'Bela who saw the first signs of the breach. "Something's going on...right near Loki crater—look! See that rubble cloud spalling off? It's breaking up—"

Marx studied the radar return. "Measurable breach this time. I'm getting a possible aspect change."

"Look at that debris!" said Farhad. "Beautiful...just beautiful!"

Outtawhack was still turning slowly, like a roasting potato on a spit. But now, one entire end of the moon was separating in slow motion from the main body. All along the cleft of Odin's Fissure, the moon was calving off a part of itself. Immutable forces of rotation were finishing the job first started by ANAD and helped by Libra's coilguns. Whack was shedding an entire up-sun third of its body. The severed end hung together by seams of rock for a few minutes, enveloped in a swelling cloud of rubble. But the centrifugal force of the moon's rotation, combined with extra gyrations from its nutating wobble, corkscrewed the severed end away and it finally separated.

"We did it!" exulted M'Bela. She pumped a fist in the air. "We chopped the bugger right off—"

"Queenie—wait a minute...look..."

"I don't believe it...of all the—"

Even as the partitioned end of Whack spun lazily away in an expanding fog of rubble and rock, a new fissure quickly opened up. Opposite what had been Odin's Fissure on the other side of Loki crater, a new seam had suddenly developed, a new crack.

"The mantle must have been weak there," Golich theorized. "She couldn't hold together when the breach came."

"Yeah, angular momentum made sure of that," Farhad added. "Her rotation increased and that must have stressed a pre-existing fissure."

The newly created body, spinning and wobbling away from what was left of Outtawhack, now calved off another section. The oblong chunk ran for hundreds of meters along a stress line that curved around the lower ridges of Loki crater. The small berg looked like a skullcap with fingers of rock sticking out into space.

"This isn't good news, folks," Farhad announced. "There's no impulse motor on that piece. It's just a loose rockberg spinning around in space."

Marx was already on the comm. "I'd better advise SpaceGuard...Time Guard too. Without impulse arrays on that piece, there's no way to divert it from impact. Maybe killsats can zap it but it's going to be close."

"Let's hope it'll spin away from Landfall...maybe just skim off the upper atmosphere. All those people down there—"

Left unsaid was a tactic that had come to Golich's mind, a last-ditch desperation maneuver he hoped no one else would think of, if it was even possible. Libra might have just enough maneuvering propellant to bump the extra piece and nudge it away from Landfall herself. But that would require somebody to stay on board and run the ship.

It was a silly idea anyway.

They watched the two severed pieces for a few moments. Both had picked up unusual torques in the breaching process and so spun, wobbled, and tumbled with crazy gyrations as they slowly separated from the main body of Outtawhack.

The moon itself, now shorn of roughly a third of its mass, had increased its own rotation rate as well.

"Whack looks like a drunken dancer now...that end wobble has picked up," M'Bela noted. "She's really nutating...can you sight in on Asgard?"

Marx watched the rump satellite gyrating like a spinning child's top for a few moments. The yawning fracture that was the Chasm of Asgard turned below them like a black seam stitched across the jagged up-sun end of the moon.

"I don't know...with that kind of rate, we'll have to pick our moment. Plus there's an extra wobble now. That'll make targeting a bitch...but we have to try. Let me study one full rotation, see if I can pick my spot."

Farhad interrupted. "I've got Nakamura on the vid, Commander. Landfall Ops wants all the data they can get on the smaller body."

Marx saw the pale face of Kaoru Nakamura on the vid...floating in micro-g aboard Phoenix Station. The station had been established in a halo orbit about Landfall's L3 point several years before.

"We've gotten radar off the smaller body—we're calling it Whack-D—from Aristarchus Array just a few minutes ago," Nakamura was saying. "Geos say it's pretty light in mass, maybe just a loose rubble cloud. There's a chance it may break up if it hits Landfall's atmosphere."

"We could try a few more coilgun bursts after our next breaching shot," Marx offered. "Maybe that would help D break up faster."

Nakamura advised caution. "Let the geos run with the data for a few hours...it's close enough to do spectrum analysis on...we can get a better handle on its composition then. We saw the vids of the first breach...good work, Libra. Good shooting. And thanks to Time Guard too; I'm sure the ANAD digs helped that process. You're targeting Asgard now?"

"As we speak, Phoenix," Marx said. "But the first breach imparted quite a dramatic wobble to Whack. It's tumbling around like my son's football passes now. I'm not sure I can get an accurate shot at Asgard...and we don't have that much left in our magazine."

"Currently, we make you at about six seven two thousand miles from Landfall. Aristarchus is giving us velocity and position updates every half hour. You're approaching the planet at just under 14,000 miles per hour. That puts impact in a few minutes less than twenty-six hours...just over two days. By the way, if you can, translate Libra more toward the down-sun end of the moon. We're going to be operating the impulse motors on the piece that has them...the one with the polar arrays. I don't want the ship to be in the line of fire of the pellet stream."

"Roger that," Marx said. "We'll move down-sun. But I can't go too far off axis from Asgard...I've got to take the best shot I can when I have it."

"Agreed. Just be advised we'll be operating the impulse motors within the hour. SpaceGuard wants to divert that piece as soon as we can."

"Understood...Libra out." Marx punched in the new position to the ship's maneuvering computer. "This should put us about halfway between the Chasm of Asgard and Freya crater."

"Fabulous country," said M'Bela. "I'd like to build a vacation home there."

"Fatima, what's our magazine like?"

"Twenty-four rounds," Farhad told him. "Plus four loaded. That's it."

Marx studied the terrain below as the ship's computers translated Libra to its new firing position. "Your opinion, Commander. Best targets inside that Chasm--?"

Golich discussed the targeting with Farhad. "You were at the site, Fatima. You had the grid. Where do we shoot?"

Farhad didn't hesitate. She pointed out an area a few hundred meters away from Thor crater. "See where the Chasm widens out...you can still see some of our garbage scattered around the dig site. ANAD boring was deepest there. Shoot there."

Marx swung his targeting scope around to zero in on the location. He pressed a few buttons to slave the coilgun array to those coordinates.

"Coilguns enabled?"

"Armed and ready, Commander."

"Do it, Fatima. Now."

Farhad pressed the firing button. The staccato bang of guns discharging rippled through the command deck hull. Almost at the same instant, a bright white plume of rubble and dust erupted from the dim recesses of Asgard Chasm, geysering out into space like a slow-motion plant blooming.

Golich operated the radar to measure lateral separation across the Chasm at the impact site. "Minimal change...I think we just vaporized a canyon wall...landslide going on now. Can you tweak your aim a little bit uphill, into those shadows at the 'Y'?"

"I'll try," Marx muttered. "But remember the bugger's rotating. I'm trying to hit a moving target here...and there's still debris from the first shots fogging up the ground view. It'll take a few minutes for that stuff to fall out."

He made the adjustments and fired another salvo of four rounds. This time, the plume erupted into a massive boiling cloud of rubble, several times wider than the first.

"You hit something...a gas pocket, maybe," M'Bela watched. "It's venting like the dickens."

"I see some separation now," Golich said. "She's beginning to breach...several meters per second—"

"Look...another seam," Farhad pointed out. "See to the left, back toward Heldof crater?"

"Crap...of all the rotten—" Golich said. "I don't believe it. This rock pile's nothing but loose rubble. It may tear itself into a dozen pieces."

They continued watching for a few moments, as the moon rotated below them, now enveloped in a debris field that sparkled and shone in the sunshine. The dig site at Asgard continued to widen, as centrifugal forces tore at Outtawhack's innards, flinging off boulders and smaller chunks. Soon, that end of the moon hung only by a few loose seams of rock, wobbling like a broken child's top.

"Designating main body as Whack-A," Marx said. "Largest bodies are now Whack-A, B, C and D."

"Commander, there aren't enough letters in the alphabet to name all those pieces. I just hope most of that junk burns up in Landfall's atmosphere."

Marx was grim. "We'd better let SpaceGuard know what's happened."

Aboard SpaceGuard's Phoenix L3 Station, the Ops center was in an uproar. Kaoru Nakamura oversaw a small platoon of technicians scrambling to power up impulse motors on the surface of Outtawhack...or what was left of it.

Nakamura shook his head at the radar plots. Aristarchus and SpaceGuard were now tracking no less than twenty chunks of Whack leftovers.

"What the hell are they doing up there?" he wondered out loud. "Every sim we did had the burg splitting cleanly along—"

"—excuse me, sir," interrupted Jonas, a nearby tech working the maneuvering console. "Polar arrays on Whack-C are powered up. Loader bank and grid charged. The bots are giving us a good stream of material."

Nakamura knew they couldn't afford to wait. "Advise Libra once more. Tell them to stand off several kilometers, at least. We're firing in less than five minutes...start the count."

"Yes, sir." Jonas pecked out a few commands and set up the maneuver. "Estimating twenty-two point one meters per second, total delta-vee over a nominal one-hour burn, sir."

"Very well...we'll fire for an hour and re-plot. What about the other pieces?"

Jonas checked the board. "We have plots on Whack A, B, C and D, from Aristarchus and SpaceGuard. There are impulse motors on A, B and C. D's a lost cause...it's going to hit in less than twenty-six hours. And Plot's giving us returns on a lot of other pieces up there...twenty in all."

Nakamura had queried his computer to display the original composition of Outtawhack, as determined by the first scoutships. "Must have more seams of volatiles than we allowed for. That could explain the explosive breaching Libra's reporting."

"Yes, sir...she was chosen for volatiles. Outworlds needed the oxygen, hydrogen and carbon and other similar elements."

"I remember. What was good fortune two years ago isn't so good now." Nakamura was in a quandary about what to do next. "Get Landfall Ops on the line. I need to let them now there will definitely be impactors."

"One minute to firing, sir."

Polamalu was the comm tech, an island kid who had grown up in Rongalu in Landfall's Western Sea, joined Time Guard as a recruit and washed out of jolt school. He'd signed on for a stint at Phoenix L3 to get his spacelegs, with an eye toward applying again in a few years.

'Pollie' worked his board, ported the vid to Nakamura's station one level up. "It's Ops, sir. Admiral Munro's office on screen one."

The Guard local base commander's face looked like an old hide leathery and beaten with worry. "Phoenix, what's going on? I'm getting SpaceGuard reports we still have impactors undiverted."

"That's correct, Admiral. We're getting ready to divert one piece now. But Outtawhack seems to have shattered as it breached under Libra's coilgun fire. Carbonaceous bodies are like that...really just loose rubble piles, dirty snow cones. That's why we started mining Whack in the first place."

Munro winced like he'd been shot. "Give me the details. "What's going to hit?"

Nakamura went down the list. "Biggest worry is a piece we're calling Whack-D. We have no divert capability for it. It broke off away from any of our impulse motors. This one came from the up-sun end, breached off and spun away from the Odin's Fissure site. I've just talked with our geos...they're saying the whole moon's probably riven with seams of volatiles, just waiting to be exposed to Gliese. Whack-D is about seventy meters in longest dimension...I'm getting projections from Plot coming in right now...looks like entry velocity will be about 26,400 kilometers per hour. Estimated impact point is in the Western Scablands, in the desert near the Quetta border. "

Munro winced at the thought. "I'll let UNSAC know. The Secretary-General will have to issue a broad-area alert. We still have a day...mass evacuations will help but we don't have a lot of time. What about the other pieces?"

"—thirty seconds to firing, sir—" It was Polamalu.

"We're preparing now to operate impulse motors on Whack-C. Aristarchus should be able to give us a new plot after an hour's firing. Whack-B breached intact and we have motors sited there. But Whack-A shattered when Libra fired...Plot is following some twenty pieces out of that. Our impulse array is on one of them but the others—"

Munro was realistic about what was coming. "A primary object that big will create one hell of an impact. Shock waves, heat, probably a tsunami in every ocean...I'm authorizing Quantum Corps to develop and execute ANAD operations around the Central Ocean basin...erecting a tsunami barrier might just cut down on the death and devastation. It'll have to be done at Big Bang scale to work...but that can't be helped. We don't have a lot of time." And Time Guard will get one hell of a black eye with the Alliance over this one, he didn't have to add.

"SpaceGuard is estimating a Level 9 impact on the Torino scale, sir." Nakamura watched the final seconds tick off to impulse motor firing at Whack-C. "Admiral, excuse me, I've got to monitor the burn."

"Very well, Phoenix...keep me advised. Munro, out." The vid blanked out to a stylized Time Guard logo...the sunburst and spiral logo. Nakamura briefly imagined that's what Whack-D would look like at the moment of impact.

"Five seconds, sir...four...three...two...one...executing now—"

All of the impulse arrays had vid systems embedded in their controller mounts. The screens shook slightly from vibration and much of the view was obscured by rubble and dust clouds stirred up from breaching a few hours before.

Nakamura, Jonas and Polamalu watched as the launcher rail belched a stream of pellets, first one, then another, then another in a thickening stream which soon blurred into a continuous flow of shaped rounds, all expelled at twenty thousand kilometers an hour by the electromagnetic cannon.

"Stream coming up nicely...rate is nominal, mass nominal...looks like a good start, sir."

"Pan around, Pollie. I want to see the rest of the array, especially the feeder."

"Panning now, sir." Polamalu operated the vid cameras with a small joystick. Whack was now close enough to Landfall to enable real-time control of the burn.

From a distance, each impulse motor array resembled a giant T embedded in the rocky surface of the moon. From her place of origin further out in the Gliese system, Outtawhack had been steered into orbit around Landfall for mining decades ago. Now at both ends of the top of the "T" were open pits excavated by robotic borers, feeding surface rock into crusher/processor stations. The crushers prepared raw surface stock for transfer along conveyor lines to the T's intersection with its leg. There, under the watchful eyes of its controller station, the shaped pellets were transferred through a charging grid into a loader bank. Now fully magnetized, the pellets, each roughly the shape of a small ball, were fed into the launcher chamber and accumulated into a shot. When the controller signaled firing, the magnetized shot was expelled by sequentially collapsing magnetic fields, slinging small masses away from the moon at up to twenty-thousand kilometers per hour. Total delta-vee was small with each shot...at best, a few tenths of meter per second but the impulse motor could operate for long periods, days at a time, slinging shots of rock off the moon, and so build up large delta-vees over time.

The trouble was they no longer had a lot of time. And Whack-C was deep in the Landfall's gravity well, accelerating every second.

Nakamura studied the imagery from Pollie's pan. "Borers, crushers, loaders, it all looks good. Magnetrons?"

Jonas checked readouts from the controller. "Charging to seventy-thousand gauss, right on the money."

"First results from Plot coming in, sir," said Polamalu. "Aristarchus is showing measurable delta-vee...just a fraction of a meter per second, but detectable. Rough projection: Whack-C will skim the upper atmosphere, possibly bounce off."

"Okay," said Nakamura," we're not done yet. Start setup on Whack-B, Pollie. Get the arrays warmed up. We're not home free."

Marx trained the scope on the rubble and rock cloud that had once been Outtawhack. Irregular pieces drifted away from Libra, some from impulse motor firing triggered by SpaceGuard, some from the usual bump and grind of a disintegrating asteroid. The larger chunks spat streams of pellets formed by the impulse arrays, looking for all the world like spider webs in the bright sunshine.

Backdropping the asteroid's breakup was the cloudy blue and white face of Landfall itself, now less than a day away.

To Marx, it was now problematic whether the larger pieces, now slowly being nudged off course, would develop enough delta-vee to miss Landfall.

Whatever happens, we'll have a ringside seat, he thought to himself.

Marx folded up the nav scope and began his part of the power-down procedure. Farhad was with him on the command deck, paralleling Marx's work. The two of them had several pages of checklists to go through to safe the ship before they departed.

A moment later, Nathan Golich's face floated up on deck between the flight stations.

Marx carefully finished his procedure. "Commander, we've done all we can do up here. Get your people moving...all hands lay aft to the mess compartment. I want to go through the abandon-ship procedure and divvy up the lifeboat assignments, make sure we don't leave anybody behind." He gazed out the forward windscreen at the approaching disk of Landfall. "I'm afraid Libra's not long for this world now."

Golich understood. "We'll be assembled by 0630 hours. Full suits?"

"The works. And keep all that extra gear to a minimum...it's going to be a tight enough squeeze as it is. We've got two lifeboats designed for six and now three extra crew, with your people."

"Acknowledged." Golich ducked out of the command deck and drifted aft to the transfer tunnel. He got on the crewnet.

"First TD...this is Golich, listen up. It's time to load up. Leave all your gear behind but get into your tin cans and button up. Briefing in the mess hall in half an hour. Golich, OUT."

"NOW HEAR THIS—" Marx's voice boomed over the intercom. "ABANDON SHIP BRIEFING IN THE MESS HALL...STARTING NOW!"

The mess compartment was jammed with jumpers in full hypersuits and crewmen floating at every angle, in every corner. Marx and Golich were leading the briefing, both hanging onto the drink dispenser up front.

"Here are the lifeboat assignments," Marx was saying. "We've got two. For some reason, we call them A and B." He read off the assignments. Golich was assigned to B Boat, along with M'Bela, Acth:On'e and Fatima Farhad.

"Commander," asked Luganin from the back, "what about URME...and TACTRON?"

Marx said, "Both of you are angels. Collapse yourself down to a small swarm...we'll put you in capsules. You'll be on Lifeboat A, with me."

TACTRON started to object but the view of Landfall gaining in size through the porthole stilled his questions. "Very well...as you wish. But there will be a formal investigation when this is all over." With that, he started deconstructing himself, sloughing off all useless bots and swiftly dispersing into a faint mist. Lucy Tabora did the capture, shutting the containment capsule closed with a firm click.

"Safest I've felt since we got here," someone said. Tabora hooked the capsule onto her web belt.

URME did the same.

Juan Cepeda had a question. "How long does this drop take?"

Marx shrugged. "Who knows? It's not going to be easy, I know that. These lifeboats are just basically big cans with oxygen and seats. Extremely limited maneuverability. Basically, you'll be making a ballistic entry...in fact, you may hit seven or eight G's on the way down. We haven't had time to do much more than a quick check of systems on these boats. So to answer your question, Juan, the best answer is: it depends. Each boat's going to make this entry differently. A nominal profile should put you on the ground in half an hour after hitting the upper atmosphere...entry interface. About a hundred kilometers above ground."

"And we are headed for ground, aren't we, Commander?" asked Tabora. "As in... solid ground. What's our projected landing point?"

"Central Quetta, the main continent," Marx said. "Landfall Ops and SpaceGuard both say we're headed for an elliptical landing zone near Willigong...mostly desert I'm told but at least there's a lot of it. Of course, as I said, every ship will enter the atmosphere slightly differently. Your landing sites could be scattered all over the place."

"I guess that about covers it," Golich announced. "Stay in your suits all the way to the ground. I can't guarantee these boats will hold up. But it's the best we have." His lips tightened, thinking of the big ship's fate, looking over at Marx and the 2nd TD crew. "Libra's doomed. But she was a good ship. And we're lucky we have any lifeboats."

"Okay, jumpers...let's move out!" Marx hooked up with his lifeboat crewmates as they drifted down the central gangway.

Libra's lifeboats were docked to a ring between the command deck and the Hab and crew deck. With a great deal of jostling and thumping, the hypersuited jumpers pushed down the central gangway in a tense silence and boarded their assigned boats.

Atmosphere entry was less than an hour away.

Golich took the pilot's seat of Lifeboat B with M'Bela beside him. Acth:On'e and Farhad were squeezed in behind them. It was like being in a closet, four suited jumpers in a space designed for three.

"Powering up," Golich announced. "Auto sep in ten minutes." He checked with the other boat, coordinating and synchronizing.

As Golich went through his departure checklist, M'Bela stared grimly at the changing cloudscape three hundred and twenty kilometers below them. It was just dawn. The day-night terminator was sliding westward like a great curtain, revealing the dappled surface of the Western Ocean, with the tan and ocher sand dunes of the Great Red Desert rolling into view.

Acth:On'e shook his head. He'd just caught a final glimpse of one of Outtawhack's segments out the porthole.

"My inverter never really had a proper test. I'll miss that," he said to no one in particular.

M'Bela said, "Hey, don't shed any tears, Acth. Your inverter kept the Rift off our backs long enough to bore through that rockpile. It worked fine."

Acth:On'e lips tightened. "Maybe I can do a Mark II version...I've got some ideas on improvements."

"One minute to auto separation," Golich told them. "Check your harnesses. Go to max on your suit oxygen. Close your visors and button up. This is likely to get hairy before we're all done."

The separation maneuver was a series of loud bangs, followed by a mild jolt as B Boat undocked cleanly. Her aft thrusters fired briefly to put her on a path up and away from Libra. M'Bela spotted the other lifeboat out of the corner of her eye. A Boat seemed to have made the separation cleanly. Golich soon confirmed that.

"Both boats away...that's a good start." Golich had piloted B Boat on a curving path that soon put Libra below and ahead of them. "We don't want to be anywhere around her when she starts breaking up," he explained.

Thirty minutes later, Libra was a speck of light and Golich was busily configuring the cramped little ship for their imminent plunge into the atmosphere.

"I make us at about one five six kilometers above entry point," he said. "Setting up for ballistic entry now."

M'Bela stared out the porthole beside her head. The west coast of Quetta—Landfall's largest continent, though it was mostly desert-- had just drifted into view, streaked with ruddy desert and deep brown blotches. Comforting thought, she told herself. At least we have land under our feet.

"How well does this garbage can fly?" piped up Fatima Farhad.

Golich maneuvered them around to make entry, flying with their backs to Landfall.

"About like a garbage can," he replied. "I've got an offset center of lift, so I can roll us left and right and shift the trajectory that way, if I want. Beyond that, we're basically making a big dive into the atmosphere."

Acth:On'e was strapped in next to Farhad. "I just hope we stay dry. There's an awful lot of ocean down there."

Lifeboat B was shaped like a squat ball with a slightly flattened top. With her broad bottom now facing into the direction of flight, Golich rolled the little ship first one way, then the other, trying to keep a blinking red dot centered between lines on his attitude display. "Too shallow and we may skip off the top of the atmosphere. Too steep and—"

"We're toast," finished M'Bela. "I don't remember ever doing this in jolt school." She tugged on her shoulder straps a little tighter.

The first reddish-orange streamers appeared outside the porthole a few moments later, tongues of flame licking up the side of the lifeboat as the ship plunged steeply into the atmosphere.

As they settled deeper, she felt a weight pressing down on her chest. Deceleration was already generating measurable forces on the crew.

"Two g's," Golich announced. "I'm rolling sixty degrees left...trying to null out a little drift. We're in the corridor okay...a little high but still in the green."

M'Bela wondered about the impactors from what was left of Outtawhack. The asteroid debris that couldn't be diverted would be hitting Landfall's atmosphere about half an hour after the lifeboats.

I just hope they don't come down on top of us.

"Three g's..." Golich said. M'Bela didn't need an announcement. The grunts and pants behind her from Acth:On'e and Farhad told her everything she needed to know. First TD Battery had spent several weeks in space, enduring everything from one-third g at K-World to weightlessness to near zero-g at Outtawhack. They were all seriously deconditioned.

"Passing through four hundred k," Golich muttered. He tweaked a hand controller and the tiny capsule rolled to port, shifting her offset center of lift to bend the trajectory a little shallower. "Going shallow...I'm trying to cut down on the g's a little, give us a break."

They were now below one hundred twenty kilometers altitude, enveloped in a white-hot sheath of ionized plasma, streaking landward at fifteen thousand kilometers an hour.

Golich and M'Bela were both soon bathed in sweat, while outside the ship's portholes, orange flames lapped at the edges of the glass, forming ribbons and curlicues and tree branches and fantastic nameless shapes of incandescent pink. A pearlescent bow formed a few centimeters beyond M'Bela's porthole, bending and twisting as if it were alive.

And through it all, the g's rose steadily on all of them...three, three and a half, four...five...six g's.

M'Bela forced out short oomphs of breath, but breath was steadily becoming precious. She tried focusing on the instrument panel, on the porthole, anything to take her mind off the crushing weight sitting on her chest.

"Under two hundred k," Golich gritted out. The pilot zeroed in on their corridor, his eyes glued to the graph on the panel and the red dot indicating their position. "Drogue should be coming out in fifty seconds."

The lifeboat was now falling faster, picking up speed again, through the upper levels of the stratosphere. Golich's maneuvering had forced them beyond the nominal corridor; the dot had moved outside the lines on the graph. They were landing long, overshooting the original impact zone in central Quetta. The pilot deployed the periscope once the worst of the plasma sheath had vanished and quickly realized what was happening.

"Coastline up ahead, folks. Looks like we've gone past the original landing zone."

M'Bela saw the same thing. She sucked in a few deliciously deep breaths, then forced out, "Can you tell where we are?"

"Eastern Quetta, from the looks of it," Golich grunted. "Computer's projecting touchdown just off the east coast, past the Scablands."

"That sounds like the ocean to me," Acth:On'e grumbled.

Golich concentrated on steering them back on course, but the lifeboat's descent path was too steep. "Drogue chute in less than five...four...three...two...one...mark!"

Almost before the words were out of his mouth, a great shuddering jolt slammed the little pod. Through her porthole, M'Bela could see the chute reefing lines stream out, snapping and twisting in the slipstream, then snapping smartly into the welcome sight of a red and white canopy. The drogue filled quickly with air and Lifeboat B jerked and slowed its descent from several thousand kilometers an hour to less than three hundred.

Golich studied the view on his periscope. "It's the ocean, for sure. There's the coastline."

M'Bela watched the clock carefully, counting down the last seconds to main chute deployment. "Maybe we can still steer back toward land. Isn't the main chute pretty maneuverable?"

"Here go the mains—"

Another series of jerks and jolts was followed by a sharp deceleration force, throwing the crew of Lifeboat B forward against their harnesses. The little pod shimmied and shuddered like a wet dog before the chutes stabilized her oscillation and damped out the swaying. The mains filled with air and billowed out to their full twenty-meter dimensions, looking like a huge inflatable wing...a paraglider.

"I'm banking now..." Golich told them. "Hold on to your hats...this could be a bit of a carnival ride."

The commander used the paraglider's extensible risers to alternately bank and turn, trying to steer them back on shore. But their descent and the prevailing winds worked against Golich's efforts.

"Still ocean," M'Bela told him. "We're through ten-thousand...down at forty-two...landing bag deploy coming up."

The last few minutes of Lifeboat B's descent seemed to flash by in a blur of frantic activity, punctuated by jerks, jolts, bangs, pops and whistles.

The impact, when it came, was a careening slap against the side of the pod's hull. When she peered out of her porthole, M'Bela saw only water, frothing, bubbling seawater. Then the little ship rolled upright as her flotation gear hissed out into place and the welcome view of sun and sky replaced the underwater scene.

That's when M'Bela saw the razorfish cruising by right outside the hatch.

"Uh, Commander...looks like we've got company."

Golich had already seen their unwelcome visitors. "We'll be okay inside." He studied the locator screen for a moment, trying to figure out just where they were. "We've come down right on top of Crown's Reefs, best I can figure. Off the coast of Quetta. Razorfish grottoes all over the place."

From the rear seat, Fatima Farhad let out a yelp. "On the horizon...look!"

A trio of black dots had materialized. Now growing visibly larger with each passing moment, the dots soon resolved themselves into the familiar shape of lifters; their black fuselages were emblazoned with the golden sunburst emblem of the Landfall's Quantum Corps.

"Must be our reception committee," M'Bela concluded. "Probably staged out of Landsdown."

"See any other pods? Any other lifeboats?" Farhad asked.

"Zip," said M'Bela. "Just us and the fish."

Golich was already cycling through frequencies, trying to contact the rescue lifters. "Rescue force, this is Lifeboat B detached from Libra, now at stable one, awaiting your orders."

Seconds later, a loud twangy voice boomed in their headsets. "Lifeboat B, this is... ah...Rescue One. Assume nominal rescue configuration immediately. We're going to have to hoist you out of there one by one. Be advised...ah...we don't have much time...we've got inbound fragments coming in, projected impacts in the Eastern Ocean...less than an hour from now—"

Golich didn't need to hear any more. "Okay, crew...you heard the man. Get your asses moving. Let's get the hell out of here!"

The operation was done in less than ten minutes. Aboard Rescue One, Golich, M'Bela, Acth:On'e and Farhad gratefully sucked in breezes of warm tropical air and topped it off with chilled canteens of water and lemon drink. It tasted better than the finest wine. Even as they settled back, Rescue One's pilot banked the lifter sharply to port and lay in a speed course north by northwest toward Quantum Corps' Landsdown base.

The little fleet had just settled onto the tarmac at the base when the first impactor, a jagged mountain-sized fragment from Outtawhack, slammed into the ocean...ten thousand kilometers northeast of them.

Over the next hour, the undiverted remnants of Outtawhack shot-gunned the planet's surface along an arc nineteen thousand kilometers long, from west of Quetta to the Eastern Ocean.

The largest impactor, as expected, was Whack-D, which impacted as predicted by SpaceGuard in the Western Ocean, some thirty-five kilometers northwest of the city of Headland.

The effects of all the impacts would be felt for years afterward. And there would be casualties, though it was too soon to say how many.

M'Bela was running a cool towel over her face as she stepped off the lifter and stood on firm ground for the first time in what seemed like forever.

"Guess we're stuck here for awhile, huh, Commander?"

Golich squinted up into the reddish glow of Gliese 876, Landfall's sun. "Until I can get word to Captain Dringoth, I guess. Time Guard doesn't have any jumpships in the area at the moment. Just old freighters, I heard." He accepted another cool drink from a nearby sergeant gratefully and sipped. "But they're coming for us, I'm sure of that."

"The jumpships, you mean?"

"Them...and the Coethi, too. I just hope the Bugs don't make a move around here before our people show up. You know Urth itself is only fifteen light years away from here."

Even under Quetta's pale hot sun, Evelyn M'Bela felt a cold shudder at the thought.

THE END

# Appendix

Journal of Temporal Warfare: An Interview with Commandstar

  1. What new missions does Time Guard have now?

Our primary mission, as always, is to detect, defeat and if necessary destroy adversary entities and formations that threaten stability, peace, economic prosperity and public health in all our mandated protected time streams throughout the Alliance and, with our partner Uman Alliance commands, throughout the Alliance as well.

New missions have arisen in recent years due to the increased activity of Config Zero and the Coethi and unauthorized operations existing across lawfully constituted time streams and sanctuary zones. Some of these threats now operate even into and out of voidtime, which is a protected space and we have to contain them.

One of our newest missions is to deal with increased Config Zero and Coethi activity at the extreme boundaries of our normal time streams. For reasons that are not always clear to us, Config Zero has chosen to engage Umans along numerous temporal boundaries and to generate increased temporal disturbances through their operations. Of course, these operations have led to much destruction and death in parts of the Alliance. That's why we conduct jumpship patrols and operations through our subordinate command Boundary Patrol, which is part of Time Guard.

One auxiliary mission we have as a defensive force is to ensure that the growth of Assimilationism and the increase in the number of angels who live and work among Normals is done in accordance with all local laws, regulations and statutes. The Guard takes no official position on these changes occurring in our society but seeks only to ensure an orderly integration of these entities into our societies.

Of course, people who seek to take advantage of Normals through aiding and abetting violence will not be allowed to disrupt society, threaten public order or destroy property. Time Guard takes its UA law and mandate enforcement responsibilities very seriously.

2. Has the Symbiosis Project gone as far as it can?

Not necessarily. Remember, the whole purpose of the Symbiosis Project was to explore, develop and deploy ANAD-style, swarm-capable master bots with dedicated and trained time jumper units as blended man-machine warriors. Our currently embarked URME units are the first examples of this. These master nanobots would be embedded in containment capsules surgically installed in the shoulders of select jumpers and would be capable of launch, capture, replicating as full-scale bot swarms and also capable of quantum coupler communications with their host trooper. I was one of the first guinea pigs and I helped Dr. Irwin Frost work out some of the early bugs. So that aspect of the original vision has been achieved.

It's now routine for time jumpers to have embedded ANAD bots with replication ability as well as attached defensive and offensive config managers. The embedded ANAD bots are just like HERF guns or mag carbines or hand collapsers...they're part of a jumper's normal armament. And they're used for more than just combat operations. Jumpers use their bots to fab structures for all kinds of purposes, even replacement parts for their hypersuits. The only limit is the configs that ANADs can deploy...the type of propulsors, effectors, grabbers, power cells, etc that can be replicated.

Having said that, I will admit that the Symbiosis Project has reached a developmental plateau. We use ANAD bots and swarms fully integrated into all Guard basic operations. With the increase in the numbers of angels now living and working among us in all parts of our society across the Alliance, the value of having embedded ANAD swarms isn't what it used to be. Our 'tactical advantage' is not as great as it once was. Instead of giving us a distinct advantage on the battlefield, our embeds now are a necessity just to operate at all. The galaxy is awash in swarms and angels and we have to operate in an environment that is quite different from what existed when the Symbiosis Project was first approved, back in the 2700s.

Now everybody is symbiotic.

3. Does Time Guard have or expect to promote angels (swarm entities) into Guard command positions?

The Guard has used angels, ANAD-swarm elements and URME units in command positions at the battalion level for a number of years now. Originally, we put angels and swarm entities in command only of dedicated swarm formations, that is battalions which consisted only of a single swarm. Some have asked 'How can you separate out part of a swarm entity and make it a commander?' Good question. We let the swarm work that out. Of course, we know that a swarm is a collective sentience, a sort of hive mind entity and so theoretically all parts are equal. But any swarm entity has a master bot, as does any angel. So in effect, the master bot is the commander.

Now, we've been a little slower than our sister Alliance command Frontier Corps. They have actually deployed angels as ship's crewmen and even command ratings, like executive officers, although not ship captains. Why haven't we done that? The real answer is in the nature of our missions. Time Guard is a true combatant command. We engage enemies across multiple time streams and temporal conditions and we have to have a strong command structure in this type of intense environment. Things happen fast on temporal battlefields. So above battalion level, we have so far used only Umans (or Normals) as commanders. It's my understanding that Frontier Corps uses angels in ship operations but not so much in combat positions.

We do expect to eventually transition angels into higher command billets, as we gain experience with their abilities and their limitations in combat. But for now, those roles will be reserved for Umans.

4. What is the Guard doing to prepare for future encounters with the Coethi? Have you had any success with accessing their archives?

Time Guard has a number of initiatives underway to prepare for future encounters. One of the most ambitious is UrthShield. This is a proposal for a massive shield that would orbit the Urth at about lunar distance, to intercept any unauthorized botswarms coming our way. Our intelligence indicates that the phenomena known as Devils Eye orbiting out in the nearer Oort Cloud may be sending us unwanted visitors in the near future.

Of course, we do keep a close eye on Delta P as well, that is the anomaly that Farside recently detected in the vicinity of 51 Pegasi, about 50 light-years from here. We're not sure what this is, but it's currently on an intercept course with our solar system and we calculate that such an encounter would come about the middle of the 29th century, unless something happens. We want to be ready for anything.

Another initiative involves a Sentinel Line that has been emplaced in distant heliospheric orbit, beyond Pluto. This project puts into place a line of detectors in an arc of solar orbit oriented in the direction of 51 Pegasi. Again, this would give us a great deal of advanced warning of any unusual objects or entities entering the outer solar system from what we believe is the primary threat direction.

Let me add this: of course, no one in Time Guard, the Alliance, or anywhere else that I know of, is certain of what 'the Coethi' really are, or if they even exist. Evidence for something like 'The Coethi' comes from past engagements with Config Zero and Coethi elements at Hapsh'm, Gibbons Grotto here in the Sturdivant system, the so-called Battle of the Gauntlet and at other strategic places.

They may well be physical entities. Or they may be something else entirely. We just don't know for sure. But Time Guard will be prepared and ready for any and all possibilities.

5. Is there anything to persistent rumors that Time Guard will be merged with Frontier Corps?

Both organizations have critical and even overlapping missions. Time Guard is tasked with the mission of defending all UA members from threats emanating from various time streams, threats involving objects or forces that primarily operate at that level, whether they be swarms, individual bots, or whatever. Frontier Corps is tasked with enforcing UA regulations, mandates and treaties beyond the Urth, in near-Urth space and indeed throughout the solar system and beyond into all of Uman space, including defending against swarm-type threats. The difference in focus is mainly one of operating theater and we certainly have overlapping responsibilities in many areas.

Of course, Frontier Corps is part of a larger UA organization that deals with all kinds of space activities and that is UMANISPACE. We're not under UMANISPACE, but both organizations are part of UMANIFORCE, the overall umbrella command for UA law and mandate enforcement and defensive operations.

There have been proposals to merge Time Guard and Frontier Corps but these are just proposals and I don't put a lot of stock in them. One reason is what I just mentioned: there is a distinct difference in operating theater, with Time Guard oriented to defend against time stream threats and Frontier Corps defending against off-Urth threats in normal spacetime.

Now, with the advent of the Delta P anomaly and the possible arrival of an alien force on our doorsteps in the next few decades, it's understandable that our level of mission collaboration will increase. Config Zero, for example, is a true galactic threat which may well have links to an off-Urth command and control system. So we have to deal with that and we will in a very collaborative way.

To answer the question directly, I see nothing to be gained in terms of organizational efficiency or tactical effectiveness in merging these two very different organizations. Of course, this decision may be overtaken by events in the future and regardless of what happens, Time Guard stands ready to fulfill its mandated mission in every way possible.

6. Quantum technology has advanced radically in the last 100 years. Now you have entanglers and disentanglers. What's next?

The rate of change in quantum technology over the last century has been nothing short of phenomenal. We first started using reliable quantum computer processors way back in the 2030s and of course, early ANAD systems incorporated these processors in their first designs. As you know, from the early 2060s to the late 2080s, UN Quantum Corps faced a major threat in the old Red Hammer cartel. The cartel was able to deploy a new communications medium in the late 2060s, called a quantum coupler. This system made it easier for the cartel to control its criminal enterprises without the Corps or other law enforcement organizations being able to gather intelligence. And when, in the early 2200s, the cartels had evolved their quantum technology to effect rudimentary time travel, that's when Time Guard was born. We're kind like a great-great grandchild of Quantum Corps. And of course, with the Coethi, the threat is incomparably greater now.

The entanglers and disentanglers you mentioned are really outgrowths of the quantum coupler. Entanglers are the operating part of the coupler at the source end. They encode the message that travels through the coupler, through quantum channels in space to the receiver. The disentangler is the real success story. The disentangler enables us to grab quantum states traveling through these quantum channels and decipher the encoded entangled message from the source. We can actually read the message. We also use variations of disentanglers as a way of jamming or interfering with the transmission of an entangled message. In short, we can mess up a quantum communication channel at the receiving end by literally 'unraveling' the encoding scheme, scattering the entanglement states so that the receiver gets nothing but gibberish out.

As to the future of quantum technology, I can say this much. Our Engineering Division is actively working on a number of projects which I can't really describe in detail. You are undoubtedly aware of ideas floating around about taking a swarm of nanobotic mechs and somehow entangling and encoding all their atomic geometry structure, their bond energies, and mechanical details in some kind of series of quantum states and transmitting that off into the ether. Nobody knows if this will really work.

But we are actively looking into it. If it can be made to work, it would be the first instance I know of a sort of teleportation...travelling great distances in the blink of an eye. But time will tell on this.

7. What are some of the main lessons, tactically and strategically, that the Guard has learned in recent conflicts with the Coethi?

The Coethi are surely the most resourceful and persistent threat the Guard has ever dealt with. Our intelligence indicates that the Coethi maintains themselves as a swarm of nanobotic devices, similar to our ANAD systems. There is a master bot inside but its exact location and its precise operating parameters and physical and functional nature are unknown...we have been unable to get actionable intelligence on this for decades.

Many of the lessons we've learned in dealing with the Coethi over the last fifty years or so are lessons inherent in engaging any enemy that is swarm based. Swarms are distributed entities, with some degree of distributed intelligence. The best way to defeat a swarm is with another swarm. We have tried to engage the Coethi in various time streams at this level, but the devices and mechanisms that comprise them have capabilities and defenses which consistently surprise us. Physical engagement of this enemy at the level of individual bots has not been very successful, due to the maneuverability and hardening of the bots. They replicate very fast, grow effectors very fast and have engagement weapons which consistently outperform our own swarms. The biggest advantage that Coethi bots seem to have is their speed of replication. They can slam atoms together and alter configurations in an eye blink. So we always seem to be behind the curve when we engage Coethi directly. And of course, their ability to travel multiple time streams and pop into and out of voidtime complicates all of our defenses and operations.

Having said that, we are finding ways to deal with this threat from a different axis, specifically its command and control systems. We use disentanglers now to inhibit the Coethi from effectively controlling swarms beyond the immediate vicinity of the mother swarm. This helps us deal with subordinate threats in other theaters and time streams, such as the swarms which set off so many tremors in voidtime. Disentangling Coethi command and control signals allows us to engage and defeat these subordinate swarms, daughter elements if you will, more easily.

Our basic strategy at this time is to contain the Coethi, perhaps even to isolate the master bot and its primary swarm structures and go after the subordinate swarms which affect other time streams. Meanwhile our Engineering Division and our intelligence people continue to look for vulnerabilities to exploit in this on-going conflict. So contain the center and attack the perimeter...that is our current approach.

The recent appearance of near-Urth threats, such as the Devils Eye anomaly roaming around in our outer solar system, may change this strategy in the future. Time will tell. We suspect that the Coethi may well be trying to damage or render all or part of time stream T-001 unusable, even from its earliest days when Urth formed. There is intelligence to support that conclusion. As I said, the Coethi are resourceful and persistent and if there really is anything to these stories of a Prime Key and some kind of Imperative driving the enemy, then we'd better be on our guard for new surprises.

My gut feeling is that the Coethi may well be on our very doorsteps soon, or at least infesting T-001 from one end of the time stream all the way up to current times. If that's true, then we are possibly facing a true existential crisis in the coming years and our defenses and strategy will have to adapt to meet it.

8. Does the Guard have any official position on Assimilationists and the effects they are having on politics and culture around the Alliance?

No. The Alliance has sufficient means to enforce UA laws, treaties and mandates and protects member states from threats emanating from both the temporal, nanoscale and normal worlds. We do not take positions on matters of political or cultural significance.

9. Thank you, sir, for taking the time to be with our members and readers today.

It's always a pleasure to spend time with the editors of the Journal of Temporal Warfare. Any time Commandstar can be of assistance, we're happy to do so.
About the Author

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He recently retired but worked for nearly 25 years for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He's been happily married for over 27 years. He's also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Pekingese dog named Chance.

For technical and background details on his series Tales of the Quantum Corps, visit his blog Quantum Corps Times at http://qcorpstimes.blogspot.com. For details on other books in this series, visit his website at http://philbosshardt.wix.com/philip-bosshardt or learn about other books by Philip Bosshardt by visiting www.smashwords.com.

To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt's notes and the backstory on how the Time Jumpers series was created, recent reviews, excerpts from upcoming books and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog The Word Shed at: http://thewdshed.blogspot.com.

Download the next exciting episode of Time Jumpers from Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers. It's called 'The Time Guard'. Available on May 31, 2019.

