Mallory knew they must have slowed down to a fraction of the speed they had been going in the open air, but the proximity of the trees with their four-meter-diameter trunks made it feel that they had accelerated. Talking was impossible between the sudden violent vibrations from the fans and the sudden jerks as the pilot flew left, right, up, down, avoiding the trees reaching to knock them out of the sky.

They flew through old growth, massive trees far apart from each other, but it still seemed impossible to maneuver, a flying camel through a forest of needles. It couldn't last.

It didn't.

Mallory watched out the window, transfixed, as they rode a three-dimensional slalom through the trees. Then they came close to an ancient monster that must have had a fifteen-meter-diameter trunk. The housing on the left forward maneuvering fan clipped the edge of the tree in a shower of bark and shredded composite. Mallory felt the crunch of the impact in the bench he sat on, shaking the floor of the craft.

It looked as if the glancing blow was only cosmetic. But the vibration through the floor continued and increased in magnitude. The fan housing shook worse, shedding more composite, the vibration turning the edges of the machine fuzzy and indistinct. A high-pitched, arrhythmic whine filled the cabin, and then the fan exploded, sending spinning fragments of itself in every direction, pitching the whole machine in a dangerous dive in the direction of the now-absent thrust.

God must have listened to his prayer, because their pilot avoided an uncontrolled death tumble. Just as the aircraft started to rotate nose down around the pivot of the contragrav providing its lift, the pilot cut power to the contra-grav and throttled the fans back enough to turn the tumble into a controlled dive. Once the tumble stopped, the pilot brought the remaining forward fan back up to flatten out their angle of attack. They leveled out so close to the ground that Mallory lost all visibility out the window from dust and debris kicked up by the three still-working fans.

They kept moving five minutes past the point where Mallory thought they should have crashed. It took another half minute to realize that the craft had managed to land.

"Everyone out!" Shane called from the cockpit.

The militiamen grabbed the quartet of prisoners and shoved them out of the aircraft just as the side doors slid open. Mallory stumbled out into a semi-clearing in the woods where dust and dead leaves were still settling from their arrival. The fans still whined as they spun down. Above them, a break in the canopy a hundred meters above showed a slice of deep purple sky cut in two by a black band.

Mallory took a few steps, wobbly from the invasive surgery and from the hellish flight, staring up at the slice of sky he could see between the shadowy trees.

"It's gotten bigger," he whispered.

The three other prisoners walked up next to him. Brody looked up at the sky. Dorner led Pak, who followed her like an automaton.

"You're right," Brody said. "It is bigger."

Back by the aircraft, Shane stepped out of the open door and faced them and the six militiamen. "We have a problem." Mallory wasn't certain if Shane was addressing the troops or the prisoners, maybe both. "I had hoped that the fact the facility wasn't active might have prevented it from being an obvious target. Our visitors seemed to have decided otherwise. There's a dropship bearing Caliphate markings in the landing quad."

Dorner shook her head. "You must be kidding me," she whispered.

"The ship, from the profile, is based off of a Medina-class troop carrier. That means perfunctory weaponry, only really useful in air-to-air situations. So it is likely that the ship itself will not pose a threat. But it does mean we may have anywhere up to three units of heavy infantry to a fullblown ground cav unit-"

Mallory listened to Shane's analysis and realized he was listening to his own training speaking. It made Mallory slightly sick to listen to Shane repeat knowledge of Caliphate weapons and tactics, knowledge that he knew had only one source.

"What we need to know," Shane said, "is whether this dropship is actually still a Caliphate vessel."

"Sir," one of the militia guards asked, "we're being invaded. Does it matter who's on that ship?"

"Yes, it does." Shane looked over at Mallory. "The Caliphate's only interest here is imperialistic posturing. They just want to claim jurisdiction over this planet. This thing called Adam wants a lot more from us."

"Are we sure they aren't the same thing, sir?"

"At this point, no." Shane gestured at Mallory. "But our mission here is to get control of the tach-transmitter so our friend Mallory can send a message off to his friends in the Vatican. You don't have a problem with that, Father Mallory, do you?"

Mallory shook his head. It was, in fact, his only hope for accomplishing his mission here. The disturbing thing was what it implied about the situation on the ground here. Shane couldn't expect a response of any kind before Salmagundi collapsed. The tach-transmission itself would take over a month to reach the core systems.

If they made it to the transmitter, it was likely to be their last act before Adam moved on his ultimatum.

"We only have thirty-six minutes," Shane pointed toward the edge of the clearing. "We're about two klicks west of the spaceport. The tach-transmitter is in the trapezoidal building to the northeast. If we're lucky, our visitors are more interested in the ship-maintenance areas. All of you-" He waved at the militiamen. "Your job is to get Mallory inside."

"What about you, sir?"

"I don't matter. All the cities have been on their own since we lost satellite communication. Mallory needs to make the transmission so they can authenticate it. I know the proper protocol, but if they see my face, it might raise some questions. I'm going to take the scientists and try to negotiate."

"Negotiate what?" Mallory asked.

"Our surrender to the Caliphate." Shane's thin smile was a knife wound in his face.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Shibboleth.

"Never assume that the universe is limited to a finite set of possibilities."

-The Cynic's Book of Wisdom "I seek God in revolution."

-MIKHAIL A. BAKUNIN.

(1814-1876).

Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard).

Salmagundi - HD 101534.

Once the dropship hit ground, Abbas said, "Now, Captain Parvi, get out of that chair."

Parvi turned around to face a gamma laser. She held up her hands. "We need to-"

"You need to shut up and follow orders, you little Hindi bitch. You became surplus the moment we landed."

Parvi looked at the fury in Abbas' eyes and decided that the sergeant had reached the point where she wanted an excuse to shoot her. Parvi reached down and undid the harness and stood up.

"You too." Abbas pointed the laser at Wahid.

Wahid silently undid the harness and got to his feet.

Abbas held them at gunpoint and opened the door back into the passenger compartment where about twenty frightened techs clutched a random assortment of mismatched weapons. Abbas called out something in Arabic, then turned back to the two of them and said, "In thirty minutes, the Khalid here is going to leave and tach home. If you shut up and follow orders, you live to be the pilot."

Abbas detailed one of the techs to take the two of them out of the ship and out of the way. Their guard walked them about twenty meters away from the ship and had them sit down on the pitted tarmac. Back at the dropship Khalid, Sergeant Abbas kept yelling at her crew of maintenance techs in Arabic.

At least the Khalid had left the Voice with the one set of people who knew exactly what this ship needed to keep running. Parvi looked around at the complex. The buildings appeared dark and abandoned, and the surrounding woods encroached right up to the perimeter. "Now we just hope this place has what we need," Parvi whispered.

Wahid looked at the sky and said, "I think we need a miracle."

"We've had four or five so far. What's another one?" Parvi looked up at the dark ribbon across the sky and asked, "What the hell is happening here?"

"I don't know, I just know I don't like ultimatums."

"Neither do I." She thought of Adam and a cloud of machines that would take her apart, molecule by molecule, if she didn't accept him.

It.

And should it touch you, you become his servant, or something else crawls into your skin.

Parvi shuddered and prayed that these displaced technicians could get the Khalid fixed and powered in half an hour.

Parvi watched the techs as they scrambled over the ship and pulled cables and hoses from the Khalid and from access panels recessed in the tarmac. Somehow they managed to get the two to mate up.

She felt a small surge of optimism when one of the techs crawled out from the open belly of the ship and gave his comrades a thumbs-up.

Then she heard Wahid's voice say, "What the fuck?"

"What?" She looked away from the Khalid, and saw that their guard was paying more attention to the woods behind them than he was to his two prisoners. Wahid had turned to look behind them as well. "We have company," he whispered.

Parvi looked back so she could see what Wahid was talking about.

A quartet of people approached them from out of the woods. The man in the lead looked ancient; a tall, hairless wraith emerging from the trees. Three people moved behind him: a young man with Asiatic features, a tall, blonde woman, and a older man with skin darker than her and Wahid put together. Parvi stared but couldn't quite believe what she was seeing.

"That can't be-" Wahid said.

"Dr. Pak, Dr. Dorner, and Dr. Brody." Parvi pushed herself to her feet. "It's them."

It was them, and they had been through hell. Pak looked shell-shocked, Brody cradled a broken arm, and Dorner wore the expression of someone ready to die or kill someone. All wore blood-spattered field dressings on their necks.

The old man leading them was someone she had never seen before. He definitely wasn't from the Caliphate. He was too ancient even for a command position in the Caliphate military, and he wore civilian clothes that were archaically cut and styled-in addition to looking slept in.

Parvi heard shouts from near the Khalid. At least one voice was the familiar sharp bark of Sergeant Abbas. "No," Parvi muttered as she ran toward the quartet. From behind her she heard their guard shout something in Arabic and Wahid shout, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Keeping her from doing something stupid."

"What about you? Damn it!"

She heard feet running behind her, and she glanced back toward the Khalid and saw a half-dozen armed techs, led by Sergeant Abbas, converging on the newcomers as well. Abbas' face was contorted in an expression of anger and fear that didn't argue for this going well.

Parvi turned back and watched as the old man stopped his advance at the edge of the LZ, waiting for his welcoming committee.

Good, Parvi thought, no sudden moves that could be misinterpreted. We might get out of this without anyone getting hurt- Something slammed into the back of her head, and she fell face-first into the tarmac about fifteen meters from the old man.

Shane's six militiamen led Mallory in a dead run through the woods. Normally, he wouldn't have had a problem keeping up. He had better training than these men ever had. But what Shane had done inside his skull messed with his ability to move, and he found himself stumbling after them as if he was in a constant forward fall that never quite hit the ground.

The plan, such as it was, meant to get Mallory into the tach-comm facility while Shane and the remaining civilians from the Eclipse served as a distraction. Mallory didn't like it. but Shane had him out-gunned and outnumbered. So it was Shane's show, even if the old man's goals coincided with Mallory's.

Several times Mallory bounced off of trees, and several more he found one of his escorts grabbing his upper arm to help steer him or keep him from falling over. His implants, unaware of his disorientation, responded to the adrenaline and further confused his sense of space, time, and distance. The rush though the woods telescoped until it felt as if they'd been running for hours.

According to the militia's chronometers, when they reached the northeast corner of the spaceport, it had taken them less than seven minutes.

Mallory had a few seconds to survey the situation. Trees and underbrush pushed right up against the edge of the facility, which consisted of ten buildings of various sizes in a rough ring around a central landing area. The buildings showed their age, sloughing off layers of ferrocrete that piled in rust-colored mounds at the corners of the buildings. Traces of paint were tiny abstract flecks adhering to pitted walls. Signs were weathered and unreadable, and landing lights were nonexistent. The only sign that the port was kept marginally functional was the fact that the LZ itself was clear of debris, and the doors were all clean and appeared usable.

Of course, the dropship dominated everything. Size-wise it was on the outer edge of what this facility was designed to handle. The Medina class was practically all lifting body, no wings to speak of, which gave it a squat narrow profile, something like the shape of a prehistoric flint arrowhead.

Mallory could see people swarming the lower areas, connecting umbilicals carted from one of the other buildings. None of them wore combat fatigues or armor, and he only saw a few carrying weapons. Mallory wondered if he found that reassuring or not.

Suddenly, all the crew by the ship turned away from them, and Mallory could just make out Shane approaching from the opposite side of the compound.

"Come on," one of the guards said, grabbing him.

While the ground crew was distracted, they dashed for the building with the tach-transmitter. The door stood open, saving them a bit of time.

Inside, Mallory felt even more the sense of a building neglected to just the edge of functionality. Paint had chipped, peeled, or disintegrated off of every surface, leaving fine piles of dust that collected at the base of each wall. While the building had power, more than half of the light fixtures-fully enclosed and apparently intended to be permanent-remained dark. Where there had been chrome trim, on doorways and wall panels, the metal had gone cloudy and spotted.

He glanced at the lights again. Who turned them on? When Mallory looked back at the door, he realized it had been forced.

"There's someone else here," Mallory whispered.

He stared at the door. The locking mechanism, if that's what it was, appeared to have been disassembled, the parts scattered on the floor. All around the base of the door were little wires, circuit boards, tiny little screws, parts of the plastic housing, gears, and bolts.

Also on the dust-shrouded floor were signs of more footprints than could be accounted for by their presence.

The lead guard held up his hand and gestured for silence as he looked down at the mess that had once been the door's lock. Two more edged back to flank Mallory, their guns at the ready.

Three corridors led away from the empty lobby they stood in, two following the outer walls, the last going deeper into the structure. The leader checked each, and Mallory watched him search for more footprints or other signs of company. He came back to the lobby and pointed at two of the guards, then back at the two corridors flanking the entrance. The two nodded, and he waved everyone else to follow him.

The first pair of men stayed in the lobby to guard their exit while rest of them headed deeper into the building. Mallory walked with two militiamen flanking him, while the others eased up ahead, checking each doorway and intersection.

Even after the passage of the point team, Mallory could make out the footprints in the dust. The other party had gone ahead down the same corridor and had not come back this way.

They must be looking for the same thing, the tach-transmitter.

The question was, why? Were they trying to use it themselves, or prevent others from using it?

In the lobby, the prior footprints had been all on top of each other, an indistinguishable, abstract mass. Once in this corridor, Mallory had divided his attention between the footprints-half obscured by the point team's passage- and keeping his own eyes on the corridor, checking ahead and behind. Because of that, it took him a dozen meters or so before he noticed the truly odd thing about the footprints they followed.

One set was barefoot.

Another wasn't human.

Mallory stared at the first intact paw print, as wide as his own foot was long, and whispered, "Nickolai?"

One of his guards shook him sharply for breaking silence, and pulled him after the point team, who had just reached the head of a stairwell going down.

Mallory tried to piece together how Nickolai could be here. He didn't know where that lifeboat had landed, and for all he knew it could have put down within a few hundred meters of this place. But such a coincidence strained credulity.

Was he trying to sabotage the tach-comm like he had done on the Eclipse?