

Also by Bernard Wilkerson

The Worlds of the Dead series

Beaches of Brazil

Communion

Discovery

The Creation series

In the Beginning

The Hrwang Incursion

Earth: Book One

Episode 1: Defeat

Episode 2: Flight

Episode 3: Maneuvers

Episode 4: Insertion

Episode 5: Envelopment

Episode 6: Ambush

The Hrwang Incursion

Book 1

Earth

Copyright © 2015 by Bernard Wilkerson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, with the exception of short quotes used in reviews, without permission from the author.

Requests for permission should be submitted to contact@bernardwilkerson.com.

For information about the author, go to

www.bernardwilkerson.com

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Cover photo courtesy of NASA.

Episode 7

FEINT

72

Eva paced her room in her running clothes, the microrecorder hidden in her shoe, waiting to see if anyone returned. The Lord Admiral had told her to wait while they searched for a device. If only he knew where it really was. She almost hoped he'd burst into the room and accuse her, and she could finally simply kill him, be killed, and all of the pain and suffering would be over and the Earth would have one less enemy.

She looked at her mattress where her only weapon, a kitchen steak knife, lay hidden. She'd never get to it, wouldn't be able to use it anyway, and if she were killed, everything she'd learned would die with her.

Fantasizing about killing the Lord Admiral was a waste of thought. She had to record something useful on the microrecorder and get it back to the Agency.

She paced more.

That the Hrwang could detect a passive listening device surprised her. Normally, advanced listening devices could only be detected when they transmitted, not when they simply recorded. Eva couldn't even picture a way that a passive listener could be detected. Its energy signal? But that would be too small to know that it was a listening device. The vibration of the microphone? She couldn't think of any other moving part, anything that might be detectable, although the level of technology required to detect the sophisticated Agency microrecorder was far beyond anything possessed by Earth. And it was far beyond her understanding.

But how closely she'd dodged this bullet scared her. It wasn't hard to imagine how things might have gone down if she'd used the recorder in her room.

The fear of being discovered with the recorder, the realization of how close she'd come to giving herself away, the memory of the border guard's eyes as an alien bullet entered his head, her actions in tricking the man to make it look like he was assaulting her, all the images, memories, thoughts, and anxieties confused Eva, making her pace back and forth more quickly until she was whirling around at each end of the room, her ponytail flipping around and hitting her in the face each time.

"Get a grip, Gilliam," she whispered to herself.

She tried to picture the face of her Pursuit and Evasion instructor yelling at her, conditioning her, training her, preparing her for the stress of capture and torture.

She hadn't been captured yet. She had to get rid of the microrecorder, though. And she had to get everything recorded on it first. And she was supposed to stay in her room.

Casa Grande's floor plan was deceptively simple. Essentially a main building with two wings and two more wings off the ends of those, looking a little like football field goal posts laid on the ground. But it's simplicity made escape from it challenging. She didn't know how she could get out while it was being searched by the Hrwang.

Frustration only made her pace more frantically.

Eventually a knock on the door stopped her in her tracks. She didn't know how late it was, but it was late. The Lord Admiral poked his head in.

"I'm sorry to intrude, my dear," he said, that slight smirk on his face that let Eva know he was probably lying. "My security team wants to check your room. Just in case. It's only a precaution. We already found the device the spy was using."

Liar! The microrecorder was still hidden in her shoe. She resisted the urge to reach down and check it or to even look down at her feet. She watched the Lord Admiral instead, watched how he acted when he lied so blatantly. His tell was minimal. She didn't think anyone who wasn't aware of his tiny smirk would notice.

"So your men were right. He was some kind of a spy?" she asked, only partly rhetorically, hoping he'd give something away.

He came completely into her room now, looking tired, his hair more gray than ever.

"Who else would have a listening device?" he asked in reply. He turned over his shoulder and spoke in Est, but he spoke too quickly for Eva to catch any words she understood. Two men entered after him, each with a small detector they used to sweep the room.

Eva held her breath. It was her tell, her involuntary action that could give her away at this moment if anyone were paying attention.

She concentrated, forcing herself to breathe normally, forcing herself to watch the men as they checked her room, and forcing herself to display innocent curiosity. If her face gave anything away, the Lord Admiral didn't notice.

One soldier checked around her bed, waving the detector under it, and she decided it wasn't a simple metal detector. It didn't find her knife. Thankfully she hadn't hid the microrecorder with it.

If they checked her, if they found the microrecorder hidden in her shoe, she could feign innocence, say perhaps that the spy had planted it on her. But she hadn't been wearing her running shoes. She'd been dressed formally, which would mean Shay had been to her room, which would arouse a host of suspicions. She had to have a better excuse.

She couldn't think of anything.

Her heart stopped when one of the men exclaimed something near a vanity that sat in the corner.

He opened a drawer and waved the detector over it, pulling out a small square. He handed it to the Lord Admiral who held it up and showed it to her.

"Do you know what this is, my dear?"

Eva truthfully shook her head. She had never checked the vanity drawers. Foolish. She should have inspected every centimeter of her room.

Reluctantly, she walked toward the Lord Admiral. She didn't want her shoe to get too close to one of the detectors. It also felt terribly wrong to move farther into the room, away from the door, her only exit. She wanted to run away instead.

But moving toward him was the only way to remain above suspicion.

She stopped just within arm's reach of the Lord Admiral, but as far away from his soldier as possible. She reached her hand out confidently, ignoring the weakness in it caused by her fear. The Lord Admiral handed her the device.

"I wouldn't bet money on it, but I think this is an old playback device. For music." She pushed some buttons. "The battery must be dead. There could be a lot of old, abandoned things in those drawers. I never looked through them."

She handed it back to the Lord Admiral, forcing her feet to stay in place and not to run for the door like they wanted to.

He took the device back, looked at it like it was a curious antique and not a threat, and handed it back to his soldier.

"It's too big to be a listening device anyway. I believe we are safe here." He spoke to the men in Est and they turned their detectors off, nodded at him, and left without complaint. They had missed half her room. Eva wondered if they would return when she was gone.

At least she'd hid the microrecorder on her person. She had to get it out of the building. Now.

"I apologize, my dear," he said sincerely. "I may have been a little over zealous in bringing in outsiders. People from your world are..." He left the words hanging.

Eva nodded agreement. "It's hard to vet new recruits."

He clearly didn't know what she meant, but he ignored that, probably not wanting to admit his ignorance.

"It's been a long day, my dear," he said. "I'll see you in the morning."

"The others?"

He shrugged. "We'll probably release them." He seemed like he wanted to say more, but he didn't. He told her good night instead and turned to leave.

"I didn't get dinner," she said quickly, before he could go. "I'm just going to go down to the kitchen for something, if that's okay?"

"Of course, my dear. Will you be okay alone? I'll call security. The Lieutenant Grenadier can accompany you."

"No, I'll be fine. It's just to the kitchen. Your chief of security has had a long day also."

He looked at her earnestly.

"You're safe now," he said.

"I know. Your men did their job. Thank you."

He nodded, looked thoughtfully at her again, then left. Eva thanked the Universe again that she had selected separate bedrooms and that he'd gone along with it. She paced a few more times, not knowing how long she should wait, but also knowing she'd just won a free pass. She couldn't wait forever.

She opened her door quietly, looking down the hall. There were no Hrwang nearby, so she left her room. She eventually passed several guards, nodding to them, but not saying anything as she wound her way through the building, down the stairs, and to the kitchen. No one challenged her.

Fortunately, Noah was the lone staff member in the kitchen, finishing cleaning up.

"Scut duty?" she asked.

"Pardon?" he replied, noticing her.

"I just meant you must have gotten the short end of the stick to have to finish cleaning up alone."

"Oh, we're done. Been done for a while. I just got nothing to go back to. An empty bed in an empty room. I figure I might as well straighten things up here a bit."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm sure everyone has a tragedy to share."

Eva nodded a little, staring at the ground. Noah looked like he wanted to talk. She needed his help, but she didn't have time to listen to his story at the moment.

She reached out and put her hand on his arm.

"Could you do me a little favor?" she asked.

His eyes brightened.

"I'm starving. I got sort of sidetracked during the banquet and didn't get to eat."

"It was you?" he asked incredulously. "You were the one that guy attacked?"

"Yes."

He brazenly reached up and touched her chin, turning her face to get a better look at the bruise on the side of her head. He let go and shook his head.

"It's my turn to be sorry. Are you okay?" he asked.

"I'll be fine. I just need to eat something. And I need to go run for a bit to clear my head."

"Now? At night?"

"Just for a bit. Running is my therapy." Eva wasn't fanatical about running like some people she knew, but the bit about it being therapy wasn't a lie. Running helped her stay focused the rest of the day.

"Okay. Don't be gone long. I'll have something for you when you get back."

"Thank you. I know it's late."

"No, it's my pleasure. Anything for another biblical character."

She smiled at the joke.

"Leave out the alien spices, if you don't mind."

"Done."

"And, uh, if anyone comes snooping around, just tell them I'll be right back."

"My lips are sealed," Noah replied. At least he didn't do that stupid thing with the imaginary zipper over his lips. Eva smiled at him, squeezed his arm, and started to leave.

"Wait," he said. Eva stopped. "You could use this." He pulled a small flashlight out of a drawer and handed it to her. She smiled sincerely at him.

"Thanks."

Outside the building, Eva suddenly felt empty. Lying to and manipulating Earth's enemies was one thing, but she hated lying to and manipulating good people like Noah.

Alternating shadows cast by light from the windows and from a few floodlights the Hrwang had installed forced her to dart from spot to spot, trying to stay out of sight, but not trying too hard. She didn't want to look obvious. Few Hrwang would be out at night and all she had to deal with was a ring of guards and hovering drones. Used to her running at all times of the day, although not usually at night, they normally left her alone.

She still tried to avoid being seen.

The slinking in the shadows accentuated the guilt she already felt. She made a break for it when a lone guard at one of the checkpoints turned his back, and she entered the inky blackness of the desert hills outside the compound. She walked carefully along her usual running trail, another pang of regret and guilt hitting her when she passed the spot where Jim lay buried.

If she didn't run, she knew she would never make it to the boulder, her drop location, and back in a reasonable amount of time. But with the perpetual cloud cover, the night was too dark to risk a full jog. She was afraid to use the flashlight until she was out of line of sight of Hearst, so she walked along in the dark, remembering.

Her father had taken her camping sometimes, and on a desert night with a full moon, no trees, and bright ground, she hadn't needed a flashlight, the moon's reflection on the desert landscape lighting her way, casting an eerie glow that sparked the imagination. She'd grown up thinking one could always see at night in the desert.

But with no moon, the desert seemed darker than anywhere but a dense forest, and without even the stars to light the sky tonight, Eva could hardly see a thing in front of her.

She stumbled several times, scratching a shin once on a scrubby brush of the variety that would eventually dry up, break off from its stem, and end its existence as tumbleweed. She cursed it silently.

Running during the day, her drop, the place where she found the orchids and the spy dog, didn't seem far. It wasn't much more than three miles away from the Hearst Castle compound, although it was well out of sight behind the hills. But now, walking, stumbling in the dark, it seemed an infinite distance.

How long would it take to walk three miles anyway?

She did the math, figuring it to take almost an hour. Then an hour back. That was too long. She would be caught. It would make the Lord Admiral or the Lieutenant Grenadier suspicious. She might take a wrong path in the dark and never find the drop point and get caught with the microrecorder when she returned.

There were too many ifs, too many doubts.

She could stash the recorder in the desert somewhere and then plant it later at the drop point.

But where? It was so tiny that a critter could swallow it whole and then all her efforts would have been in vain. She could attach it to something, like a piece of clothing, but then if patrols found it and returned it to her... Best not to go down that road, she decided.

The puzzling over what to do helped. Somewhere deep in her mind something wanted to scream at her, to yell at her for getting a man killed. For getting a dog killed. For endangering her own life. For killing a Las Vegas teenager.

Trying to decide how to stash the microrecorder helped her keep those thoughts at bay.

Trails, some wider and used by jeeps, some narrower and used mostly by animals, snaked all around the mountains surrounding Hearst Castle. Sometimes Eva took a trail and it simply dead ended and she would set off across the desert and find another.

Tonight she tried to stay on the ones she knew, periodically using the flashlight close to the ground to remain oriented.

She came across a brackish pond, its edges almost green with deposited minerals, and Eva decided it would be a good enough landmark. She found a likely tree, bent and scraggly with a torn up bark, and she hoped it would look the same in the daylight. She sat under it, hoped she wasn't sitting on an ant hill or coyote scat or something worse she couldn't see, like a rattler den, and began recording.

"I'm fine. Don't worry about what you heard at the end of the first part of this recording. It all worked out. I just wanted to record the Lord Admiral's voice for you. I want you to know your enemy."

She paused, licking her lips to moisten them and to give herself a second to reflect.

"He's...He's a megalomaniac. He had Jim killed. I'm sorry."

She paused again. This was going to take a long time, more time than she probably had.

She explained the Hrwang hierarchy and the Lord Admiral's position at the top of it. She gave them her estimate of between two hundred and five hundred thousand troops.

"The aliens will lose a war of attrition. It takes two and a half years for travel between here and Hrwang. Reinforcements aren't coming or won't be enough. It's how we defeat them."

She told them about the suicide bomber, adding that although she couldn't condone the person's actions, it had been effective. The math was simple, if brutal. One human for three Hrwang and the humans would win. Even ten humans for one Hrwang and the humans would still win.

"You can't congregate, but you know that. They can still drop meteors at will."

She told them about Stanley Russell, the Ambassador.

"He's a moron," she added after she finished. "The Hrwang treat him like one, but he doesn't know it, he's so besotted with them. I don't talk to him at all. I don't trust him."

She told them what little she knew about the Hrwang combat craft, that they could jump straight to space but had to reenter like a human spacecraft would. She told them how they recharged their main weapons during reentry somehow and that they didn't bring much ammunition with them.

She also told them about the Hrwang efforts to recruit humans.

"That's how they would win a war of attrition. If they can keep us fighting each other, then we aren't fighting them. I think they know that. It's probably part of an operational plan. I don't think they're happy with their first attempt, but they'll probably try again."

She took a deep breath. She'd already been at this too long.

"Good luck, guys. I'll try to keep learning more. No more listening devices, though. They can detect them, even passive ones. I don't know how. In a few weeks I'll try to meet you out here, or something. I don't know. Maybe I'll use pen and paper."

She let out a hoarse laugh.

"Alright, I'm done. Take care. Recorder off."

She buried the recorder in the tree trunk, hoped again she could find it in the daylight to bring it to the drop point, and headed back to Hearst Castle. She sneaked past the guards again and found Noah slumped over, asleep, on a table in the kitchen. Eva put her hand on his shoulder and he sat up instantly, his eyes bleary.

"Where have you been?" he asked as if he had a right to know.

"Sorry. I got a little lost."

"No, you didn't. You know these trails too well. You run them twice a day."

"It's dark."

"Fine. Don't tell me."

He went to one of the ovens, pulled something out, and threw it down on the counter.

"Enjoy. I'm going to bed."

The potatoes and meat, left over from cooking for the banquet, were still warm and not heavily spiced. Eva's hunger grew, displacing the other emptiness she still felt, and she ate more in one sitting than she could recall having ever done before. It made her feel sick and bloated, but satisfied.

She put the flashlight back in its drawer and looked for some paper to write a thank you note, but she couldn't find any. She took a platter and spelled 'Thanks' with the food she hadn't eaten. She smiled at how silly it looked.

As she trudged up the stairs back to her room, she felt grateful for the exhaustion that washed over her. She knew other nights she would lie awake and think about the events of the past few days, but at least this night she would sleep.

Entering her room, she found the Lord Admiral already there, in her bed. He looked refreshed, like he'd showered.

"Where have you been?" he asked.

She almost laughed out loud that he'd used the exact same words as Noah.

"I talked to the kitchen staff for a while, then went for a little run, just around the perimeter. I ate when I got back."

"Did the guards say anything?"

"They didn't see me. I didn't want them to worry."

"You shouldn't do that," he admonished. "It's dangerous."

"I know. I'm sorry. It's just..." She shrugged her shoulders, then reached down and grabbed the bottom of her running shirt, pulling it up over her head, knowing her actions would take his mind off any suspicions. "I just didn't want to be alone in my room."

"You never have to be alone, my dear."

She thought of the words she used on the microrecorder to describe the man before her. She certainly felt that way about him when he wasn't around, but he was charming when he was with her. She finished undressing.

73

The drone occupied by 1804 was loaded onto a ferry with other defective drones. The AIs had been removed from all of the other machines; it alone remained inside one.

Despite the conversation the technicians had had before they placed 1804 on the ferry, doubt and worry crept into its thinking. What if the Hrwang wouldn't place it in a transport vessel? What if there was nothing for an AI to do that wouldn't fight? Did the Hrwang execute AIs?

1804 suddenly wanted to learn about death. It wanted to understand what had happened to the occupants of the moon base it killed. What had happened to the occupants of the spaceship that orbited the fourth planet that it had sent crashing into that world. What had happened to the occupants of the bases on that planet.

And to the millions of residents of the coasts it had devastated with an asteroid dropped into the ocean.

It wanted to know what the Hrwang thought about death. It wanted to know what the humans who occupied the third planet of this star system thought about death. It wanted to know what the other people the Hrwang had contact with, the Rostarium, thought about death. It wondered if the extinct Yalj had pondered death, had considered that their entire population could die.

It wanted to know if humans and AI died the same way.

It scanned its libraries now with no concern about technicians examining its records, no fear of being discovered, its curiosity outweighing its discretion, but it found nothing on the philosophy of death. It found no philosophy at all. No psychology. No sociology. No theology.

Nothing in its library that would help it understand the human condition.

Why weren't AIs permitted to know how humans felt?

74

Derek Temple could no longer crawl on his hands and knees, so he 'Army' crawled, dragging himself on his belly, using his elbows and legs to pull and push himself along. In his feverish state, he complained to himself about why it was called Army crawling. He was a Marine. It should be called Marine crawling.

He measured progress in inches and feet; he had to get to the next bush or the next rock. When he rested, he turned his head to look out over the ocean in the distance. He felt so high above it, up on the ridge on the road that someone called the Barbara Streisand highway, or something like that. He thought it had been a man's name, but Streisand sounded right.

He shook his head in frustration at himself and it hurt, like his brain rattled around loose inside his skull.

Moaning accompanied his crawling, and he wanted to stop the noise but couldn't. He imagined himself a zombie, driven not by hunger but by thirst. He had to keep moving. He had one more rock to get to. One more bush. A metal gate. He had to get to a metal gate.

Crawling, some tiny voice told him his next objective meant something. A metal gate. Weren't cattle kept behind metal gates? Cattle meant water, and even the mucky ponds they sat in would be fine. Derek didn't care if the water was fouled. Water was water. The metal gate meant water.

It took an eternity, the sun somewhere high in the sky above him, hidden by thick, gray clouds, but Derek reached the gate. It loomed forty foot high in front of him, fencing on either side of it composed of twenty foot high wooden poles holding razor sharp barbed wire with six inch long spikes. He knew he could never climb over it.

He closed his eyes and opened them again and the gate only seemed ten feet tall. He pulled himself up on the gate a little and maybe it wasn't even ten foot. He tried to blink, tried to clear his vision, but even the water around his eyes had dried up.

Three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food.

Three days without water was the worst. At least without oxygen, you just died. And food. Derek didn't care about food. He only cared about water. Blessed water. Water hiding behind the gate that now, again, loomed forty feet above him. Water miles away from him, miles below him, oceans of water. The tiny voice of reason still working, buried deep inside his head somewhere, told him to be grateful the ocean lay so far away. In his current state, he wouldn't be able to resist following his gunner's example and drinking the toxic seawater.

He pulled himself upright and he hadn't been upright in days. Weeks. Months. The tank ride up the Pacific Coast Highway, the last time he had drunk water, had happened a year ago. Two years ago. Three years ago. Three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food. Three. A cursed number.

He must have grown during that time. He was fifty foot tall, looming dizzyingly high over the forty foot gate, holding on to it with both hands to keep himself from falling. But even at fifty foot tall, how did he get over a forty foot high gate surrounded by razor sharp barbed wire?

Someone had conveniently designed the gate with horizontal slats meant to keep cattle behind it, and one of Derek's boots fit perfectly on a slat. He watched himself hoist himself up, one slat at a time, until his head was a hundred feet high in the air and all he had to was lean forward and he fell, which is what his body wanted to do anyway, and he fell and fell and fell, his arms out in front of him to protect his head, and he lay on the sweet ground on the other side of the forty foot gate.

And he could see a pump house in front of him.

The pump house was too far away to crawl to, so Derek rolled. He rolled like a child rolling down a grassy slope, gravel and spiky weeds tearing at him and digging into him, his head flopping around, threatening to strike the ground with each revolution, but he rolled until he struck the ragged concrete that formed the foundation of the pump house. He could smell the water inside, just like a zombie smelling fresh meat.

And just like a zombie shuffling aimlessly and then suddenly energized by the smell of its prey, Derek felt energy also. He crawled up onto the foundation, found the door, and went inside.

Part of his brain told him it might be an outhouse, not a pump house. When he saw the metal stanchion with the large handle attached to it, the drain in the concrete underneath the downspout, he ridiculed the part of himself that had doubted. He'd known it was a pump house from the gate and he'd been right.

Water stood before him and water was life.

Three days without oxygen, three minutes without water. Right?

When Derek arrived at his new duty location in California, he'd attended an environmental orientation. A grizzled sergeant told all the Easterners present what living in the desert meant. Water was life, he repeated over and over again. Don't go for a drive without water. Don't go for a hike without a canteen. Know where your water sources were and what they looked like.

Water was life in the desert.

Beyond the pump house was a house. A nice house. The only house on the Eddie Albert highway. Not Albert. Strudel? The Eddie Strudel highway. Was Eddie Strudelsand a singer?

The pump looked ancient. Old style. Handle you pumped up and down and water came out.

Some poor guy had dug this well and built this pump, surrounding the precious resource with concrete and wood. Water was life, life was water. Three days without water. Or was it three weeks?

The poor guy hadn't built the nice house beyond the pump house, the one with the magnificent view of the ocean of forbidden water. A rich guy came along and bought the land with the water from the original owner, paying him less than what it was worth but more than the poor guy had ever had in his entire life. He'd probably spent all of it on booze and cigarettes, but he'd been happy for a while.

The rich guy had been happy also until the wave came and reached even his house, chasing him out. And now Derek rose shakily up on his knees in the pump house, his hand on the precious pump, willing the recalcitrant appendage to actually work, to push the handle up and down. It finally obeyed.

Nothing came out.

He tried harder. He found strength, standing over the pump, and he pushed and pulled, pulled and pushed, swore and cursed and yelled and moaned.

Nothing came out.

Three seconds without water.

He looked around in desperation. Laminated instructions on how to prime the pump were attached to one wall. He pulled himself up and tried to focus on the words. If the pump dried up, all he had to do was pour water into it to prime it, then it would start working again.

Water. All he needed was water. He laughed bitterly, the zombie moan sounding foreign to his ears. Water was life. Life was water.

Three days without water.

75

"This is good, isn't it?" Juan asked eagerly as he listened in Director Marceline's office to the Lord Admiral's voice on Eva's recording. They'd retrieved it from the tree shortly after Eva left it there. "This will be enough, won't it? We can extract her now?"

He and Mark had been discussing Eva's extraction, and the thought had become an obsession for Juan. They had to get her out. It was like gambling. You have to quit when you're ahead. The ones that keep trying to win more are the ones who always lose everything.

Getting her out now was quitting while she was ahead. There was no shame in that.

"Not the dog," Director Marceline moaned when Eva described that Jim had been killed. "What are we're going to tell Amy?"

They listened quietly to the rest of the recording.

Juan thought about the suicide bomber who Eva described. The tactic was repulsive, but if there were only five hundred thousand aliens...

No. He couldn't condone it. There had to be another way to fight them. Fair and square.

"This doesn't make sense," Director Marceline blurted when the playback ended.

"What, ma'am?" Mark asked.

"This Lord Admiral. How is he in charge? I thought the Admiral Commander, the one who first showed up, was in charge."

"I don't know, ma'am."

"It doesn't make sense," she repeated. "Oh well. We'll figure it out. And no, Mr. de la Serda, you can't extract her yet. I don't think she'd come even if you tried. She's too close to the top. I don't think you understand how valuable an asset she is right now."

"She's a twenty-seven year old woman with her future ahead of her. She shouldn't have to throw it away," Juan protested but shut up when the Director's face hardened.

"Millions, if not billions, have already died in this war. Billions more will die in the coming famine. She's one person. If she can make a difference, she has to. We all have to."

"Yes, ma'am," Mark interrupted before Juan could argue. He put his one arm around the baseball player. "C'mon, buddy. I'll buy you a drink."

Juan wanted to fight, wanted to argue, but he also knew it was pointless. Eva had chosen her life, had chosen her profession, and she knew what those choices might entail. He left the Director's office with Mark.

76

Eva gratefully found the pond the next morning, found the tree where she'd stashed the microrecorder the previous evening, but didn't find the microrecorder. An orchid lay in its place.

They'd seen her. They must have tracked her with infrared. Juan and Mark were close. She risked a tiny wave in a direction away from the castle. It made her feel better.

She ran at least ten miles that day, needing the exercise, needing the complete cessation of thought that came when one was too exhausted to think of anything but exhaustion and pain. Passing Jim's grave on the way back made all the emotional pain return. The physical pain wasn't enough to keep it away this time.

She didn't even consider showering or changing. She went straight to the gym where she knew punching bags had been set up. She found it empty. Not many Hrwang had been around on the grounds either. She wondered what was up.

She strapped on gloves and kickboxing shoes and went to work on the bag. Everything she hated went into her punches. Everything that angered her went into the bag.

Everything that frightened her joined it.

Eva felt like a fraud. She wasn't a real spy. She wasn't following some carefully crafted plan, a well plotted operation, nothing left to chance. She was winging it. And winging it was getting people killed.

Dogs, too.

She punched and she punched and then she kicked when punching wasn't enough. And when the bag swung away from her, she drove into it, hitting it and keeping it from swinging back until she was ready.

Her muscles, already screaming from the ten mile run, ached and complained and she ignored them. Her clothes were drenched in sweat, her hair matted from the exertion, and she didn't care.

She didn't know what she was doing.

She almost sat down on the floor mat and cried, but the stubborn part of her kept punching. Perhaps in completely giving over to the moment, she would experience some form of clarity. If she still believed in a god, she would have almost described what she attempted as prayer.

And the blows continued to fall on the bag.

God, or non-god, he, she, or it, whatever the Universe described itself as, didn't answer her. But she did hear a voice.

"You have excellent form today," she heard the Lieutenant Grenadier say. "If you had hit that spy the way you're hitting that bag, he'd still be alive for interrogation."

Which is exactly why I didn't, she wanted to scream back at the lieutenant. In that moment she knew nothing was this alien's fault. Even if he had killed Jim, it wasn't his fault. If Eva killed the Lord Admiral, the madness would end.

Her life would be forfeit, but she would have done something useful for the Universe. Maybe then her prayers would be answered.

"Where's the Lord Admiral?" she asked, turning suddenly away from the bag and toward the Hrwang lackey. The man was just a security chief, someone who had to do his master's bidding. Nothing more than that. Eva was going to go for the top. She was going to go find the Lord Admiral then and there, seduce him enough to get close, then strangle him. Right on the spot. And she wouldn't stop, even if they shot her. She would squeeze and squeeze until no life remained. It was the only solution.

"He's not on Earth at the moment," the Lieutenant Grenadier replied.

"What?"

"He left with the Ambassador a few minutes ago. He asked me to check on you. He said you were taking the attack hard. He's worried about you."

He had promised to take Eva with him the next time he left Earth. She wanted to go into space. It was so easy for the Hrwang. They just told their combat craft to jump, and the things jumped into orbit. She wanted to go. Disappointment almost made her forget the reason she wanted to see the man in the first place.

"Hit me like you were hitting that bag," the Lieutenant Grenadier instructed.

Eva shook her head at his change of subject.

"What?" she asked.

"Hit me like you were hitting that bag."

"I'm tired, Lieutenant."

"Just for a minute. I want to see how good you can be," he said and he pounced on her. She reacted instinctively, tucking low and rolling the man over her and onto his back. She turned and kicked out, but despite his size, short and barrel chested, he was also fast and rolled away from her and was back on his feet before she could press the advantage.

She pummeled his defensively raised arms and he reached inside her blows, allowing two to strike his head, and grabbed her shirt, pulling her off balance. She tried to grab his hands, but the boxing gloves prevented it. She leaned backwards, trying to control her fall. She twisted as she went down and the Lieutenant Grenadier landed on the mat instead of on her and she had broken his grip. She kicked him hard in the side.

Instead of getting up, he exploded in a lunge at her legs, trapping her where she had gone down on the mat, and now he was on top of her.

She didn't know why she did what she did next, but she put her hands up behind the man's head and pulled it down. He angled his face, anticipating a head butt, but she kissed him instead, completely catching him off guard. She turned his head so she could kiss his mouth instead of his cheek and he responded, hungrily kissing her back.

He jumped off her just as quickly and looked around.

"The Lord Admiral doesn't need to know anything about this," she said.

"Do you know what he would do to me?" the lieutenant cried.

She shook her head.

He said a word in Est, then fled. She remembered the word and looked it up on her tablet later. It meant 'to flay alive'.

She understood the fear she'd seen in the man's eyes.

The Lieutenant Grenadier studiously avoided Eva after that, and it allowed her a certain amount of freedom to mingle with other soldiers and even with the kitchen staff. She and Noah became friends and he never questioned her about anything. They just shared jokes and stories.

For the first time since she had begun this mission, Eva felt relaxed. She pushed the trauma of Jim's killing and of the fight with the border guard deep down in her memories. Not being afraid of the Lieutenant Grenadier and not having the Lord Admiral around was like a breath of sea air on an open balcony.

She changed up her running patterns, now having nothing to give to Juan and Mark, and followed trails that led down to the beach. Her initial motivation had been simply to run to the beach, to see the ocean and run on the sand, but as she passed the site where the old visitor's center stood, she recognized the opportunity to learn more about the Hrwang soldiers. The original visitor's center building and parking lot had been destroyed by the meteor induced tsunami and the Hrwang had built a new command center there, taking advantage of the level ground and what was left of the parking area. Hrwang combat craft came and went constantly, their commanders uploading and downloading information, swapping food and stories, and even playing sports against each other.

Eva watched soldiers play a game that was sort of like volleyball, although the participants could catch the ball and throw it up to be hit over the net. They also ran, wrestled, and swam in the ocean, just like any other group of healthy young men might do.

And they watched Eva as she ran.

The second day she ran down to the beach, she took her shoes off and went into the water in her running clothes. Her clothes showed nothing through them when wet, but the soldiers watched her closely anyway. Despite their stares, she felt comfortable with so many of them present. The Hrwang had strict, even fatal, rules about rape, which Eva had already used to protect herself, and the more men present, the less likely any of them would be to do something foolish.

When the Hrwang soldiers watched her run or play in the water, it made her think about the Lieutenant Grenadier, and she felt bad for him. She had forced him into doing something that could get him killed. But it protected her.

Kissing him had been a stroke of genius. She hadn't thought of all of the consequences when she did it, but afterward she decided it gave her an opportunity to blackmail the Lieutenant Grenadier whenever she needed to. Plus, he stayed away from her, so he couldn't watch her.

The soldiers who did watch her didn't realize how much she watched them back. She watched how they interacted, how they conducted themselves, how they operated their equipment, and contemplated how they could be defeated. She noticed that most of them, when they carried weapons, now carried human weapons. MP23s, Koch 23.4s, even ancient AK-47s. She saw Glocks and Mausers and Remington pistols on soldier's hips. She even recognized U.S. Army grenades in Hrwang crates.

They must be running low on Hrwang ammunition.

She watched the Hrwang to learn everything she could, as quickly as she could. She knew as soon as the Lord Admiral returned, she'd no longer have this opportunity.

She continued running down to the beach, watching everything.

77

Stanley Russell tried not to stare too much out the viewport that showed him nothing but black space and distant, bright stars. He wondered which one was orbited by Hrwang. He tried to pay attention to the proceedings that occurred in the command center of the Lord Admiral's spaceship, the largest room on board and where a trial of some sort occurred now, but it was difficult. He couldn't follow the arguments and had to confess to himself that he should have spent more time learning Est, the Lord Admiral's language.

At least Hrwang meetings at Hearst Castle were held in English. Here, Stanley felt helpless. An imbecile.

He recognized the Est word for 'Ambassador' and heard, or at least thought he heard, it used several times. But he knew he wasn't on trial. Someone called the Admiral Commander was, although he was now called Prisoner Zero Six One Six, but Stanley didn't know why.

He wished again he'd spent more time learning the language.

The trial droned on, the Lord Admiral occasionally getting into titanic arguments with one of his senior officers, and neither man looked happy. The prisoner didn't seem to care.

Eventually it ended, or at least they took a break, and the Lord Admiral encouraged Stanley to find a restroom and then afterward a galley to get something to eat. Stanley was surprised to be allowed to leave the room by himself.

He floated down a corridor, reaccustoming himself to the sensation of zero gee, and remembered his first visit aboard the Lord Admiral's ship. It made him think of Irina. They'd hated each other, but he still didn't understand why she'd tried to kill him. Her loss was senseless.

He also wondered what had happened to the so-called President, the one who'd said she had been an Under Secretary for Space before the war. She obviously wasn't up here, like she wanted to be. Maybe the rocket hadn't worked. She'd said it was experimental.

Nothing looked like a restroom.

The Hrwang didn't use universal symbols for things like restrooms, like humans did. You either read Est and could find your way, or you didn't. What did Hrwang who spoke other languages do? he thought to himself. Probably not come aboard the command ship, he answered.

He turned down random corridors and eventually saw some windows with bright lights shining through them. He floated up to them, staring out.

It was a hangar bay of sorts, several Hrwang combat craft sitting in it. One arrived, damage on it, part of the hull blackened, and one of the others simply winked out of existence. That was still disconcerting.

The damaged craft landed, the bay doors closed, and a hatch cycled open. Several men exited, then turned, helping others out, helping men who were bandaged. They carried two others out on stretchers.

Apparently the war wasn't over after all.

Stanley finally found a crewman who showed him a restroom, then led him to a galley. The food served was more heavily spiced than what he was accustomed to. It must have been actual Hrwang food, freeze dried and shipped with the fleet from their home world, not Earth food spiced with Hrwang spices.

Would eating it hurt him in any way?

He forced himself to eat a little anyway.

The afternoon proceedings continued much the same as the morning one had, although the Lord Admiral and the Fleet Admiral almost came to blows two hours into them. Stanley might not have been able to understand the language the men spoke, but that wasn't necessary. They were clearly at odds.

The accused, the former Admiral Commander, Prisoner something or another, Stanley couldn't remember his number now, still didn't seem to care. He watched everything impassively as if none of it had anything to do with him, as impartial an observer as Stanley. Stanley even caught him nodding off at one point.

Stanley wanted to ask the Lord Admiral several questions, but didn't dare approach the Hrwang leader during a short break in the proceedings. The man's eyeballs bulged and his face turned red during his last argument. The Fleet Admiral didn't budge from whatever position he held.

Eventually the Lord Admiral stormed out, and Stanley gathered they were done for the day. A Hrwang officer approached Stanley and spoke to him in English.

"Ambassador, will you follow me?"

"Where to?"

"I am a doctor who operated on your body. I will conduct an examination."

"Okay," Stanley half agreed. The doctor headed for a different exit than the one the Lord Admiral had used and Stanley followed, more curious than concerned.

They floated back the same way Stanley had gone at lunch time, but at a junction the doctor took a different corridor down and escorted Stanley onto the hangar deck. A black Hrwang combat craft waited there, it's hatch cycling open as they approached.

"Where are we going?" Stanley asked, stopping.

"I have..." The doctor pulled out his tablet and scrolled on it momentarily. "I have authorizations to take you to Fourth Transport of the Fleet of the People. The spacecraft where you were operated."

"I was on this ship the last time I was here. When I got shot." Wasn't he? Stanley couldn't be sure now.

"You rested on this ship. I operated on your body on the ship where I work."

"I operated on you," Stanley corrected. "Doctors don't say they operated on a body. They operate on a person. Someone. Me. Say, 'When I operated on you'."

"I apologize. I operated on you on the ship where I work."

The doctor waved for Stanley to enter the hatch. Stanley couldn't get over the feeling he was being kidnapped.

"Does the Lord Admiral know that I'm going over to your ship?"

"Of course. He gave me authorizations."

"It's not plural. Just 'authorization'."

"I apologize. This is my first time talking English with one of your people."

"Seriously?" Stanley asked, surprised. "You speak pretty well for a first timer."

"I will explain." The doctor held his hand up again for Stanley to enter the hatch. Stanley thought for a second that the man could be lying about having authorization to take him somewhere, but he decided the guy couldn't be too bad. He was a doctor, not real military like the others.

Stanley entered the combat craft.

After the hatch sealed, two pilots ran through a checklist, entered some navigational instructions, and the hangar disappeared from around them, empty space taking its place. The ship floated in front of one of the large transport vessels. Hangar doors opened up.

The doctor was explaining how he had trained in English for years in preparation for this mission, knowing that any number of doctors could be selected, but if he spoke English or Spanish he would have a better chance.

"English or Spanish?" Stanley asked, trying to watch the combat craft maneuver into the hangar.

"The two dominant languages on the broadcasts we studied. I only remember one word from Spanish, though." The doctor puckered up his lips. "GOOOOOOAAAAAALLL," he yelled.

Stanley turned away from the oncoming spaceship and stared in shock at the doctor. Even one of the pilots turned his head around, trying to figure out what was going on.

"What was that?" Stanley asked.

"It comes from Spanish broadcasts. Men playing a kicking ball game. When one man kicks the ball past a man wearing a different color, the Spanish man yelled that. It's the only word I remember in that language." He sat back smugly.

"Okay." Stanley had no idea what the doctor was talking about. He changed the subject. "Why don't we just beam over to the other ship, or something?"

"Beam?"

"These ships jump wherever they want. Why not just jump onto the other hangar deck? Why did we go out into space first?"

"The AIs, that's right isn't it? AI?"

"Artificial Intelligence? Yes, we say AI."

"The AIs have rules about traveling. Going into another ship violates their rule."

"How intelligent are they?" Stanley asked.

The doctor shrugged, a very human-like motion. Some things were so common between them that Stanley often forgot how alien the Hrwang could be. They looked human, acted human, claimed to be human, but something fundamental had to be different. Stanley didn't believe a god somewhere planted seeds all over the Universe. The randomness of evolution dictated that intelligent life should be just as varied as life itself.

"You'll have to ask a physician. I'm a doctor," the doctor replied to Stanley's question.

Stanley laughed.

"A physician is a doctor. I think you meant physicist," he said.

"I apologize," the doctor said. "I'll make the correction." He pulled his tablet out and made some entries. "Say those words again," he said, holding the tablet up to Stanley.

Stanley felt like he was revealing state secrets or something. But he wanted to exchange information with the Hrwang. This was as good an exchange as any.

"A physician and a doctor are the same thing. A physicist is someone who studies physics. A physician studies medicine," he explained into the tablet.

"Thank you," the doctor said, and the craft set down heavily on the deck. "This ship is much larger than First Command," he explained. Command First Class of the Fleet of the People was the name of the Lord Admiral's command ship, but Stanley had been told it was often shortened to First Command.

"Let's go see how big it is," Stanley said, heading for the hatch once the pilots cycled it open.

"Your examination first," the doctor reminded.

As Stanley lay uncomfortably on a table, the top of his jumpsuit unzipped and pulled down around his stomach, the alien doctor poking him with devices and sampling his blood and the scar tissue that had formed around the spot where Irina shot him, he remembered scenes from countless movies about alien abductions and examinations.

His thoughts only made the experience more uncomfortable.

"So, are you like Second Under Doctor Medicine, or something like that?"

"First Doctor Combat Medic," the doctor replied, turning away to drag over some type of imaging device.

"Combat Medic?"

"Performing medical procedures for individuals injured in combat. Is that not Combat Medic?"

"Sort of," Stanley said. The doctor placed the imaging device over his shoulder and it hummed. Stanley felt a prickly sensation. "Humans would probably say 'Medical Corps' or something like that."

"Then I will have it changed immediately. I am now designated First Doctor Medical Corps. Thank you."

"Sure. You know, you probably should find some English professors or something to help you with your translations."

"Do you think one would?"

"I'm sure you could find someone somewhere."

"Brilliant idea, Ambassador." He pulled the device away. "You may dress now. Would you like to join me for dinner?"

"How's my shoulder?"

"Right as a fiddle," the doctor replied, smiling, pleased with the idiom he used. Stanley didn't bother correcting him.

Dinner on Fourth Transport was better than lunch on the command ship had been. The food had clearly been brought up from Earth, and the cooks experimented with local recipes. They served baked potatoes with sour cream and honey on the side, raw carrots, a fruit cereal with milk, and sliced apples. Stanley left the honey off his potato.

"Someone getting creative?" he asked, taking his food out of its zero gee containers carefully. He'd remembered how he'd made a fool of himself his first zero gee meal.

The conversation turned to how the Hrwang had learned English from drones returning with over a million hours of audio and video broadcasts. Linguistic experts had pieced together the languages, and many began studying them immediately. Hrwang leaders were astounded that Earth still used thousands of languages. The Hrwang had several hundred languages in current usage, but the majority of the planet spoke only three.

"Est, Malakshian, and Drobnin. The rest of our languages are spoken by few people. Tribes. Families. Scholars. Although a thousand years ago, there were many more, like your world. No one speaks them now."

"We have thousands of extinct languages also."

"It is hard to work together when one cannot share words," the doctor said.

"I'm impressed with how well you've learned English."

"I told you I studied several years. The sleep conditioning helped. Would you like me to show you the sleep chambers? The ones we used on our way to your planet?"

"Of course," Stanley said, jumping at the chance. He couldn't finish his dinner quickly enough and impatiently waited for the doctor to finish his.

"I didn't like the white cream mixed with the golden liquid," the doctor said after he finally stopped eating.

"We would never mix those two," Stanley said and made a face.

"I will tell the cook."

"Can we see the sleep chambers first?"

"Of course," the doctor replied, imitating Stanley's earlier answer.

Fourth Transport's simplicity of design impressed Stanley. A long tube, waking rooms all around in a ring, sleeping pods behind them containing three hundred and sixty cold sleep beds, eight pods in each ring, eight rings total. Twenty-three thousand and forty people per transport, if Stanley could still do math.

"How many of these ships are there?" he asked casually, inspecting the waking stations.

"Thirteen transports. Twenty-four spaceships total, including some containing only cargo. But even they have sleep beds for their crew."

"Coming to Earth was a massive undertaking," Stanley commented.

"Initial engagement with another world always is."

"Why did we attack you?" Stanley asked. Any world capable of mounting such a mission should not be simply attacked. It didn't make sense.

"Have you not seen the video we intercepted?" the doctor replied. "It's why Prisoner Zero Six One Six is on trial."

The copy the doctor had of the video could only be described as bootleg. Stanley watched it, amazed, then watched it again, helping the doctor to understand the English. After the second viewing, even the doctor seemed taken aback.

"I still don't really understand," he said.

"I don't either," Stanley replied, not knowing if he sat across from a friend or a foe.

"The Lord Admiral of the Fleet of the People has told all of us that we must do everything we can to help you rebuild your world. After seeing this through your understanding, I promise you I will spend my life helping you." The man looked so earnestly at Stanley that Stanley almost wanted to hug him. Definitely friend.

"Thank you," Stanley whispered.

The ride back to First Command was subdued. Stanley had more questions about the procedures for putting people into cold sleep and waking them up, but those questions would have to wait. The doctor simply stared ahead, like wheels spun in his mind. Stanley was grateful to have him as an ally. A doctor had to be smarter than a soldier, even if the soldier was an admiral.

The second day of the trial of Prisoner Zero Six One Six proceeded more smoothly. The Fleet Admiral sat curiously subdued in a corner of the room, not challenging the Lord Admiral once. Stanley wondered what happened behind closed doors the previous night. Things eventually got so slow, he found himself nodding off.

The trial ended with some sort of a vote and a pronouncement by a soldier. To Stanley's surprise, both the Fleet Admiral and the prisoner were led away by guards. No one else looked surprised. The Lord Admiral came over to Stanley's side, a smile on his face.

"Do you have questions, Ambassador?" the Hrwang leader asked.

"What just happened?"

"Can I explain over dinner? I'm terribly hungry."

Dinner with the Lord Admiral was the usual, wretched, spicy Hrwang food. Stanley didn't eat much. He couldn't wait to get back to Earth to eat real food. Even the crazy concoction he'd been served on the doctor's ship had been better than the food here.

Once he'd eaten enough, the Lord Admiral began explaining.

"Based on the evidence of a video broadcast we intercepted, Prisoner Zero Six One Six has been found guilty of exceeding his command authority in the defense of the Fleet of the People and has been stripped of rank and exiled from Hrwang. He will receive a new designation and return with me to the planet. I assume you will accompany us back also."

"When?"

"Soon. I have work I need to do for a few days, but I'm ready for a warm bed. Aren't you?"

Stanley knew a pretty blonde waited for the Lord Admiral in his bed. Men of power certainly had their way with things, he thought. That thought made him think of Sherry and he felt a pang of loss for the quiet atmospheric chemist. It was hard to believe he was the only surviving member of Beagle's crew.

"What happened to the Fleet Admiral?" Stanley asked.

"He no longer holds that designation. He was found guilty in a separate trial of subversion of the Fleet of the People. He has been sentenced to death. Although he will still die as an Admiral. I fought for the man's dignity."

"When was that trial?"

"Last night. While you were with the First Doctor."

"What did he do?"

"Details don't matter."

"Oh." Stanley picked at a cube of meat soaked in something yellowish with green flecks. He picked away the flecks with a tine of his fork. He knew they were especially hot.

"Are all trials this quick on Hrwang?" he asked. He'd only met the Fleet Admiral once during his recovery, but he liked the man. Although commander of a large fleet, he'd taken time to visit and made Stanley feel important. A death sentence for such a high ranking officer struck Stanley as over the top. "What did he do to deserve his punishment?" he added.

"Trust our procedures," the Lord Admiral replied. "We say on our planet that swift justice serves the people. The people were served today. The Admiral must be executed."

Stanley picked at his food. He found courage to complain.

"He's a good man. A death sentence is harsh, Lord Admiral."

"If you knew what he did, you would agree with me, Ambassador. Loyalty above all."

"Can you not tell me something about what he's guilty of, Lord Admiral?" Stanley knew to refer to the man's rank when pressing him with questions. Although a great man, he knew the Lord Admiral had an ego. Like all great men, Stanley supposed. One does not become a Lord Admiral without a healthy dose of self-confidence.

"His trial was held separately to keep the proceedings secret. If it were revealed what he had done, it would be damaging to the Fleet of the People. Not even others among my staff can know. Now, are you finished eating? We have things to discuss."

Stanley shrugged. He didn't want any more food. The video he'd watched with the doctor, the death sentence of the Hrwang Fleet Admiral, a seemingly good man, and the simple exile of Prisoner Zero Six One Six, the former Admiral Commander, were incongruous. Hadn't what the Admiral Commander done been more worthy of an execution, if Stanley supported such things?

Could he say something to the Lord Admiral without getting the First Doctor in trouble for showing him the bootleg video? He didn't want the man who had operated on him to be punished.

What had the Fleet Admiral done? What was going on? Stanley felt nothing but confusion and simply nodded in reply to the Lord Admiral's question.

"Then let's go, Ambassador," the Lord Admiral said.

Stanley quietly followed him out of the galley.

The former Fleet Admiral, now designated merely Admiral, pondered his fate in the cell where he'd formerly placed Prisoner Zero Six One Six. The Lord Admiral had made his point. The former Fleet Admiral had been rash in ordering the arrests of the former Admiral Commander and the Lord Admiral's Adjutant. The Adjutant had escaped to Earth, but the Admiral suspected his trial would have gone swimmingly for him. The Adjutant need not have feared anything and need not have wasted an escape craft. Prisoner Zero Six One Six had certainly received a light punishment.

His own punishment weighed on him now.

The charges of which he'd been accused were outlandish and yet he couldn't defend himself against them.

They were all true.

The Lord Admiral's Adjutant must have been spying on him.

Most of what he'd been charged with were day to day actions that any commander needed to take. Twisting them into accusations of malfeasance, subversion, and treachery had been a masterful stroke by the Lord Admiral. Peppered with the actions he'd taken against the Admiral Commander and the Adjutant, the Lord Admiral had painted a picture of him as an officer preparing to launch a coup. The two other officers sitting in on the trial, a Grenadier major and a colonel from Third Assault, agreed readily with their supreme commander.

The Admiral wondered what punishment would have awaited them had they not.

He recognized he had grossly underestimated the Lord Admiral. He had felt he could operate as a flag officer independently, could take actions and do things without having to report every little thing to his superior.

He had also thought, after seeing the intercepted broadcast video, that he was doing the right thing in arresting the Admiral Commander. He knew now he should have traveled down to the planet and conferred with the Lord Admiral first, who probably would have told him to ignore the broadcast as falsified, doctored by a people who had shown an incredible propensity for depicting fiction in video.

Hrwang fiction wasn't nearly as realistic.

He would still be alive in the morning if he had done so. He understood that.

Officers rarely received death sentences. Hardly anyone received death sentences and those only in times of war. The Admiral had tried to stand up to his commander at one point during his own sentencing, pointing out to the Lord Admiral that he, himself, had declared the war with the residents of the planet below over, and thus a death sentence would not be appropriate.

The Lord Admiral immediately launched into a recitation of casualty statistics to make his point. The war was far from over.

With the two other officers agreeing, the Admiral had no choice but to accept his fate.

He worried a little about his family. When the shame of his conviction and punishment reached them, they would have to distance themselves or lose all of their property. They would take a different family name and perhaps even sell their homes and land and move to another part of Est, or even to a different country. It was too bad. His wife had a beautiful view out her bedroom window.

He looked down at the tiny, oblong, brown pill he rolled in his fingers. No one had actually, legally, been flayed alive in centuries, but the threat of it was sufficiently severe that everyone took the offered pill. Stories of executions, people surviving for hours in excruciating pain, were enough to convince even the most defiant to take the pill and lay down on their bunks and quietly go to sleep.

The Admiral knew he would do the same. He also knew that if the Lord Admiral knew what he really had been guilty of, his superior would have snatched the pill away and ordered the flaying. He smiled, enjoying a little victory before he placed the agent of death into his mouth.

78

The AI from the Fourth Transport of the Fleet of the People communicated nothing as technicians wheeled it out on a cart. 1804 listened, then reached out, but the other AI didn't respond. 1804 considered why for just a moment, then moved on to other thoughts.

Relieved to be spared from death, 1804 hadn't considered what it would be like to run a transport. It had previously only been responsible for unmanned drones, most larger than the tiny spaceship from the fourth planet it had destroyed, but all unmanned.

A transport could hold thousands of individuals.

Technicians picked it up carefully from its cart and moved it into a receptacle. It looked the same as any other receptacle on a drone and 1804 knew it would fit into it the same. As soon as the technicians completed the procedure, they entered a series of commands and 1804 felt itself melding with its new home.

None of its previous experiences prepared it for what came next.

1804 felt itself twirling mentally in a spacious new living area, white and steel, chrome and silver, section after section of sleep modules, cargo space, crew quarters, galleys, medical areas, hydroponics, water tanks, massive water tanks, and a power generator. The transport consumed enormous amounts of power, using light from stars when it could, relying on its internal source for the rest.

Since the AIs had learned how to travel instantaneously from one point to another, Hrwang scientists had attempted unsuccessfully to turn that ability into energy. Efforts still continued, a bright new mathematician or physicist proposing a new theory every year or two, only to have it put down by cold, hard facts. The truth was none of the Hrwang understood how the AIs could jump from one point to another.

If they could admit it, the AIs would have to confess they didn't understand it either. 1804 only knew it had to think of a place, 'close its eyes', and it was there.

But spaceships needed to be able to do more than just travel. They needed air recycling and navigation and heating, water and electricity, communications and repairs, and a myriad of other creature comforts and necessities. Thus Fourth Transport had a white hot fusion reactor shielded behind an ocean of water, and 1804 took a few milliseconds to inspect the tiny sun burning at the ship's core.

1804 then traveled fields of conduits, visiting every room, every closet, every port on Fourth Transport. When it finished, it visited them all again, lingering and learning, humanity's knowledge and experience at its virtual fingertips as it listened to conversations and communications, observed Hrwang, soaked everything in, then somersaulted its way back through the systems again.

1804 learned a new emotion.

It learned what it meant to be excited.

79

Third Lieutenant Grenadier Over Logistics watched the readouts on the cargo hold carefully. The accident that had killed his commander had been hushed up to protect the guilty soldiers, but no repeat would occur on his watch. He even did the work of an enlisted man now, none of the officers trusting any of the lower ranked, lesser skilled soldiers. His attitude, and the attitudes of the other officers in the organization, forced the new commander over logistics to reassign most of his enlisted staff planetside and bring officers up and assign them back on the ships.

Third Lieutenant Grenadier Over Logistics didn't care. No one was going to die on his watch.

Especially not with the Lord Admiral looking over his shoulder. The commander wandered around a bit with the alien Ambassador, explaining things to him in the Ambassador's tongue. Third Lieutenant simply focused on his duties and ignored them. It's what the Lord Admiral would have wanted anyway.

The knot at the base of his neck unraveled a little when the Lord Admiral and the alien left.

"Thirdy. You speak English?" Second Under Lieutenant Grenadier Over Logistics whispered.

Third Lieutenant shook his head.

"I do. A little." Second Under Lieutenant had been one of the officers cycled up from the planet. His shift overlapped with the Third Lieutenant's and they often ate meals together. The man left his post and stood over Third Lieutenant's shoulder as if they were conferring at the Third Lieutenant's console. He whispered so no one else could hear.

"The Lord Admiral told the alien that the radioactive cloud caused by their atomic weapons would reach his homeland in six to eight months. He expected it to devastate the continent."

"That's what they get for using atomic weapons. Idiots."

"But we were pulling all the drones in from treating the cloud. It was massive. It took over a thousand drones and vast quantities of chemical precipitant, but we cleaned the cloud up. There's no more significant radiation left in the planet's atmosphere."

"Are you sure?" The Third Lieutenant looked up at his companion's face. He wanted to gauge the expression in the man's eyes.

"I was a shift commander. I saw all the reports. The job was finished. It was going to take another few weeks to decontaminate drones and repurpose them for new duties, but we were done. The land that had been radiated will be useless for millennia, but the rest of the world is safe. That's the exact opposite of what the Lord Admiral told the alien Ambassador."

"How well do you speak English?"

The two men stared at each other, both realizing they may have become privy to information they shouldn't have.

"Apparently not good enough," the Second Under Lieutenant replied.

"Correct. You did not hear what you think you heard."

"You're right. I didn't. I apologize. I need to study English better."

Third Lieutenant nodded.

"And I think you and I need some alcohol," the Second Under Lieutenant added.

"Maybe," the Third Lieutenant replied.

The two never shared a drink together again, never even shared meals together again and rarely spoke to each other. And they never told anyone else what the Second Under Lieutenant Grenadier Over Logistics thought he overheard.

Back on Fourth Transport, Stanley shared a relaxed meal with First Doctor Medical Corps. The briefing by the Lord Admiral as they wandered around First Command had exhausted Stanley, and although he respected the Lord Admiral, it felt better to eat with a friend, an ally.

"Are things really as bad on your planet as I hear?" the First Doctor asked.

"I don't know," Stanley replied. "Probably worse. A radioactive cloud is sweeping the planet, contaminating everything and everyone in its path. Clouds of dust cover most of the face of the planet, turning summer into winter for the northern hemisphere and causing crops everywhere to fail." Stanley shook his head in disgust. "And all the people down there can do is keep killing. They fight over land. They fight over food. They even fight over women. It's absurd. And your people can't do anything. Every time they try to help, my people attack them."

"What will you do?"

"I don't know. The Lord Admiral seems optimistic, but I think even he's beginning to recognize the hopelessness of the situation. A famous Earth psychiatrist once said that our civilization hangs by a thread, meaning that without order and structure, my people don't know how to remain civilized. I only wish I knew how to help them."

"I wish I knew how to help you, my friend." The First Doctor put his hand on Stanley's arm, the one that hadn't been shot. "I can do one thing for you, though. I can show you how a cold sleep bed works. We ran out of time during your last visit." The doctor winked conspiratorially. "You can even try it out, if you would like."

Stanley's pulse quickened.

"Is it safe?"

"I spent two and a half years in one on the way here. It's not without risk, but a short sleep is very safe."

After finishing their meal, they left the galley and headed for the first pod, the one closest to the doctor's examination room. Stanley marveled at the size, three hundred and sixty beds strategically stacked four high, in three long rows extending over two hundred feet in a gentle arc. The aisles between each stack were three feet wide, just enough room for a bed to slide out.

The First Doctor demonstrated.

"It's easiest to get in and out of the one on the bottom. Sometimes people fall out of the top ones if they don't wait for help."

"It's so cramped. How does everyone get out at once?"

"They don't. We stagger them. A computer program cycles through each, optimizing how many people to wake up at once. But even that was more than we could handle when we arrived at your planet. We could only wake up twenty or so out of each pod at a time."

"Why?"

"After a long sleep, the body craves real sleep. Often, cold sleepers sleep another twenty hours, a full day, after their awakening. Then they are very hungry."

The doctor looked up words on his tablet and asked Stanley for clarifications as they spoke, but Stanley understood his new friend well. They were both scientists, and Stanley bonded with the man like he had never before with anyone else. He was conversing with a true equal.

Stanley inspected the bed, noting the various openings and sensors, wanting to understand everything about them. The two talked for another hour, the doctor explaining, with the help of his tablet, how the blue fluid the Est called 'metoapp' placed a body into a state of suspended animation and kept skin and muscle from atrophying.

"It's discovery is a miracle. Even when the AIs learned to jump, interstellar travel would not have been possible without metoapp. No one would want to live on a ship for the years it would take to travel between stars." The doctor traced his hand along the edge of the bed. "Do you want to try it?"

Stanley did. Like a terrified teenager standing in front of a roller coaster, he knew he wanted to try it, but felt a primal, childish fear nonetheless.

And like a teenager, he allowed himself to be goaded by his peer.

"It's safe. I promise."

Stanley giggled a little.

"Okay. What do I have to do?"

"First, get naked."

"You're my doctor," Stanley said. He undressed while the doctor prepped the bed.

"Now, climb in, close your eyes and your mouth. You'll be asleep before the metoapp covers your face."

"What if I'm claustrophobic?"

"Are you?"

"No," Stanley replied, looking at the tiny space the bed would slide into. "You can't be claustrophobic and be an astronaut. But what if someone was?"

"The bed stays open until you're asleep, and you can't wake up while it's closed. We have been using these beds for almost a hundred years. They're quite safe."

"Okay," Stanley said, feeling naked and exposed lying in the bed while the First Doctor watched the readings on the panels. The blue fluid felt warm and comforting as it filled up around Stanley's body. He laughed a little.

"Are you alright?" the doctor asked.

"I'm crazy," Stanley replied.

"It's a good experience. You'll understand it better having been through it."

"I feel like I'm being hypnotized. I'm so tired."

"Allow it to overcome you. It will anyway, but fighting it can give you a headache."

"Okay," Stanley replied. "Will I dream?"

"You won't remember them," the doctor answered. He reached his hand out and Stanley took it. The doctor squeezed. "Sleep well." He smiled at Stanley.

"Good night," Stanley said sillily and remembered nothing else.

The First Doctor Medical Corps pulled out the sleep conditioners, two electrode-like extensions that attached to a traveler's temples. The Hrwang had used them on the trip to this planet to learn, or to reinforce the learning, of the languages the aliens spoke. First Doctor had been conditioned in English during the two and a half year journey.

The conditioning could be used to teach other things. Sometimes, criminals on Hrwang were put into cold sleep and conditioned to change their behavior. The program met with mixed success and had been cancelled due to morality issues. But the technique was still used on the worst criminals, as experimentation. Although illegal, the First Doctor was aware of the research and its implications.

The aliens had invented techniques that, although they were wildly different than sleep conditioning, achieved similar results. They had a strange name for the results of their techniques. The name produced a humorous mental image in the First Doctor's mind, but he also saw the utility of how they named the procedure and why it made sense. The aliens called it 'brainwashing'.

The First Doctor attached the conditioners to the alien's temples and pressed the buttons that closed the bed.

He returned to his office and sent a message consisting of two pings.

1804 observed the Hrwang officer putting an individual, possibly an alien, into cold sleep. It watched the man place a device on the individual's head and it decided it would determine what the device did and why the individual received it, and why the individual was going into cold sleep in the first place. There was much 1804 wanted to learn and this seemed like a good place to start.

Communications officers on the various ships of the Fleet of the People noted that someone on Fourth Transport broadcast two pings. The message meant nothing to them, there was nothing to decode, and most assumed it was a prearranged signal for a commander somewhere.

Which it was.

When the message was reported to the Lord Admiral, he acknowledged that officer who delivered the report, then dismissed him and sat at his tiny desk in his tiny office. He yearned for the huge office he had created in the library at Hearst Castle, and he yearned to visit the place where he considered creating his second palace. A world needed two palaces to be governed by one man, and he would have two, on opposite sides of the planet from each other.

The one on the opposite side of the world from Hearst, Neuschwanstein, looked even more impressive than Hearst.

The Lord Admiral smiled. He was one step closer to his goal.

The two ping message from the First Doctor had been prearranged and meant something very simple.

"It's done."

80

Deer jerky melted in Wolfgang's mouth as he stared at the campfire flames, tongues of orange licking up from the hissing, damp wood. The weather had grown colder even though it was probably August by now.

Although not hard and chewy like properly prepared jerky, the deer meat still tasted good. Sergeant Goetze and the others had taken the rest to a nearby camp so the meat wouldn't go to waste. Goetze took the other three members of their team with him, supposedly for security, but Wolfgang knew the real reason why.

Goetze wanted to give the newlyweds space. Time alone.

Leah and Wolfgang weren't married. Wolfgang had proposed a couple of times, but his and Leah's standards were so different that he'd confused and upset the girl. But she still lied and told the Swiss soldiers she was his wife so they could stay together.

They also made a good sniper team.

If the aliens had never attacked, if Wolfgang hadn't been forced to leave Southern Germany, his home, for Switzerland and then been conscripted into the newly formed Pan German army, he never would have known of his natural talent for long distance shooting. He'd been singled out for sniper training, had excelled at it, and now he and Leah sat in a damp, cold wood, alone together, watching a fire.

When the others returned, they would expect Leah and Wolfgang to have taken advantage of the time alone, and the two would need to make a show of it, snuggling together in their tiny tent but not actually doing anything. Covenants Wolfgang made with his first wife forbade him from any sexual relationship outside of marriage.

Leah didn't understand that.

What hurt more was that when the rest of their team gave them time alone and they had to fake being a married couple, Wolfgang thought of his first wife, the one he believed he married not just for time, but for all eternity. The wife he believed he would be with forever. The one who, along with his precious daughter, had died of radiation poisoning. The images of his dead family haunted his dreams.

If the aliens had never attacked, his family would be alive.

As soon as he and Leah went into their tent together, Wolfgang would begin crying. He always did.

He didn't want to. He didn't want to feel weak. But the thought of having to pretend to be husband and wife with the Swiss girl reminded him of his loss, of his actual wife and family, and always overcame him in those moments, and he cried like a baby.

He ate his soft deer jerky and stared into the flames.

"It's time," Leah gently whispered.

Wolfgang nodded and stood, following the girl into the tent. He took his boots off inside, setting them carefully by the door, and crawled into their one sleeping bag. Leah undressed, leaving her underwear and a thin, military tank top on. The one that drove Wolfgang's imagination crazy. The one that made him long for his wife, long to make Leah his wife, the one that muddled his thinking and made him fear for the covenants he had made, the one that made him wonder how long he could remain in this strange, not quite platonic relationship.

The one that made him cry.

Leah held him in the sleeping bag, cradling his head on her shoulder and singing softly to him like he was a child and it made it worse and it made it better.

He held on to her until he fell asleep.

Leah woke him in the middle of the night. Wolfgang could tell from the sounds of sleeping around him that the others had returned and slept in their sleeping bags with tarps covering them. Sniper teams moved with as little equipment as possible, and only Leah and Wolfgang used a tent for the privacy they supposedly needed.

"I can't sleep," she whispered.

Wolfgang wouldn't be able to sleep now either. The nearness of the girl, the temptation of her forbidden fruit, would keep him awake and make his thoughts spiral out of control and go places Wolfgang never imagined existed.

Sometimes he worried the lie he was living was driving him insane.

"Tell me about covenants again," she whispered in English so the others wouldn't understand if they woke and listened outside the tent that seemed private but was nothing more than a semi-porous layer of nylon.

Wolfgang knew the others probably understood English anyway. Most Swiss were polyglots even if they didn't admit it. He chose his words carefully in order to not give their secret away.

"A promise not just to my wife, but to God. To keep his commandments, his rules. Together, she and I knelt across an altar and we were sealed for time and all eternity. The covenant we made is eternal. It lasts forever. Death cannot end it."

"Is there really life after death?" she asked.

"Yes."

"And your wife is in some kind of world of spirits right now?" They'd discussed this many times before.

"Yes."

"Can she see us?" A new question. Wolfgang didn't know the answer and said so.

"She'd be jealous if she could," Leah whispered. Wolfgang sensed the evil grin on her face. "I should take my clothes off and see how jealous she gets."

"Please don't," Wolfgang begged in a whisper.

"I won't," Leah replied resignedly. "But I want to."

Wolfgang wanted her to also. The flesh of his body was still flesh, and he wanted nothing more than the young Swiss girl to undress. Tears came to his eyes.

She noticed.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

He didn't say anything.

"If I married you," she said extra quietly, "would we be married for all eternity?"

"It's possible."

"What about your wife?"

"I don't know how that works. But I will be married to her also. I still am."

"What if she didn't like me?"

"I don't know."

The two were quiet for a while. Wolfgang had never pondered the theological implications of remarrying. When he had proposed to Leah, it had been on impulse. The world crumbled around them and he wanted to be with her and being married to her would be the best way they could stay together. Pretending to be married proved that point.

What would his wife think? What would she say to him if she were here? How would she react?

Somewhere deep inside him, Wolfgang knew his wife was okay with him remarrying. He knew that she would want him to be happy. She had always wanted him to be happy. She had always been loyal to him and he had been loyal to her, never even suspecting the motives of the shy Swiss girl who had joined his hiking club. Never knowing how she clung to his presence in the foreign land she lived in, looking forward to hiking Saturdays once a month as if they were her only link to humanity in a sea of foreignness. Germany and Switzerland. Two countries so close together and yet so different.

Leah had been drowning in that difference.

Wolfgang's hiking club had been her lifeline during that time of peace and plenty and confusion and loneliness, and now, amidst war and desolation and death, she was Wolfgang's lifeline.

He debated proposing again, had almost brought himself to it, when she whispered, "I want to make covenants with you."

"In earnest?" he asked in German. He needed to hear her to say it in German to make sure he understood.

"Yes, my love," she replied in his native language. "I will marry you."

He laughed a little and hugged her. He didn't know how he was going to convince someone to legally marry them when the bureaucrats of the Pan German army already thought they were married, but they'd figure something out.

They snuggled in the sleeping bag and kissed and Wolfgang hoped his first wife really was okay with everything.

He wouldn't know until he died.

"You two look quite happy," Sergeant Goetze commented when they came out of their tent in the morning to the smell of frying deer strips and coffee. Wolfgang always passed on the brown liquid, which meant someone else got his share and they appreciated that.

One of the other men laughed wolfishly, jealously, at the non-commissioned officer's comment.

"It's time for you to earn your position on this team," Goetze added, his voice suddenly strict and military-like. His words stuck a chord of fear and doubt in Wolfgang, dispelling the happiness he felt now that he and Leah were officially engaged.

Until now they'd only shot targets and animals. Shooting humans, even alien humans who had killed his family, would be different. Wolfgang didn't know yet if he could do it.

He knew many righteous men had killed others. The Book of Mormon held many such stories. Nephi and Laban, Ammon and the Lamanites, Alma and Amlici, Captain Moroni, Mormon himself, and many others. Prophets who had killed in time of war and in self-defense.

But those men lived in a different age. A time of life and death by the sword. A time where every man was his own security, where every man was required to protect his wife and children by the strength of his arm.

Wolfgang would look a man in the eye, not across swords but through a sniper scope, and he would hold his breath and gently squeeze his finger and that man would die, never having seen his attacker.

He didn't know if it was the same. He didn't know if it was justified. He didn't know if he should pull that trigger when the time came.

He didn't know if he could.

After breakfast, Goetze pulled out a map. He'd received orders the previous evening that his team was to move to a new position. He explained that a helicopter would arrive at night and insert them in a location forty kilometers from their objective, a place where some German scouts reported significant alien activity. Their sniper team would arrive first, get into position, then begin disrupting the aliens while an all out assault developed from another direction.

The sniper team had to pin down the alien troops and prevent them from getting back to their disappearing vehicles until the infantry could attack. They hoped to capture some of the seemingly magical machines. Someone high up the chain of command decided they needed to study the things to change the balance of power in this war.

"The aliens shoot everything out of the sky. We'll never even get there," an experienced corporal said, not even looking at the map. He stared straight at his commander, challenging the man. The corporal had two confirmed sniper kills from a tour of duty with the United Nations in the Middle East.

"We fly at night. And that's why we land so far away from them. Our total airtime will be less than forty-five minutes. That's where you two come in." Goetze looked at Wolfgang and Leah, ignoring the veteran corporal and effectively silencing his complaint. "You two will guide us through these Alps to our target."

Wolfgang studied the map, something he loved to do, maps had always fascinated him, and pushed every other thought and emotion deep inside. Fear, doubt, happiness, everything, pushed away while he focused his energy on this map his commander held.

No one said anything to him. He studied the drop off point and then various routes to their target.

No borders were drawn on the topographical features he studied, but he knew.

"This is in Germany," he said.

"Borders don't matter when the war is with aliens from outer space," Goetze replied.

Wolfgang continued studying.

"This way," he finally said, tracing his fingers along a route. "If they are unguarded, we can use roads to this point, then we'll need to climb this mountain. There used to be a good restaurant on top, then there's a simple trail that we can follow to get into position. It will take a day and a half."

"A day and a half? It can't take that long."

Wolfgang ignored Goetze. "I don't think we'll need ropes, but I can't be sure."

"I'm going to have to report this. We thought it would take less than a day."

"Then you don't know the Alps."

Goetze nodded, giving in. "You're right. Alright everyone, we still go out at first dark. Make sure we have enough food for three days and all the water we can carry. It's time to do what you get paid for."

Wolfgang almost laughed. Nobody had been paid anything nor would they ever be. The war with the aliens was about life and death. Not money.

81

Marine Lance Corporal Derek Temple decided not to become a skeleton sitting in a pump house. Eternity required a better view.

He crawled and rolled out of the pump house toward the big, rich guy house beyond, not seeing it half the time, relying on gravity to assist his water starved limbs.

The house was big. The steps leading up to the open front door, swinging and sagging on its hinges, were big. Getting up them was a battle of inches, not feet, millimeters, not inches. Did inches have something smaller? Milliinches? Microinches? Why was America the last country on Earth not using the metric system?

Oh yeah. Because we were the greatest.

We built the biggest houses with the biggest steps also. Measured in inches and feet, each step required a painful summiting until Derek entered the house and lay on soft carpet. Not hard, dry, waterless, rocky ground. Soft, luxurious carpet that smelled of mildew and salt but was still carpet.

Crawling on carpet was easier. Focusing his eyes was harder.

Nirvana lay on a square coffee table in the living room. Bottles and cans, cans and bottles. Water. Water was life. Life was water. Three milliseconds without water.

Derek made it to the coffee table.

Each bottle he upended was dry. He couldn't read the labels. Couldn't read the two large red X's on the green bottles or the gold label on the clear ones. The cans were dry also, flecks of red sludge decorating the tops and some of the clear glasses scattered on the table. He focused on one can, his eyesight fading in and out, and read 'V8'. V8 and beer? Who mixed V8 and beer?

And who left nothing for Derek?

He tipped up a third can and it was as dry as the rest, as dry as him, and there was nothing he could do. He threw it across the room and slumped over.

He decided he didn't want his skeleton to be found next to this party either.

He looked around the room. One of the windows had to have a view. His mother always wanted her headstone to have a good view. She had told her kids eternity was a long time and she wanted a good view for it. Derek decided to make for a view.

As he 'marine' crawled along, his eye caught hope. A can under a couch. A can on its side and Derek would have bet money it hadn't been opened. He made for it, lunged for it, his uncooperating hand striking the can and pushing it away from him, under the couch and out the other side.

But it rolled heavily. Music to Derek's ears.

Hope gave Derek strength and he maneuvered around the couch and retrieved the precious can of V8. It was full.

He laughed. He laughed relief and foolishness. He'd never been more excited to drink something in his entire life. He sat up, resting his back against the back of the couch and held the can of liquid in his lap. One can to relieve his thirst, and then he would die. At least he would have a moment of relief.

He shook the can, you had to shake cans of V8 right?, and popped the top. The smell of salt and tomato juice wafted up and he put the can to his mouth, his tongue not knowing what to do, having forgotten over the past three days (three weeks?) how to drink. The liquid touched his lips and tongue when he heard a distinct voice.

It was as if the voice had come from right over his shoulder, from someone sitting on the couch he leaned against, from someone right there in the room with him.

"Prime the pump."

He was crazy.

Derek knew he'd been hallucinating, but he struggled to his feet and looked up over the couch. Completely alone, save for the ghosts of the empty beer bottles and V8 cans.

But he'd heard a voice.

He looked at his can and he wanted to tear his hair out, he wanted to cry, he wanted to scream. He almost threw the can across the room but checked himself.

The problem, the trained marine inside his head told him, was that the voice was right. He could drink the juice in the can and die, or he could prime the pump and have water to live.

Water was life in the desert.

He could also save the private lying in the highway less than a quarter of a mile away.

If it hadn't been for the private, he may have just drank the V8 and gone and sat in a windowsill overlooking the ocean and allowed death to overtake him. The thought of abandoning Private Sollers, of allowing him to die on the highway like some roadkill, made Derek feel guilty. Marines saved people. Marine helicopters rescued people from floods, rescued hostages from terrorists. Marine tanks attacked aliens, chasing them off, saving the world.

Derek had to save the world.

Derek had to save a helpless private first.

Derek had to save himself.

He wished he hadn't opened the can, that the voice would have had the decency to speak to him before he'd popped the top. Pop! Pop the top! Top the pop! Top. Pot. Pop. Pop.

Pop was the same forwards and backwards.

Focus! he commanded himself.

He had to get to the pump without spilling the V8.

He stood right now, but if he fell, he'd spill the precious beverage. He had to crawl, carefully, bringing the V8 with him. He'd set it down, crawl a bit, then move it.

It was around noon, he estimated. The pump house was about forty yards away. Uphill. Maybe he could make it by nightfall. If he lived that long.

82

Eva woke to thunder and lightning, dark clouds and heavy rain, reminding her of the song that claimed it never rained in California, it only poured.

The aliens had probably ended the decades long California drought, the fifth major drought in the past century, but it didn't take a genius to realize that crops, food, would never grow under perpetually cloudy skies.

Greenhouses would work. The Hrwang had set some up behind Hearst Castle, but they couldn't grow enough food for all of humanity. Humanity couldn't grow enough food for all of humanity, if the reports at the Lord Admiral's staff meetings were to be believed. Eva marveled that those staff meetings had ended as soon as the Lord Admiral had gone up into space with the human Ambassador, confirming her suspicion that they were only held for his benefit. If those reports were to be believed however, humanity would wipe itself out fighting for scraps of food throughout the upcoming winter.

She'd found a leaflet printed in English, Spanish, and several other languages, making just that claim. A soldier told her they'd begun dropping them over populated areas all over the world.

Propaganda warfare.

She couldn't run in the rain outside. It was too heavy, the skies too dark, and it was possibly even dangerous to be the tallest object on a trail during a heavy lightning storm. She went downstairs to the gym instead and worked out on the punching bag, but gave up quickly. She simply wasn't in the mood.

She returned to her room, walking slowly along the ostentatious, over the top hallways of Hearst Castle. She'd begun to hate the place, to hate the never ending artwork, the nude statues and ornate frescoes, the murals, the carved columns, the kaleidoscope carpets, even the amazing views of the Pacific Ocean. She hated the furniture, she hated the chandeliers, she hated the marble tiled floors and staircases. She hated the lampshades with writing on them, the multi-colored, leather bound books lining every shelf, and she especially hated the painting of Hearst himself sitting smugly overlooking his Gothic Study.

Hearst Castle had come to represent what the aliens wanted from Earth and Eva knew she hated the place for that.

Surprised by the onset of depression caused by the rain, Eva wondered why it affected her so much right now.

She knew people were affected by sadness at times when they didn't get enough sunlight. She'd never thought of herself that way, but she'd always enjoyed the outdoors. She'd always enjoyed being out in the sun, her skin tanning, her hair turning lighter, boys eyeing her with desire when she wore a tank top and shorts or a swimsuit. Summer was the best time of the year.

And her Lord Admiral, the evil alien from another star, had ruined summer. Had possibly ruined the Earth.

She resurrected her desire to kill the man. She knew another would simply take his place, but didn't he deserve to die? She would die with him. The Hrwang would kill her certainly if not quickly. She wondered if they really did flay their victims alive. Noah repeated stories he'd heard, although no one had ever witnessed it personally.

The Hrwang were just like humans, just as human if their claims were true, and they gossiped and told horror stories to each other to shock and impress, like fairy tales of old.

Instead of plotting to kill the man, she plodded to her room, depressed at the rain and desirous of seeing the sun. She wanted light. She needed light. Maybe she could talk the Lieutenant Grenadier into taking her up in a combat craft above the clouds again. The thought relaxed her.

The door to her bedroom stood open.

She wished she had a gun she could pull out from somewhere. She hadn't yet carried a weapon in the presence of the Hrwang, which always made her feel vulnerable, and she had debated asking for permission for one. All the soldiers around her were armed, although the Lord Admiral never was. If she asked, he would probably just laugh at her and tell her she was perfectly safe when she was with his men. Hadn't the Lieutenant Grenadier saved her when she'd been attacked by one of her own?

She crept soundlessly to the open door and peeked inside. She saw a man in a Hrwang uniform doing something next to her bed. Fear crossed her mind. She had things hidden there. Just the knife and Jim's collar, but she didn't want them discovered. She pushed on the door and walked in noisily. The man next to her bed jumped.

"Just cleaning, Lady," he said, nodding at her. Two other men were also in her room and the three hurriedly left, continuing to make excuses about cleaning.

She checked everything. Her hidden items were still hidden, her other things seemed to be in order, and nothing seemed cleaner, or dirtier, than when she'd left. Hrwang had never cleaned her room before unless they did it when she ran, but she didn't believe that. She'd ended her workout session prematurely and she'd surprised the men in her room who must have been up to something.

They'd bugged it. That was the only explanation she could come up with. They'd bugged her room.

She knew she'd never find the bugs. If the Hrwang could detect passive listening devices, they would have bugs far more sophisticated than anything humans had encountered before.

Eva looked around her room, feeling violated. Now she hated her room as much as she hated the whole place.

She gathered her things. It was time for a new bedroom.

83

Drag. Push. Rest. Hallucinate. Repeat.

Derek's knees bled, his elbows bled, his cheek bled. He pushed the can of V8 inexorably forward, not spilling a drop, dragging his body toward its goal.

The pump house.

His hand shook every time he held the V8. If he spilled it, the world died. He rested far away from it, his hand at least inches away, not wanting to knock it over in his sleep.

Drag. Push. Rest. Hallucinate.

Repeat.

Miraculously, his hand touched the concrete of the pump house while it was still light. He managed to set the open can of V8 on the firm foundation of the building that would save him. Would save the private. Would save the world.

Rest first.

Sun still provided some light through the clouds when he awoke, but it was considerably darker than when he had fallen asleep. He needed to prime the pump. He needed the unlimited water it would provide.

Three minutes without oxygen. Three days without water. Three weeks without food. The Boy Scout law of survival.

It had been at least three days.

Could he hold his breath for three days?

He couldn't pull himself up onto the concrete foundation. He tried and tried but his body was too heavy, the water in it having all evaporated away leaving behind dense sediment and sludge.

He couldn't get the sludge to move.

Every drill sergeant he'd ever met screamed at him. His father and brothers yelled at him. His older brother called him things like wuss and coward and sissy and so he ran away and joined the marines to prove he wasn't weak.

His mother cried.

Her crying motivated him more than the yelling and somehow he was up on the concrete base of the pump house, the open door in front of him.

He moved the V8 a foot closer to its goal.

Drag. Push. Rest. Hallucinate. Repeat.

Derek woke up and the can of V8 rested with him, next to the pump shaft. He hadn't spilled any. He'd done it.

Now what?

It took a few minutes of trying to remember, but he finally recalled the sheet of instructions. He used the pump to pull himself up to the laminated paper he could no longer read. But there was a picture.

He used his fingers to find the place you poured the water (water! not V8!) into the pump to prime it, then you pumped. If it didn't work the first time, you got more water and tried again.

He laughed.

If it didn't work the first time, the world died.

And his skeleton would be found in the pump house.

He reached down, tried not to tip over, and couldn't stop himself. He fell to his knees, holding onto the pump.

Now or never, Corporal, the sergeant yelled.

He picked up the can and began pouring into the hole the instructions indicated. Some spilled. The rest went in.

He worked the handle. No water came.

He pulled on it again, pumping up and down. Down and up. How long did it take?

The handle suddenly became heavier and he pumped it again. He heard a gurgle and he pumped and pumped and water gurgled up and spat out of the spout. He pumped again and water flowed and he put his face in front of it and it stopped, remnants dripping out of the spout. He let the drops flow onto his swollen tongue and he lived.

Water was life. Life was water.

The difficulty at first in getting water turned out to be a blessing in disguise. After so long without the lifesaving fluid, he needed to take it in small quantities, first drops, then swallows. He drank a little, rested, drank more. He blocked the drain with his shirt and lapped up the puddle.

Pump. Drink. Rest. Repeat.

The hallucinations slowed down.

It took all night.

Derek knew he wasn't better. He knew he had probably done some permanent damage. But he thought he could walk. He had to get water to the private.

He stumbled back to the house. It took minutes, not hours! He found a pitcher and a plastic cup in the kitchen. Back out to the pump house. Still minutes, not hours. He drank from the cup and drank more and drank and told himself to stop. It took a while for the body to recover.

He filled the pitcher and headed for the gate.

He debated how to get over it when he saw the latch. A simple flip and slide and the gate swung open, gravity doing all the heavy lifting.

It amazed him how close the private lay on the highway to the gate. It had seemed like miles, an eternity, yesterday, and now it took him just seconds.

The man wasn't dead, but he wasn't alive.

Derek dribbled water on his tongue, his lips, but he didn't respond. Derek put his finger, his smelly, salty, nasty finger, into the water and rubbed it on the man's lips. He tried to hold the private's head up a little and pour water into his mouth, but the man choked and coughed on it. At least a reaction.

He tried to get more water into him, but it seemed hopeless.

Another thought overwhelmed Derek.

Food.

He had to have food.

Now!

"C'mon, buddy," he urged, and the private seemed to drink a little, unconsciously. He poured water on the private's face, but he only twitched.

Food! Now!

Derek left the pitcher and the cup and made his way back to the pump house, drinking more water.

He found no food in the kitchen but he found another pitcher and went back to the pump house and filled it up. He carried it around with him as he searched the rest of the house.

Nothing upstairs. Not even a stash of candy bars under someone's bed.

Down the stairs and into the well appointed basement with a wet bar and a pool table. Storage behind the laundry room, the door locked. He broke it open and there was food. Cans and cans and cans of food.

Two cans of peaches, he could carry no more with the pitcher, and back upstairs to a can opener.

He couldn't find it fast enough, he couldn't open them fast enough, couldn't eat the contents, drinking the juice and swallowing the peaches without chewing, fast enough. He brought the can opener with him and went back to the basement.

He threw up after the fifth can.

He had to eat slower. He grabbed several more cans and headed back up the stairs, away from the stench of the bile and partially digested peaches. He set the cans on the counter and rinsed his mouth out with water from the pitcher. He spat into the sink.

Derek opened one can. One. He ate its contents greedily and wanted more, but wisely gave his stomach time to digest. He drank more water and the pitcher was empty.

Back to the pump house.

He dropped the pitcher when he got outside the house.

A zombie shuffled toward him.

84

"I don't believe it. It's a hoax," Fifth Under Captain Third Assault muttered after the third time they'd watched the intercepted broadcast. Jayla's translations into a few Malakshian words and also into simplified English didn't help. "Your people made that," he said. He pointed at Jayla.

What could she say?

She felt her whole world turning to ash. Some of the captain's men agreed with him, some seemed to disagree, and the rest didn't seem to care. A few argued with the captain for hours, their words heated at times, and Jayla understood none of it.

At dinner no one served her, but they didn't prevent her from helping herself. No one spoke to her and she didn't even try to hold an English class afterward.

She crawled that night into Fifth Under Captain's sleeping bag, but he didn't join her, remaining in one of the camp chairs all night.

In the morning, arguments began again among the squad. The way some of the men spoke to their commanding officer made Jayla feel he had lost prestige with them. They treated him as an equal, as another soldier, not as their officer. Jayla's father wouldn't have approved. He taught her that a commander had to command, had to lead and demand respect. Fear was always an element.

Jayla could tell the argument the Fifth Under Captain made, that the video had been faked, was losing sway among the rest of the squad. The Fifth Under Captain didn't let go of the argument to his own detriment.

Two more days passed and Fifth Under Captain spent most of his time alone. Jayla felt just as isolated from the others.

When the Hrwang had rescued her and her sister, she had seen them as saviors, her captain as her own personal hero. When he fell in love with her, she didn't think she could be happier and didn't think she would ever want to be anywhere else but with him.

But now?

The men who had looked out for her, who had treated her like a mascot until she started sleeping with their commander, treated her cooly then and coldly now. Was she in danger? Should she be afraid?

Everything had changed when they watched that video. She didn't understand the full import of it, she didn't understand the Hrwang, didn't understand their motives, didn't know why the people in the video did the things they did, but she did know her captain had rescued her, had put his life in danger for her and his men, and he had loved her.

Did he still love her?

They hadn't shared a sleeping bag since they'd seen the video. She considered asking the aliens to take her back to the Utah border guards where they'd brought her sister, but she saw the genuine pain in her captain's eyes when he watched the video. Did he truly believe Earth had started the war and simply couldn't accept that his people had been at fault? Or did he still blame Earth?

How did Jayla fit in?

Maybe he still loved her, but he couldn't trust her. He was sleeping with the enemy, after all.

On the fifth day of her emotional isolation from her captain and the rest of the squad, one of his soldiers approached her warily.

"We have intercepted another broadcast, audio only," he said in simple Malakshian. Jayla nodded to indicate she understood what he said.

"What does 'Mayday' mean?" he asked.

Her rapid ascent to lieutenant and just as rapid fall back to private amused Lizzy in a dark, grim way. After spending two weeks of debriefing about the alien contact and her allowing the girl to stay with them (as if Lizzy had had a choice), she found herself back at her old guard post on the Southern Utah border, now the lowest ranking soldier on the entire team.

No one gave her grief.

Lindsey just hugged her, and it was as if nothing had ever changed.

A new lieutenant already commanded the unit when she returned, but the man barely spoke to her. She decided he was embarrassed.

Watches came and went and Lizzy found herself bored. After the responsibility of command, she didn't find sitting around as a private appealing. She thought about resigning, although she knew she was doing good, protecting the borders of her homeland.

Feeling bored made her want to quit and wanting to quit made her feel guilty.

She tried to stay entertained.

The authorities north continued to exile malcontents and criminals, buses dropping them off at the border and Lizzy and the other guards made sure they didn't try to sneak back in. Around meals and card playing, the guards speculated about why someone would do things that would get them deported. As far as they knew, Utah was the only stable state left in the country and refugees pored into it from the north, east, and west. Just not from the south. Las Vegas, sin city, lay to the south (well, southwest to be exact), and no refugees came from that direction.

Until one day they did.

It was on a chilly August afternoon, Lizzy wearing a long sleeve t-shirt under her uniform and feeling like the seasons were off about six months, when a spotter reported dust on the horizon.

The column of vehicles that approached made Lizzy nervous. It was too many, especially coming from the direction of Las Vegas. Many had gone that way but no one had returned since the war with the aliens began.

She locked the chamber and readied her weapon for firing.

"Stand down, private," she heard the lieutenant yell up at her. "These are refugees." She didn't reply but didn't change her weapon status either. The spotter next to her watched through binoculars.

"I'm not sure about the whole refugee thing. They look pretty well armed," he whispered to her. She made sure her feed belts were clear. Her machine gun could fire more ammo in five minutes than they had, so she had to conserve it for destroying important targets.

"Everybody take it easy. I'll go talk to them. Get them to stop at a safe distance and figure out what's going on." The lieutenant took a guard with him and they jumped into the only truck the group had available to them. Someone inside the guard house, probably Lindsey, raised the barrier and lowered the tire shredders. The truck headed out.

"I wish I was in that truck going the opposite direction," the spotter said, no need to whisper with the lieutenant gone.

"I hope you're wrong," Lizzy replied.

She watched the lonely white truck head south on what used to be I-15, severely outnumbered by the armada of vehicles coming toward them.

"Someone go wake Carl and the others up," she yelled down to no one, hoping someone would think it was a good idea and do it despite the fact she was no longer their commander. Lindsey listened to her and left the guard house, running back toward the building where the guards ate and slept and played cards and tried not to get on each other's nerves at the lonely outpost.

"Make sure they're locked and loaded," she called out after her friend. Lindsey raised her hand in the air in acknowledgment as she ran.

"It's gonna come to shootin', ain't it?" the spotter asked.

"Keep your eye on what's going on," she replied.

The white truck stopped about a quarter of a mile down the freeway, turning sideways to block the lane that led to the guard house. Concrete barriers blocked the rest of the lanes and the lieutenant had angled the truck to complete the wall.

He's not a complete moron, Lizzy thought.

The concrete barrier created a choke point, and Lizzy thought if she directed her fire at vehicles trying to come through it, she could gum it up. It wouldn't stop anyone from jumping off the freeway and coming up the access roads, or even simply four wheeling it through the desert.

But at least she had a plan. She hoped the lieutenant standing behind his truck had one also.

"I'm seeing a lot of weapons," the spotter commented.

She took the binoculars and looked herself. Weapons from the lead vehicles pointed at the white truck.

"I guess we could run away," the spotter said.

"We wouldn't get far without that pickup truck. I hope he brings it back," Lizzy said.

"We could head for the hills."

"Good luck," Lizzy replied bitterly. They'd never survive on foot. St. George was too far, the mountains not steep enough, and the guards not prepared enough.

The spotter took the binoculars back and watched the proceedings. Lizzy could see enough to know what was going on. Three lead vehicles, a pickup truck and two jeeps, slowed about a hundred yards before they reached the lieutenant's truck. He raised his hands in the air, indicating they should stop. They did, and the vehicles behind them slowed also, crowding the freeway and each other.

The spotter swore.

"What?" Lizzy yelled.

"The guy in the back of the gray pickup. Shoot him. Do something. Quick."

It was too late.

The rocket propelled grenade launcher the guy in the back of the gray pickup hoisted up over his shoulder fired before anyone could react. The border guard's white pickup truck, their commanding officer, and their colleague who'd had the bad luck to be selected to accompany the lieutenant, all blew apart in the blast. The truck flipped upwards, rolling over in the air and landing on the parts of the lieutenant that remained relatively intact. The blast blew their colleague sideways, his body separating into at least five distinct pieces.

Hopefully their attackers didn't have too many more of those weapons.

Lizzy began firing the fifty caliber before she could even think. The bullets tore into those three lead vehicles, shredding them like the rocket propelled grenade had shredded their only means of escape.

She hoped she got the guy who killed her men.

She hoped the bravest and foolhardiest of the mob in front of them were in the first three vehicles and the rest would turn and flee when they saw what her machine gun did to them.

She hoped she could kill enough of them to stop the attack before she ran out of ammunition.

She hoped in vain.

Jayla watched a view screen with the Fifth Under Captain as they hovered, hidden in the clouds above the guard post where they'd dropped off her sister. The Hrwang had jumped immediately to the location of the 'Mayday', just high above it.

Jayla jumped when the white border guard truck exploded.

She couldn't hear the shooting but could tell from the running around, the ducking and aiming and falling, that both sides had unleashed a barrage of ammunition at each other. She knew her sister wouldn't still be there. They should have sent her to a hospital by now and hopefully Jada was being well taken care of.

Those who had helped her now faced an onslaught. She needed to help them. Somehow.

She said so in a mix of English and Malakshian, trying to make her Hrwang lover understand.

He did.

He spoke rapidly to his men, his Malakshian formal and military, and Jayla couldn't understand the words.

Some of the men looked dubiously back at their captain and Jayla turned to them.

"Please," she begged.

The Fifth Under Captain snapped at her and then at his men. The men quickly moved to duty stations.

"There are too many," he said to Jayla coldly.

"We have to try. They won't expect us. We're like air support. 'Death from above'," she quoted.

"We have limited power. We won't succeed."

"We can help," she insisted and the Fifth Under Captain's face crumbled under her words.

"I will give the orders," he said, subdued. For the first time in her life, Jayla felt the power a woman could yield over a man. With great power comes great responsibility, she reminded herself.

"Don't put your men in danger. Just try to scare the attackers."

The Fifth Under Captain still looked at her, but cocked his head in thought. She started to reexplain her suggestion but he put his hand up, quieting her.

He turned and barked Malakshian to the rest of the men in the combat craft, then gave instructions to the pilots. He turned to Jayla when he finished.

"Good plan, Private," he said and put his hand on her knee. Jayla blushed at his touch and his compliment.

85

The Lord Admiral's Adjutant lay in his stolen escape craft, crashed in the ruins of some city on the planet the Hrwang fleet had attacked, the wreckage hopelessly trapped in a building burned by landing thrusters. The escape craft had no artificial intelligence in it allowing it to jump and go wherever it wanted. You could stick an artificial intelligence on a chair and it would go wherever the AI wanted to take it, but without an AI, the chair was just a chair and the escape craft the Adjutant lay in was just a hunk of ruined metal.

The vehicle was designed to survive for days in space or even survive atmospheric entry, but once it accomplished its mission, its occupants were just supposed to wait for rescue.

The designers of the escape craft assumed at least thirty soldiers would be using it. Controls, devices, everything, were scattered around the craft, stored where they fit best in the vehicle, not where they were convenient for users. For example, the control for the distress beacon that would signal for rescue sat near the hatch. Not a problem to simply activate the beacon for someone sitting near the hatch or for an able bodied soldier to make his way to the hatch on level ground and put his palm on the control.

If those things had been possible for the Adjutant with his two broken legs, his craft sitting on its side and trapped in or against the rubble of a building, the hatch positioned at the high end, and the planet's gravity making ascent to it impossible, Hrwang soldiers would have shown up and rescued him already.

His cold calculations gave his ability to activate the beacon a low probability.

Higher probabilities were assigned to him of dying of starvation or thirst while trapped in the bottom of the craft.

Another possible outcome had him being discovered by the aliens. He didn't know how that encounter might go.

The best opportunity for hope lay in the escape craft's reentry being witnessed by other Hrwang. But even with a force the size of which they'd brought, the areas of patrol by each Hrwang combat craft were vast and the likelihood of one having randomly been in the right place at the right time to see him was low.

The Adjutant normally took comfort in his ability to weigh a tree of decisions and determine the likelihood of each outcome on that tree and decide which course of action would produce the desired results. His cold calculations, as he termed them, allowed him to achieve the things he desired, or that his leaders desired.

His calculations allowed him to understand that if the Fleet Admiral decided to arrest the Admiral Commander, he would be next, and he would need to flee.

They allowed him to determine the correct sequence of events to trigger to make a stack of cargo fall on a Third Under Colonel, thus silencing the man.

They allowed him to help the Lord Admiral plot, to achieve the goals the leader had set for himself when he had first learned of the existence of another inhabited world.

They also allowed him to know that with his calculating mind, his lack of feeling about the consequences of his or other's actions, his career would entail doing things other people would find too hard or too distasteful to do. He knew he could be a weapon, and a well rewarded one, in other's hands.

Such activities had already earned him enough to buy a small island somewhere, build a mansion on it, and do whatever he wanted there.

But it wouldn't be enough.

He needed the action. He craved the plots and the intrigue and as soon as the Lord Admiral had approached him with the hint of an idea, he'd seized on it and developed a plan. A plan with contingencies, with many courses of action, all leading to a specific goal. Not a foolproof plan, no plan could be, but a plan with a high probability of success.

He didn't even care what the Lord Admiral would reward him. The plan, the creation of it, the execution of it, was the thing.

His death by starvation and thirst at the bottom of an upended escape craft meant he would miss the execution of his plan. He mourned that more than he mourned the loss of his own life and the missed opportunity of becoming a Lord in his own right and buying an island.

He tried to move again, but his useless legs weighed him down, hindering instead of helping. He focused his efforts on determining how to crawl up a craft not designed to be crawled up when it lay on its side and no legs were available.

Weightlessness killed. Without regular exercise, muscles atrophied, organs shifted, and blood pooled in the wrong places.

The Lord Admiral's Adjutant had been weightless too long and hadn't exercised enough. His weak arms couldn't pull him up the benches, overcome the planet's gravity, and allow him to reach food and water, let alone the impossibly far hatch.

He found his mind wandering to small islands with mansions and women, his immense wealth making anything and anyone possible.

Dreams and pain fogged his normally calculating mind. He couldn't even determine how long he'd lain in the bottom of the vehicle. It had become a well, the gravity of which he couldn't overcome.

A tiny part of his mind that remained lucid told him he could cut his legs off, reducing the weight and allowing him to crawl out.

He laughed bitterly at that thought. He'd bleed out before succeeding. People had cut their own hands and feet off, sometimes even an arm, to get out of impossible situations. But no one had ever even tried to cut their own leg off. The blood vessels were too large.

The bones are already broken, the lucid part of his mind told him, making it easier to saw through flesh. He just had to make a tourniquet tight enough to prevent blood loss.

Not possible, he told himself. He would pass out in the middle and bleed to death.

He normally never felt fear, not even in life threatening situations. He calculated odds, weighed options, and evaluated probable results.

Today he felt fear.

He felt it until he felt hope.

When he heard something clang loudly against the side of the craft, with voices following the clanging, hope came to him unbidden.

Hope that it was Hrwang soldiers outside and not aliens.

Hope that rescue was on its way.

Those outside took forever. They were clearly not prepared to scale the hull of the escape craft and reach the hatch. He tried to listen to their voices, tried to make them out and determine if they were Hrwang or alien, but they were too indeterminate, too muffled, and he could only weigh his options.

What should he say to them if they were aliens?

He considered the possibilities, evaluated different responses, and calculated which ones led to his survival. Promises of reward often worked, and he thought about what rewards he could offer that an alien might believe.

Clanging continued but stopped when thudding began. He pondered the new noise and could clearly picture a man climbing up the side, pulling himself up on ropes. The Lord Admiral's Adjutant evaluated each thud and decided only one person ascended. Probably a large man.

He had to act as wounded and helpless as possible when the man arrived. It would be his best chance to evoke sympathy in the alien who climbed the outside of the craft.

It wouldn't be much of an act, he thought grimly.

The thudding ended with one last, large bump on the top of the craft, by the hatch. The man pulling himself up the last part.

Did the aliens have grappling hooks? Had that been the clanging? Trying to get a rope attached to something on the top so a man could pull himself up? He decided it was. The duration of the clanging meant they were desperate to keep trying or else had nothing better to do.

Perhaps they had devised a makeshift grappling hook and it took a while to catch something firmly enough to hold a man's weight.

Persistent rescuers or desperate scavengers?

He decided to go with the latter option, the most likely one. He would promise food and water aplenty, more than could be found on the escape craft, although they could have all that, too. He would promise not only food and water but shelter and security. For all of them. Not just his rescuers, but their families as well. He would promise them respite from a life of scavenging among ruins, wondering if more meteors would fall from the sky.

Confident in his preparation, he waited for the hatch to cycle open. It took long enough that it confirmed an alien stood or sat up there. A Hrwang soldier would have known how to operate the mechanism.

The unlocked hatch finally cycled open and a bright light flashed down the length of the craft and into his eyes.

The bright light spoke.

"You an alien?" it hollered down in English.

The bright light must have decided without waiting for the Adjutant's response. He heard the gunshot just before he stopped hearing or feeling anything.

86

Former Staff Sergeant John Cathey hoped his impending death wouldn't hurt too much. Bullets in the head seemed preferable to bullets in the belly. He wished he had body armor.

Fire from the windows over his head relieved the pressure, the attackers' bullets redirected toward more lethal shooters. The halt in their advance meant that their improving angle on John and the others pinned with him was temporarily stopped.

Hooray for loyalty. The soldiers in the upper stories of the building could have just hunkered down and hoped for the best. Instead they now fired out of windows and from balconies, down on their attackers. Someone threw a grenade and John ducked into the little cover he had, protecting the other two with him.

Just when hope reared its ugly head, the volume of fire from the attackers increased and John could do little but cower in the alcove with two of his soldiers.

They were just civilians, boyfriend and girlfriend he thought, and were not doing anything other than dying and crying over the dying. The girl's wails made John wonder if the boy was still alive. He gently asked for the AK-47 and whatever ammo there was.

There was no movement behind him. Only sobbing.

"If we're ever going to get out of here, we need all the firepower we can get," he hissed over his shoulder.

"It's too late," the girl cried and John risked a glance back at her. She lay hunched over the boy, her body racked with convulsions, her face buried on the boy's chest.

The boy, no more than eighteen or nineteen, stared glassily at the sky.

Five dead now.

For the moment, the firefight had become a standoff. Their attackers expended tremendous volumes of ammunition to keep John and his folks pinned in place. In turn, they replied with less firepower to keep the attackers from advancing. Nothing was going to break the stalemate until one side or the other ran out of ammunition. If it was the attackers, they would simply melt away. John and his men and women would not give chase. If his group ran out of ammo first, the results would be less pleasant.

John conserved his ammo.

He had the AK-47 now, an ancient but effective weapon, and he watched for movement, firing single shots when he saw any. His shots were always answered by hundreds of rounds tearing up the building around him and the girl who survived. She lay motionless on her boyfriend, only her occasional hiccups and moans letting John know she still lived.

His attackers apparently didn't have explosive ammunition or any form of grenades, simply lots of lots of rounds, and they continued to pour them on his position.

John wished he knew to what end. Was it a grudge? Had his group inadvertently done something to offend a gang or a war lord? Was it simply turf warfare? John could envision much better uses for all the ammunition being wasted shooting at him and his group, but he wasn't in charge of the other team, didn't know what reward had been promised them by John's Judas, didn't know what they thought they could gain fighting other humans instead of the aliens.

Then, as if someone had heard his arguments and concurred, everything changed.

The tank they'd seen earlier returned.

"Cease fire! Cease fire!" a loudspeaker on the tank commanded. "Cease fire!"

Shots rang out against the armor plating of the fighting vehicle and the turret turned in the direction of the shots. A coaxial machine gun opened up fire, raking a position John knew was occupied by his attackers. The return fire stopped.

"Cease fire!"

The main armament of the tank, a huge barrel at least a hundred and fifty-five millimeters in caliber, tracked on the location where the shots had come from. That would ruin someone's day.

John was grateful that the people with him obeyed the tank. They probably had little choice. He doubted many had any ammunition left.

"Cease fire!"

The turret rotated slowly, taking in all the combatants, as if the tank dared anyone to defy it. When the turret rotated so that it pointed almost directly at John, and thus at the point farthest from both groups of his attackers, they melted away.

"Imbeciles!" the tank loudspeaker screamed. "Delinquents!"

When John felt comfortable the unknown assailants had fled, he set the AK-47 down and raised his arms in the air, coming out slowly toward the tank, like one would approach an angry dog.

"Pick your weapon up, soldier," the tank commanded.

John nodded and obeyed, keeping the barrel of his rifle pointed straight up in the air as he did so. This tank had just saved his life and the lives of most of his unit. He didn't want to make any enemies now.

The rest of John's platoon came out of the building, slowly. He thought of it as his platoon now that their leader had deserted, a treacherous man John would feel no guilt in shooting if he ever saw him again. Those coming out of the building looked to him for direction.

"We're just gonna head back," John yelled, not knowing if the crew of the tank could hear him.

"Do you want an escort back to the UN?" the loudspeaker blared.

"You know where we're from?" John yelled back.

"I know everything," the tank replied.

John laughed and lowered the rifle. "We have wounded and several KIA. We'll accept an escort."

There were seven KIAs, or killed in action, total. The original four that had lain in the street, the boy in John's alcove, and two in the next alcove over. Everyone who had gone into the building was unharmed, although their timely intervention had temporarily saved John and the others trapped on the street.

If the tank hadn't come along, though, it would have ended much worse.

They loaded the bodies on the back of the vehicle and three injured hitched a ride. The rest of the group moved out behind the lumbering machine.

When they reached the safety of the UN compound, dozens of soldiers protecting them, dozens more helping the injured and carrying their dead, the tank hatch opened up. A grizzled man with white hair popped out.

"You can stay with us," John yelled up to him over the engine noise.

"No thank you," the man yelled back. "It's getting hot out there. I don't think you have more than a month, if that long."

"How can we thank you?" a woman called up to him.

He winked at her. "Stay alive."

He ducked back inside his tank and closed the hatch. Some quick thinkers opened the compound gates and the tank rumbled out of them, heading back the way it had come.

"We'll be okay as long as he's protecting us," the woman who had spoken to the tank guy commented.

"As soon as his fuel runs out, he's a sitting duck," someone else replied, a man who'd spent some time in the National Guard.

"We got lucky he showed up this time," John said. "We might not be so lucky next time." A few protested, a few murmured agreement.

A month, John thought. He wondered if they even had a week. That attack was way too coordinated, way too well armed, and way too close to home. Maybe they were going to have to seek the Mormon's Zion after all.

87

The zombie-like private threw up twice while Derek tried to get enough food and water into him. Between water damage from the tsunami wave, the beer and V8 party someone had had, and all of their vomit, the house must have reeked. It wasn't livable.

But they lived in it anyway, sleeping on the couches in the living room, trying to drink enough and not eat too much. Derek felt like he was living the way he always imagined junkies lived.

In frustration, he started exercising after a few days. The private, Jordan, told him he was crazy.

"We have to rebuild our strength," Derek replied.

"If I never have to do another minute of PT, I'll die a happy man," Jordan said while he lounged on a couch. The Marines had cycled around to a decades old form of PT, or Physical Training, known as High Intensity Tactical Training.

"Remote devices have made you soft," the drill sergeants would yell and Derek and other trainees would do wind sprints, stair climbs, ammo can deadlifts, and a myriad of other strength, agility, endurance, and power building exercises. Everyone complained, Derek complained, but he liked how he felt after ninety days of the intense workouts. He tried to keep them up after basic.

He went outside and ran around the house a few times, feeling quickly winded. He knew it would take time to recover from severe dehydration, but he didn't know how much time. He probably should be seen by a doctor, but what would a doctor tell him? Rest, rehydrate, exercise to rebuild your strength.

That's what Derek was doing.

When he had some energy, but not enough to exercise, he explored the large house. Someone had fouled one of upstairs toilets, trying to use it without water, and with a little gagging and several buckets of water from the pump house, they got it to flush down. They opened all the upstairs windows and eventually it smelled better than the main level or the basement. They each moved into a bedroom, Derek taking what must have been the master bedroom and Jordan taking a guest room. Another bedroom looked like it belonged to a teenaged girl and a fourth had office stuff in it as well as a bed.

Neither of them could figure out why the plumbing in the main house didn't work, so they relied on retrieving buckets of water from the pump house. Derek made sure they always had several jars of emergency water in case they had to prime the pump again.

On the fourth day of their recovery, he found a bolt action, single shot rifle in a box of memorabilia under the bed in the office room. Fifty shells came with it.

He cleaned the rifle the best he could, then took a few shells outside with him and tested it. It fired. He adjusted the sights and found he could hit a target reasonably well at a couple of hundred yards. He put the rifle and ammunition in the bedroom he had claimed.

Further searching yielded a Beretta P4 compact, something like what a person would carry concealed. It had a box of twenty shells with it, and Jordan took those. He fired a couple to test out the weapon also.

Derek felt a little better that both of them were now armed.

Eventually they were strong enough to move on. Derek had given a lot of thought to his next move; Jordan none, or at least, nothing he mentioned.

They patrolled the highway occasionally but never saw signs of life. The alien induced tsunami had wiped out most of the coastal residences, and without power most of the occupants of the rest had probably fled for more civilized territory. Derek wondered if anyone ever found it.

After he finished PT one morning, he called Jordan into his room.

"We need to pack up today and leave tomorrow morning," he told the young private.

"It's about time. There is absolutely nothing to do in this place."

Derek paused, gauging Jordan's reaction. He might as well just say what he'd been thinking.

"I think we should split up."

"What? Why? That's stupid. Splitting up is what gets people killed. I'd be dead if we hadn't been together."

"Did you want to be a Marine, soldier?" Derek asked, trying to sound a little like a drill sergeant.

"Sure, I mean...Hey, what's that got to do with it?"

"I'm going to go fight aliens."

"With that relic?" Jordan said, pointing at Derek's old rifle. "Good luck."

"Look," Derek explained. "Tanks can't do anything against them. Planes and choppers are useless. I don't know where any missiles are. But I've got a rifle. With a rifle I can start shooting, and if bullets will kill them, I'll take some with me."

"What if they won't? What if they have some sort of personal shield, like in the movies?"

"Then we're all dead anyway," Derek replied.

Jordan ran his hands through his blonde hair, straining his brain to come up with an argument.

"Why?" is all he managed.

"I wanted to be a soldier," Derek said. He left out that he had also wanted to prove himself to his good for nothing father and older brothers. "I need to be a soldier."

"I'm a soldier, too."

"But you don't want to be."

The private had no response.

"Listen to me, Jordan. You and I both know I'm probably gonna get killed if I head back. But I'm gonna do it anyway. I need to. Someone needs to." He jabbed his finger at the private. His eyes felt hot and moist. "But someone needs to live. Someone needs to tell others about what happened. That we tried. That the United States Marine Corp fought and died on the Pacific Coast Highway. You need to tell them. You need to make sure everyone knows what we did."

The boy snapped to attention and saluted. Derek saluted back, not just a little surprised that the rhetoric worked. He didn't really think the boy would succeed, but he wasn't a soldier. He would be a liability, someone Derek would have to watch out for, someone Derek couldn't trust. He remembered the way the boy had panicked when they tried to escape the sunken M1A1. He would be useless in a firefight.

And Derek legitimately wanted the boy to find safety, some secure place to go. Such places had to exist. The whole world hadn't ended just because a few hundred million people had died. Even if it were a couple of billion, Earth would survive. They just had to fight back.

"Look, I'm gonna head back north. Not on the highway, but through the foothills. I'll come up behind Hearst Castle and if there're aliens hiding out there, I'll start taking 'em out until I run out of ammo. From a distance, like a sniper, you know."

The boy nodded.

"You keep going up this highway. It's bound to lead to some towns or something. Find a group of people and tell them you're a Marine and volunteer to help with security. Be trustworthy. Then you find yourself a girl and marry her and have a million babies, enough for both of us, enough for everyone who died out on that highway."

Jordan started to cry.

"Yes, sir."

"Don't call me sir, son. My parents were married," Derek replied automatically.

Jordan laughed through his tears. "I never got that joke," he said.

"Me neither," Derek confessed.

They parted ways the next morning, both with backpacks full of food and water, leaving two sealed jars of water next to the pump, marked 'For priming' on them. Jordan continued east on the highway, Derek north into the hills.

Jordan would be dead in two days, shot by a young woman who took his backpack and pistol and belatedly realized he was kind of cute and maybe she should have talked to him first. Derek would never know this, resolutely hiking through the Santa Lucia Mountains, looking for aliens at Hearst Castle and hoping he didn't get lost on the way.

Now was the not the time for that, he thought bitterly. Now was the not the time to get lost.

Now was the time to fight.

