We don't need to understandhow, right now, she said. What and who will do just fine.

So we stay in touch, Carmaggio said. And we get ready; getting those papers smells like preparation for another try at the U.S. to me.

Whatever lived behind those eyes was getting smarter.

Getting ready.

We can help each other with this, Finch said. It sounded as much like a prayer as a statement.

I certainly hope so, Ms. Finch, he said. Because we both need all the help we can get.

He looked down at the picture. The rest of the data on the sheet was probably fiction, but the face was real. The eyes, green and level, with a hint of mockery in them.

CHAPTER SIX.

Immobilized in gel, breathing thick oxygen-rich fluid, Kenneth Lafarge was one with the machine. It was deceptively simple in appearance, an egg two meters long and one-and-a-half at its broadest point. The color was a soft matte black, the material a complex ceramic assembled atom by atom. Inside were the mechanisms that maintained him unknowing as it coasted in through the outer planets to a precisely calculated meeting with the third.

The machine woke him.approaching Earth/2, it said/thought,passive scans reveal no overt enemy presence.

He activated the exterior sensor feed, and the chill immensity of space snapped into being around him.

Below was a view he knew only from ancient holographs and long-distance scans; the blue-white shield of Earth, turning in majesty. Now he was near it, one of less than half a dozen of his people since the Exodus, four centuries before. It was like and unlike Samothrace in the Centauri system. Blue of water, white of cloud, brown-gray-greens of land; more water than his native planet, less land surface, slightly bigger overall, the shapes of the coastlines completely different. Samothrace was a world of many islands, many continents scattered among shallow seas, none larger than a few million square kilometers.

Earth.

Earth/2,he reminded himself. Four and half centuries before, in a history that was probably very unlike the one that had led to his world.

Input analysis,he commanded.

Data flowed in; from radio and vid broadcasts, from the sparse satellite traffic.There's a United States here, but no Domination, he realized. Getting ready for a Presidential election. Amazing. Dozens upon dozens of sovereign countries, few of them large. Somuch for the theory that planetary unification is inevitable in an industrialized world. There was hardly anything in space, which was even more amazing. Plenty of electromagnetic traffic, neutron output from fission plants, the atmosphere showed alot of industrial byproducts, more than anything in the prime line's history. But none of the lunar colonies and orbital habitats his 1995 would have shown, nothing out in deep space or the asteroid belts.

How do they maintain that density of population without materials and energy from space?he thought.

From the looks of it, there must be more than five billion people down there; his Earth had never reached even half that, and by the late twentieth century it'd been dependent on space-based inputs.

The first tenuous wisps of atmosphere buffeted the egg. It plunged more steeply, and outside views degraded under ionization and the peeling of layers of ablative covering.

Detection,the machines told him; he could feel the microrays stroking at the outside of the egg, like sun on skin through the linkage. The stealthing would handle it easily; it was quite a primitive system. Not as good as what the Alliance for Democracy had had at the time of the Final War.Would have had. This whole multiple-world thing was enough to warp your brain. At a guess, this history hadn't had the sort of relentless competition that had driven technology in his.

Lucky bastards.

Gravity pushed at him, building, even in the liquid cocoon. At sixty thousand meters the drive kicked in, slowing his descent. That many energetic ions ought to cause some sort of a stir, but he doubted they'd know what they were looking at. It lasted exactly twenty seconds, and by then he was moving at only slightly more than the terminal velocity of the half-ton egg. North America opened beneath him, dark with night, starred with cities and roadways.

He felt his throat tighten, emotion unexpected and intense. The ancient homeland, the lost and lovely. His great-great-great-great-grandfather had been born here . . . or at least this was another version of that place. The land of Jefferson, Washington, Douglas, Evrard.

Minutes passed. The machine sensed the proper altitude and the exterior of the egg disintegrated, returning to its primary constituents and dispersing silently on the wind as molecular dust. The wing deployed; he steered it effortlessly on the currents of air toward the cornfield below. It set his feet down between two rows and disappeared itself, a rain of particles far too fine to feel against his skin. He pulled the breatherfilm off his face and spent a moment coughing the liquid out of his lungs.

He was naked in a cornfield in . . .Illinois, the comp built into his skull prompted, drawing a map. The same political division here as in his history.But Mexico and Canada are separate countries. Events must have diverged early in the nineteenth century; Canada had been annexed to the U.S. in 1812, Mexico in 1848, Central America and Cuba during the 1850s.

It was fairly chilly, a cold March night; much like the high country around his family's ranch in Galatin State back on Samothrace. He opened the flat case at his feet and took out overalls and boots, both neutral colors with archaic zip fasteners. Nothing there that any detection apparatus would find interesting, but he'd ditch them as soon as possible. The rest of his equipment stayed inside the shielded suitcase, except for a smooth dark oblong he slipped into one pocket. That would shoot a slug of ultracompressed gas, very effective at close range, and not at all conspicuous.

He cocked an ear. Traffic sounds from about two klicks away; a highway, and transport.

Mid-eastern coast, North America.That was all they'd been able to learn about the enemy molehole; that, and that it was probably an accident. Typical Draka brute-force-and-massive-ignorance science, but it could work. If they had the time. He was probably within three or four years of the original penetration, certainly within a decade. No overt sign of the Draka's activity.

The corn rustled about him. A sleeping continent . . . a sleeping world, and something terrible loose in it.

A worm in the bud, eating and burrowing and preparing to riddle it with the deadly spawn of the Domination.

He picked up the suitcase and began to walk toward the road.

Ken Lafarge snapped a fist into the elbow. It broke with an unpleasant crackling sound, and he released the knife hand.

The other two muggers fled down a darkened alley, hauling the injured one along. Ken stooped and picked up the weapon one of them had dropped when snap-kicked in the gut; he turned it over in his hands, ejected the magazine, worked the action and disassembled it.

Alittle primitive, he thought, putting it back together. Semi-automatic slugthrower, no guidance system at all. He reloaded and dropped it into a pocket, then reluctantly added the money from the criminals'

wallets he'd taken. They'd probably stolen it themselves.

This section of Chicago was unbelievably shabby and run-down. Itstank, of urine and uncollected garbage. Everyone else he'd seen here was black-rather like what he'd read about parts of the South, right after the Civil War. Not many blacks had been among the refugees to Samothrace, and the population had homogenized by intermarriage in the centuries since.

Didn't they free the slaves here, or what?he thought, turning and walking north, farther away from the bus station.Wait a minute. No Domination here, ever. So there'd been no place for the irreconcilables of the South to go, after whatever version of the Civil War this mutant history contained. That could mean . . .Wait until you've got the data.

More of the internal-combustion vehicles passed him along the rain-sodden street, splashing through puddles in the cracked pavement. He stopped beside one that was resting on the bare rims of its tires and popped the hood open, shining a pencil-light on the interior.

Interesting.Spark-ignition piston system. A fuel-air mixer that looked for all the world as if somebody had developed it from a perfume-bulb atomizer. Lots of electrical auxiliaries, and even a compchip monitoring system. He called up schematics of autosteamer engines from the historical files. Nothing even remotely similar. Oh, this thing wouldwork, it probably even had a fairly good thermal efficiency, but it was absurdly overstressed for a civilian road-vehicle at a twentieth-century level of technology. Not to mention the toxic byproducts of high-temperature combustion.

IC piston engines something like this were used for aircraft,he remembered. And sometimes for armored fighting-vehicles, compression-ignition Diesels, although the Draka had used a turbocompound system during the Eurasian War of the 1940s. Road vehicles had always been external-combustion, though-steam, from the early days of powered street transport in the 1820s, closed-cycle Rankin engines by the 1990s.

Lord, you'd have to have had fairly advanced machining to use IC engines in road cars.High temperatures like that required close tolerances and corrosion-resistant materials compared to steam.

This one was quite well-made, in a crazy sort of way; he pulled a sensor thread from his suitcase and scanned.

tolerances to within one ten-thousandth of a millimeter,the comp told him.following alloys- He tried to imagine an early-Victorian precursor of the engine before him, and failed. Steam engines had started out heavy and crude, like the first road autosteamers themselves, and gotten gradually better.

Steam turbines had powered the first dirigibles and aircraft; then internal combustion had been developed when those ran up against inherent power-to-weight limitations, in the 1870s. By then manufacturing technique had improved enough to make that practical. How on earth could gas engines like this have been developedfirst, though?

He clanged the hood down and started north again. It might have been easier in an honestly weird analogue-something where Vikings had colonized North America, or the South had won the Civil War.

There was just enough familiar here to be disorienting. Some sort of cheap hotel for the night, then to a library.

I'll have to investigate before I contact the authorities, obviously,he mused.

The motel room smelled of disinfectant, but it was spacious compared to quarters on an interstellar spaceship. The window outside showed a vista of wet dark parking lot, an anonymous part of an anonymous town in Ohio. Ken Lafarge had a car outside, two suitcases of local clothing and sundries; even a razor, just in case someone looked over his effects. This paper currency of theirs was childishly easy for his faber to duplicate, and if anyone caught the duplicated serial numbers his money would look more authentic than the originals.

Not that anyone seemed likely to check him over. He didn't expect genescans, but there was almost nothing of the structure of identity documents and permits he remembered from history lessons abouthis world's America in the 1990s. These people didn't spend anything on defense, and very little on exploration. No national service, no youth-training camps, an incredible cultural balkanization that destroyed unity and purpose. They were onlynow getting anything like a reusable orbital launcher; by this date in his history, the first interstellar ship was nearly completed. And this Earth was sopoor, so short of energy and materials, so filthy with the byproducts of horrendously inefficient industries.

But it's not about to be conquered by monsters,he thought grimly.Not if I do my job.

Kenneth looked back at the vid-the television,he reminded himself.Too strange. Too much.

He could understand the standard language well enough; it was far closer to the rather conservative Samothracian dialect of English than the Domination's variety. It was thecontext he couldn't follow.

Alien, alien. People in an ampitheater-like room were standing and telling a black woman things about their personal lives . . .

Incest. Child molestation. Sexual combinations even aDraka would find disgusting. He sat on the bed and dropped his head into his hands.

All his training and study had been aimed at the twenty-fifth-century Domination.This mission is a ratfuck waiting to happen. Lousy tradecraft. His equipment was aimed at that particular setting, too.

Elaborate stealthing that he didn't need, and minimal power outputs because he couldn't possibly shoot his way off a hostile, highly-advanced planet. What he needed was brute-force stuff, weapons.

your blood chemistry is at less than 87% of optimum,the AI said in his mind.indications of shock syndrome and stress, permission to adjust.

Granted,he thought, and shuddered as a sudden coolness ran over his skin. Breathing slowed, sweat dried. He stripped and dropped to the floor; a hundred two-finger pushups with the weight of his case on his shoulders, stretching, squats, crunches. Better. A shower, and he began to feel like a human being again.

Let's get to work, he said and snapped off the TV.

He sat by the telephone. Tendrils grew out of the case, pale threads thinning to invisibility. They wove their way into the native instrument. Ken closed his eyes.

The cyberweb formed around him. Scan, he thought.Eastern North America, five-year intervals, following parameters.

A long wait, in a floating world of colors. Waiting while the AI poured out through the low, slow bandwidth available, and communicated with machines several orders of magnitude more primitive.

A structure began to grow before his mind's sight, three-dimensional and glowing with colors impossible for waking eyes.

Interesting, he breathed. Adistributed system?

correct.

The AI wove it backward in time, then forward again to show its growth. About the only commonality it had with the history of cybernetics he knew was that the original set of linkages had been military-inspired.

No central nexus?

no. capacity is added incrementally. the basic units are small personal comps with open-access memories and instruction-set parameters.

He whistled silently. Grotesque, he said. Somany separate processing units! And so easy to infiltrate; nothing but a few clumsy password systems and crude encryption codes. This would give any competent counterespionage agency the screaming willies, right back to the beginning of computers-back to the compressed-air-powered mechanical Babbage systems used in the nineteenth century, even.

His attention flashed to an item culled from a database.

new york, january 2, 1995,the machine said.following details.

Oddly limited details. Twenty men-petty criminals of some sort-slaughtered. A few pictures. The AI corrected them to 3-D, filled in probabilities in coded order. One with his head blown mostly off.

Plasma gun, Lafarge breathed softly. Layer knife.

Stripped metallic ions, superconducting guide coil and power source, flash chamber. Not a sophisticated weapon, in use for centuries-but nothing this world could build without boxcarloads of equipment.

The others had been killed by blunt-injury trauma and the edged weapon. Typical, he said.

Thedrakensis had reacted with the bloodlust built into the species; and they loved to do it by hand, if they could. Killed everyone there in a single orgasmic burst of slaughter, crushing and ripping bone and organ, tearing the life out of the fragile human bodies.

Oh, I think you were a startled and unhappy little snake, he said.

Follow the leads. He walked through luminescent tunnels of data. Barriers glowed for instants, then dissolved like sand under his fingers. Like movement in a dream, thick and honey-slow. Things took so long.

Ah. Two more killings in New York. A derelict, and a businessman. He grimaced slightly at the details of the last.It lured him. Used him. The pheromonal dominance system; the poor primitive would never have known what hit him. Also the snake must have been recovering, getting its mental feet under it-that showed thought and planning, not blind fury.

A description.Jesus. A female. He opened his eyes for a moment, returning to the realtime world.

Damn.

That meant it could reproduce; the techniques were easily within the tech level here. Potentially hundreds, thousands of times, like digger wasp larvae in grubs. He swallowed queasiness and closed his eyes again. No immediate trace.There. A skin sample. Data cataracted down the link, built up into a picture.

Know the enemy.

He banished the sharp-featured image, sighing. Three years more time to track down; and with increasing caution. It would have anticipated pursuit, and built safeguards as soon as it could.

And you're from another galaxy?

Ken felt his eyes narrow. I didn't say that, he said Don't be absurd. I'm from a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. It's only 4.2 light-years from here.

Thattaway, just a bit, the young man said. Engage.

His partner snorted amusement; he was older than the agent talking to Ken Lafarge, heavier-set, and much less communicative. He was also standing behind the Samothracian, behind and to the left-a posture which made Lafarge extremely uncomfortable, since it put him in a bracket. The office was a cubicle in some unmarked office building northwest of Washington proper. It had the faint ozone smell he was coming to associate with here-and-now bureaucracy, the stink of primitive electronics with loose connections. The rest of it looked very ordinary, under a fluorescent light with an annoying subliminal hum.

He could approve of that commonplace aspect, if nothing else: putting up a huge monolith with some equivalent ofSecret Intelligence Headquarters on a big sign out front had been a bad habit of some of the old Alliance for Democracy's security agencies. Everything else might change across the centuries, but it remained a constant that this line of work attracted both paranoids and the boyish type who liked to show off their affiliation with powerful clandestine networks. Whatever this organization was, it was keeping the latter under control at least.

Look-what's your name, anyway?

John, the young man said. John Andrews. This is Clete Debrowski.

Look, Mr. Andrews, I thought I gave you some pretty convincing data.

Andrews leaned back in his swivel chair. It creaked. John Andrews didn't look heavy, but his frame was packed with solid dense muscle.

Yup, you did, Mr. Lafarge. You know things you definitely shouldn't; about what went on in New York back in '95, and things from extremely classified databanks.