To the north the vast clifflike face of the North European Enclave was studded with gun turrets and observation blisters. An irregular tangle of huge buttressed gantries loomed over the gap, camouflage nets of fine mesh ice draped between them like giant, glittering webs. Buzzing cycloids patrolled the upper air, giant black-shelled scarabs, their searchlights probing the air, while in the depths below deadly mechanopods, sprint-fast and armed with warmtrace homers, sought out their targets tirelessly.

To the south, exactly two li away, lay the White Tang's City, its face the mirror image of the Enclave's; a Great Wall of weaponry that ran three thousand li from Le Havre in the west, through Niirnberg and Dresden, then northeast to Stettin on the Baltic coast. Between, in a wasteland known to both sides as the Rift, a war was being fought-a war that had gone on for almost six years now. Two thousand one hundred and four days, to be precise. Fifty thousand, five hundred and eleven hours. Three million andthirty thousand six hundred and ninety-four minutes. And not a minute had passed without blood having been shed, lives lost. More than twenty million at the last count. The Rift crawled with machines. Robotic mines, programmed to move in random patterns, scuttled about, like crabs at the bottom of the ocean, while ticking android bugs flittered and sprang, or hovered on see-through polymer wings, looking for prey. Only one thing was certain: nothing was what it seemed. Larger machines lumbered about slowly on tracks or jointed legs, heavily armored against their smaller brethren. Some were semisentient, some genetic sports. Among them were spies and mimics-infiltrators trying to win some brief advantage. But no advantage was possible here. The only reality was death.

And among it all went the men-the jou chi ch'i, or "meat machines" as the more cynical of the old Rift hands called themselves. Men who, in this deadly, mechanical cauldron, had been honed to machines themselves: the nerveless and psychotic, the brain-dead and the idiot savants. The only common factor among them was the presence of some deep-rooted character abnormality in their psych profiles.

Normal humans didn't survive here.

War here wasn't a game or some temporary aberration, but the very condition of existence. War shaped the Rift. It also shaped all those who dared to enter it.

Karr's craft moved slowly, a shadow among shadows, remotes hovering at random distances from it sending out false radar images to the ever-vigilant eyes of the enemy. Karr himself lay on his back in the webbing couch, twin display screens above him showing both real and enhanced visuals of what was outside. Beside him lay his pilot, a middle-aged Han named Jeng Lo, his deeply lined face hidden beneath a Wrap. Right now the old Rift veteran was twitching like an epileptic and mumbling incoherently into his lip mike as the images danced across the insides of his eyes.

Karr watched, fascinated, as things swam toward them on the screen, were captured visually, identified, or-if unknown-destroyed with a short laser burst from one of the wall-mounted guns which were acting in close coordination with their craft. They themselves were unarmed.

Routine, Karr thought, trying to relax; to let his pulse rate return to normal. But he had not been out before, he had only read reports.

They drifted on. Beside him Jeng Lo twitched and mumbled, his right hand trembling jerkily, the fingers depressing touch-pads in a seemingly random fashion, moving with an eye-defying quickness across the control panel built into the couch's arm.

I wonder what he gets paid for this, Karr thought, determined to look it up when he got back. Not enough, 1 bet. Then again, who in their right mind would do this job sokly for the money?

Something swam toward them on the screen-something squat and tripartite, like a stunted ant, its outline a neutral black. The cameras seized the image instantly, enhanced it. Somewhere in the heart of the Enclave a computer calculated the math of the machine's surface and deduced by that whether it was friendly or hostile. The shape changed color. Now it glowed a cool, relaxing blue.

Friendly. Karr let out his breath, then laughed uneasily. How quickly his fighter's instincts had taken hold again. That old familiar buzz.

He watched the screen, waiting tensely now. I have been fighting much too long, he thought. All of my life, it seems.

Yes, but recently it had got much worse. Since he'd been made General he had come to conceive the world solely in terms of threat. It was true what the old Marshal said. There was no safety anymore.They drifted on, like a shark basking in the depths. Things sniffed them from a distance, then moved on.

Then, suddenly, one latched on to them. It came in fast from half a li up, spiraling toward them at first as if it were damaged and falling. The cameras saw it, enhanced it. For a fraction of a second its image was clear on the screen, outlined in black.

"Fu Ian te. . . ." Jeng Lo mumbled. Rotten . . .

The color changed. The screen glowed red.

Hostile! Shit! Karr looked for something to press. His whole body ached to hit out at the oncoming hostile-to punch it or shoot it-but there was nothing he could do. It was up to Jeng Lo now.

"Hit the fucker! Hit it!"

The image seemed to expand, the red glow intensify. He felt a tiny shudder, felt the craft pushed to one side as if by a giant hand as the missile hit. On the screen the image shattered in slow motion, replaced by the Mandarin symbol K'uei, meaning to cut open and clean a fish, or to kill a sacrifice.

"Wu Shi!" Jeng Lo crowed triumphantly as the craft steadied. Fifty!

Fifty what? Karr wondered. Was that his strike rate for the week? The number of kills he'd made? He shivered. It had been so fast. A matter of two, maybe three seconds at most.

Not only that, but he felt absurdly grateful to Jeng Lo. The speed of his response had saved them. His instinct had been good. Even before the computer had confirmed it, he had known. Fu Ian te. Too right the bastard had been fu Ian te!

They sank lower, almost on the floor of the Rift now, searching, looking for rogues and runaways or anything unusual. Mines clustered thickly down below. They tickled them with radar as they passed above, soothing them with friendly codestream, searching . . .

"What's that?"

Jeng Lo grunted. For a second or two he was absolutely still, then he began to twitch twice as energetically as usual, both hands dancing across the control pads.

Karr's mouth had gone dry. It couldn't be ... It couldn't . . .

The familiar shape glowed red.

"No!" Karr shouted, half lifting himself from the couch, the restraint harness pulling him back. "No!"

Jeng Lo's hand hesitated, then withdrew. On the screen the image pulsed a warning red.

A man-a running man-out here? Karr shook his head at the impossibility of it.

"What's he running from?"

Jeng Lo punched up a sector map, then enhanced it to show their locality. Their craft was at the center of the screen, the running man a speck of red to their left. To their right, drifting in slowly, were a pair of blips, their parallel paths leaving Karr in no doubt as to what they were after.

"Deal with them, then let's pick him up."

Jeng Lo nodded, but even as he made to turn the cruiser something struck them with the force of a gianthammer.

"K'uei!" Karr yelled, his senses screaming as the ship disintegrated about him in a searing flash of flame.

He died . . .

AND WOKE, gasping, his chest on fire, his nerve ends singing, his skin feeling as if it had been burned in a thousand places.

"Sir? . . . Are you all right, sir?"

Karr lay there, letting his heartbeat slow, the trembling pass from him, then gave the smallest nod.

It had been so real.

Another voice, older, deeper in register than the first, spoke to him from close by, to his left. "General Karr? Are you all right?"

He turned his head and opened his eyes. A face swam into view. It was that of the A.A.D. Project Director, Harrison.

"I died," he said.

Harrison nodded. "You had us all worried. That wasn't meant to be part of the show."

Karr tried to laugh, but it came out as a groan. His chest hurt.

"Lie still," Harrison said, laying a hand on his brow. The feel of it was cool and reassuring. "Your nervous system had quite a shock just now. It'll need a while to settle."

You bet, Karr thought, remembering the moment the missile had struck. Though he'd been safe-though his body had been here all the while, secure in this couch inside the unit-his mind hadn't known that. His mind had been out there in the Rift, in the robot cruiser.

"It's powerful," he said. "Too powerful. We should consider some kind of safety system. Maybe concoct some kind of drug cocktail to be injected into the men as soon as something like this happens. Why, the shock of it could kill them."

There was an embarrassed silence, an exchange of looks between Harrison and the duty oficer. Harrison looked back at Karr.

"I'm afraid Jeng Lo didn't make it. The strain on his heart . . ."

Karr felt a shock of disbelief pass through him. He turned, seeing at once the pale still figure on the couch beside him. "But it wasn't real. . . ."

"It was too much for him," Harrison continued. "Fifty missions . . . it takes a toll. Most don't make it past thirty."

"Fifty . . ." Karr let his head fall back onto the couch, understanding. Thirty missions. Was that all they got out of their pilots? Just thirty missions? It was a good reason for trying something like this. But would this new system make it any better?

"And the running man? Was he real?"

Harrison looked to the duty officer, who shrugged. "I ... I'll find out, sir. A man, you say?""In the Rift. We saw him, just before the missile struck. He was being pursued."

The officer laughed. "Impossible, sir. He'd not have survived more than a few seconds."

Karr looked directly at the young man. "We saw him, Lieutenant. Before the hostile got us. Now go and check it, unless you want to be flying missions yourself!"

The young officer blanched. "Sir!" he said straightening to attention. With a curt bow he turned and left the room.

Karr looked to Harrison. "I understand the reasoning behind this. That drug-induced belief that every situation is a life-or-death one gives our men an edge out there. But if they're going to have to go through this every time they get it wrong, we'll lose just as many as we were by sending them in."

Harrison nodded thoughtfully. He turned, looking across at his two assistants who were standing nearby, then looked back at Karr. "We can do tests, of course. See if we can come up with something that acts .

. . well, like a parachute, I guess. Something to damp down the shock. But drugs need a while to take effect. It's those first few instants that do the damage, and I can't see what we can do about that."

"Work on it," Karr said, undoing the harness and sitting up. He took a deep breath, letting his head steady, then swung his legs around so that he was sitting facing Harrison. He was naked, a web of wires taped all about his body. At a signal from Harrison the two assistants came across and started to remove the wires.

The A.A.D. system had been developed from Shepherd's "Shell"-a modified version geared to "At-a-Distance" experience. Harrison and his team had been working on it for two years now and had promised it would be ready for use a month back, but when they'd delayed yet again, Li Yuan, impatient to see the project up and running, had ordered Karr to go and check it out firsthand.

I could have died, he thought, angry suddenly, but not sure whether his anger should be directed at Harrison for not getting it right, or Li Yuan for forcing him to go through with it.

"How do you feel now?" Harrison asked, as his assistants stepped away.

Karr reached for the one-piece Harrison was holding out to him. "Sad. Jeng Lo was a good pilot."

"One of many. We lose two or three a day, you know, just in this one sector. But if this works ... if we can iron out the snags . . . then maybe we can bring the death rate down to a fraction of what it is now.

Think of the savings, and not just in terms of life. Think of the money the T'ang spends training up new pilots, not to mention the tonnage of equipment the rookies manage to lose in there. Now . . . if we were to have a whole team of A.A.D. pilots, most of them with a thousand, maybe even fifteen hundred, missions apiece, that would give us an edge in there, wouldn't you say?"

Karr zipped up the one-piece, then met Harrison's eyes. "You think they're not working on this too?

Maybe those two ships that shot us down in there were A.A.D.'s. Maybe that's how they got the edge on ms. You thought of that?" "I've thought of it."

Karr nodded, then looked across. The duty officer was standing in the doorway.

"Well, Lieutenant?"

The young officer beamed. "We got him, sir! A snatch team took him only moments after you were hit."

Karr felt his spirits lift. "Excellent! So where's he being kept?""In Decon, sir. The lower cells."

"Okay." Karr clapped his hands together, pleased to have something real to do for once. He turned to Harrison and nodded, glanced briefly at Jeng Lo, then turned back to the young officer.

"Then lead on, Lieutenant. I want to see this with my own eyes."

DECONTAMINATION WAS a whole deck-ten levels-at the bottom of the City, in what had once been called the Net. Emerging from the air lock, Karr was greeted by Captain Lasker, in charge of the unit and three of his junior officers. It was not often they were visited by the T'ang's General, and they seemed prepared to make a ritual of it, but Karr waved aside all ceremony.

"Where is he?" he asked, moving past them purposefully. "Take me there now."

Lasker looked to his men, then hurried to catch up with the giant. "He's down here, sir. Surgeon Hu is looking at him right now."

They went through transparent flap doors and out into a large area lit by arc lamps. At one of a dozen huge workbenches, a surgical team was at work, crouched over a naked body.

As Karr drew close, he felt all of the optimism wash out of him. They were working on a corpse. The top of his skull had been removed and his chest was pinned open.

Karr moved two of the assistants aside brusquely and stood beside the surgeon.

"What's the story?" Karr asked, as Hu looked up, about to scold him for interrupting the autopsy.

"General Karr . . ." Hu said, surprised. "I-"

"Have you found anything unusual?"

Hu shook his head. "Not yet. But we're still looking."

"Do you think they might have hidden something in him?"

"If they did, it's not something that's shown up on any of the scans. But we're checking the body physically. There's nothing up the anal canal, and nothing in the stomach."

Karr looked past Hu at Lasker. "Who captured him?"

Lasker turned, indicating one of his officers. "It was Daubler here."

Daubler, a fresh-faced young man in his early twenties, stepped forward, giving a curt bow of his closely shaven head. "He was dead when we took him, sir. The craft that hit yours got him also. But it didn't get away. We got one, a mine got the other. Big things they were. Proper battle cruisers."

Karr stared at the young man a moment, then nodded thoughtfully. Now, why would Lehmann have sent two battle cruisers after a single man? Why risk so much expensive hardware, unless there was a reason?

He looked at Surgeon Hu again. The man was cutting into the dead man's lungs now. Karr watched, undisturbed.

"Is there nothing unusual about him?"

Hu looked up, smiling. "About him, nothing. But you might look at his coat. It's over there, on the benchby the door. There's a team coming down from Bremen to look at it."

Karr went across and picked up the coat. It was a pure black, quilted thing, full length and padded like a flak jacket. He held it up, squinting into the overhead light to try to make out the pattern on the cloth.

Tiny circles and spirals and what looked like exploding stars.

"They're tiny circuits," Lasker said, standing to attention just behind him.

"How do you know?"