"What's it say?" Bob asked.

"Not much. Chris wants Arie to consider what would happen if two hyperdrive engines were operated close to each other."

"Why?"

"Doesn't say. But it's put Hague onto something. Look at him. He'll be like that all the way back to the High Command."

Rick led Hague into the boat, encountering no resistance, but no acknowledgment either, and Bob followed. Hague was placed in a seat and buckled in, and Rick joined Bob up front in the cockpit.

"That's what Arie's like when he's thinking real hard about something. Dead to the world, but, boy oh boy, just wait till he comes back to life."

They lifted from Paracelsus and the ship followed a low ballistic trajectory over the lunar surface. They were in sight of Mare Crisium when Hague uttered his first words of the trip. "Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes! Two, two, two. Yes, two, two, two! It works better with two. It does. It does! Yes! Oh yes! Inside the discontinuity even, it-" But he cut himself off at that point, again staring blankly.

"Looks like he's got even more to think about," Rick said.

Interlude I "Blasted it to hell, didn't they?" Ensign Luke Johnson said, surveying the damage.

Ensign Nikki Le, the one in the petite power suit, found herself agreeing. She couldn't help sadly imagining how the station used to look-bright lights illuminating the cold, deep space iceberg, scores of parabolic scanning dishes all pointing toward the inner system, people in spacesuits flitting like fireflies around the central dome and among the bubble habitats-an island of life in a sea of frigid gloom. "Yeah. X-ray laser cannon for sure. Some of the buildings have been bombed, too."

They were hovering low over the 50-kilometer-wide potato of ice and rock, indistinguishable from the other thousands of wannabe comets and asteroids out in the frozen reaches 20 or so A.U. beyond the orbit of Pluto, except that this one had held the Deepguard Station.

"Let's poke around in the command center," Luke said.

Nikki steered the EVA skiff toward the base and kicked in the plasma jets.

The Deepguard base was an utter wreck-not a landing deck left uncracked, not a habitation bubble left unburst, not a scanning dish left untoppled. What had once been a deep space intelligence gathering base for the System Patrol, no bigger than a half kilometer from end to end, was now wreckage spread over an area ten times as wide. And the bodies, scattered all about, some still inside broken suits, others just broken-there'd be over a hundred of them to find.

"What a mess. They never even had a chance. See the laser batteries? They're untouched. The aliens must not have targeted them because the base probably never got off a shot," Luke said.

Arriving at the dome, Nikki flew them over the top. Dome shards surrounded a crater inside. While they were looking, their ship called. "Brachiosaurus to skiff. Do you read, Ensign Le? Ensign Johnson?"

"We're here, Captain," Nikki acknowledged.

"Good. Sit tight you two. We have a bogey approaching at high velocity. It just popped on the screen from nowhere. It looks like one of them. What's that?" Captain LaBonte was listening to someone Nikki couldn't hear. Then: "Holy shit! We have another! It came out only 450 kilometers-" The link went dead.

High above the rough, bleak surface, a hundred kilometers away, the Brachiosaurus exploded, going up like a fusillade of Solar Union Day fireworks.

Luke and Nikki watched the death of their ship. Numb, they continued to stare at the spot of the explosion, long after the streamers of fire and incandescent dust had faded away into the eternal stars.

"We're dead," Luke finally said. "We won't be rescued out here. No one in the Patrol knows we're down here."

Nikki felt anger welling up, both at the aliens for their act, and at Luke, for stating the obvious. "I'm not giving up," she said defiantly. "Not yet. We haven't checked out all of this base yet. We might find a few places still habitable. One working food processor will feed us for two years."

They left the command center and headed for the burst habitation bubbles. Neither of them knew the layout of the base, but it was possible that the bubbles had sat atop volumes of living space buried beneath the surface.

The base was at the edge of a large, flat spot on the comet. Suddenly Luke pointed ahead, toward the far side of the plain. "Did you see that? Something just came down out there, range about 8,000 meters."

"Probably just a piece of the ship," Nikki said.

"No. It landed. It didn't fall." Luke was fumbling with the skiff's telescope controls, locking onto the position. He got the image on the screen.

Nikki glanced over. "Damn."

"It's the aliens. What did the captain call them? Phinons," Luke said, staring at the convoluted shape of the alien vessel. All odd curves and curious angles, it looked like nothing a human would design, not even Picasso on acid. As they watched, two figures emerged, moving on all fours. They stood up, reminding Nikki of rearing spiders. Their knees bent backwards like ostrich legs, and their arms looked like the legs, except that they stuck out straight up from the shoulders. Their suits were superficially like a human's, though the air tubes ran to a spot in the middle of the chest. The aliens touched controls on their midsections, then lifted gently off the surface. Small rockets fired and they started floating toward the base, a pair of arachnid wraiths.

"They have repulsor technology. Think they know we're here?" Luke asked.

"Let's not stick around to find out. They're coming to the station. We'd better be elsewhere." Nikki spun into her seat and turned them around. She had an idea. There was a deep crack ten or twelve klicks west of them that she'd seen when they made their descent to the surface.

The crack went deep, a canyon kilometers long, penetrating the lumpy mass of the comet to 1500 meters or more. Nikki brought them in just over the edge, taking them down 50 meters, grounding on an ice ledge that jutted into the abyss.

"They won't be able to see us here," Nikki said. "Those shelves above are good cover."

"Great," Luke said. "Now we'll just wait. And wait, and wait, and wait."

"Spare me the sarcasm, poster boy. We have air for a week, and the emergency rations will last just as long. We can cool our heels for a day until they leave. If they come poking around, you can play with your gun all you want. I promise." Luke had opened up the weapons chest on their way to the crack, and had been brandishing a laser rifle most of the way.

"If the aliens find us, we've got to do our best to kill them," Luke said. "We can't just run away again."

"Our duty is to survive, Luke. Not to give you a chance to be a hero."

"That's enough of that shit, Nikki. I'm serious. If they find us, we can't let them get back to their own

people to tell them about us. They've had almost no contact with humans face-to-face. The one time they did, one of them was killed. It's very important that the aliens know we're dangerous."

"You're forgetting that we know almost nothing about them, either. Deepguard was a monitoring station.

Given time we can fix up a transmitter. It's more important that we survive to get what we know of them

back to our superiors, whether the aliens think we're cowards or not."

Despite the light amplifiers in their faceplates, their surroundings consisted of gloomy masses, dark gray blobs against a background of black. "I wish we could turn on the lights," Luke said. "This ice canyon would be beautiful in Rocky Mountain sunshine."

As if on cue, the canyon flashed into brilliance, dazzling them in the fraction of a second before the light amplifiers kicked out and the faceplates polarized and darkened.

"Sit tight!" Nikki ordered. "I may have to move us out of here fast."

"It's a flare," Luke said as the actinic blaze dropped into view on a slow motion plummet to the depths below.

"They must have spotted us when we left the base. And I was right," Luke whispered. "This ice is gorgeous when you shine a light on it. I doubt they've seen us yet, though. You parked us in a good spot."

"Accolade accepted, but quit admiring the view and grab the guns." Luke hefted his weapon, retrieved one for Nikki, checked the charges, handed one to her.

"Have you ever used one of these, Nikki?""I've had the same training as everyone else.""That's not what I meant. Have you ever used one-fired at something when it counted?"Reluctantly, she admitted she hadn't."Then set it to continuous beam," Luke told her. "And wave it around at your target. You'll eat up energy, but you're more likely to hit something than if you use pulse mode."

Nikki made the adjustment. "What about you?"

"I've hit things when it counted," he said.

Nikki looked up, trying to see if anything was hiding against the background of shadow and dazzle.

There! "Something moved!"

"Where?" Luke raised his weapon looking for something to aim at.

"Up high on the far side, by the wall. See? It moved. It's one of them, coming down." Nikki turned on

the repulsors, felt the slight tremor in her butt as the field lines were twisted into lift mode.

"I see it." His rifle up, Luke drew a bead. But before he could fire the alien pushed away from the wall

with all four limbs like a jumping spider. It sailed rapidly across the gorge, twisted around, and fired a weapon.

In silence the ledge disintegrated under them, shards of ice shattering into space. Luke was almost torn

off the skiff, managing at the last instant to grab the side with his hand, needing all of the power amplification to hold on.

They were falling, ever so slowly.

"We'll be okay," Nikki said. "The repulsors are on." Jets fired. "I'm taking us deeper."

"Right," Luke said, regaining his seat. They descended for long moments, then their flight path leveled out.

Nikki said, "I'm taking us a couple of klicks along the bottom before we climb out.""And go where?""I don't know. The base maybe? You got any bright ideas?""Truthfully, I thought this crack was a good idea, at least if we were going to hide. We're probably going to have to fight them after all. But we might as well beat them to the base and see if we can hold out

there."

But after a quick search of the base, they had found no additional food or weapons. "Doesn't look so good, does it?" Luke said.

"No," Nikki agreed. "I guess waiting for rescue is moot." She sighed, dejected. She hadn't wanted to believe that their option barrel was this empty. Their prospects looked more than just bleak.

"You can take the skiff up and crash if you want," Luke said.

"It would be quick that way."

"Yes, it would. Be my guest. But I have work to do before I check out," he said grimly.

"What are you going to do?"

"There are two aliens out there I'm going to kill."

Nikki said, "Count me in."

"Good," Luke said. "I really do need you for the plan I have in mind."

"Plan?"

* * * Luke had gone up to the fractured rim of the command dome to watch the horizon for the approach of the aliens. In a dark tunnel below the surface, Nikki picked her way through the toppled bunks and furniture, shining her suit beam into hollows and dim spaces. She had gone down below since they still had a few minutes before they expected the aliens to arrive. She wanted to search here, one of the few places left they hadn't looked into. The carnage was hideous. Nikki had already found a dozen more mangled corpses. Two, a man and a woman, were clenched in a dead embrace. She tried not to think about their story.

"Get up here, quick!" Luke said over the comm. "I see them. They're gliding over the surface, coming

this way."

Nikki started back, relieved to be leaving the death behind her, yet afraid of what lay ahead. "Did they spot you?"

"How do I know? But I doubt it. Anyway, it's showtime."

Nikki emerged from below, hopped over a pile of rubble, and stood beside Luke.

"Ready?" Luke asked.

"Ready."