But the very strength of the temptation had warned him that it was born at least as much of anger as of professional judgment, and anger was not the best basis for making command decisions. Better to wait until he was certain his own temper wasn't driving him . . . and until he could bring the hammer down as Garlath deserved without doing any more damage to the platoon's internal discipline while they were in the field. If there'd been any prospect of running into some sort of opposition, or even any dangerous predator, it might have been different. But this was a virgin portal. There wouldn't be even the threat of the frontier brigands or claim jumpers the Army was occasionally called upon to suppress.

"I'm afraid the fifty and I don't exactly see eye to eye on the proper conduct of a first survey," he said after a moment, answering the magister with rather more frankness than he'd initially intended.

"And I'm afraid that that's because the fifty is a frigging idiot," Magister Kelbryan replied tartly.

Jasak blinked in surprise, and she giggled. It was an astonishingly bright, silvery sound, almost as unexpected as her earthy language had been.

"I'm sorry, Sir Jasak!" she said, her tone genuinely contrite despite the laughter still bubbling in the depths of her voice. "It's just that Magister Halathyn and I had to put up with him for almost six full days after your departure, and I've never met a man more invincibly convinced of his own infallibility. Despite, I might add, the overwhelming weight of the evidence to the contrary."

"I'm afraid it would be quite improper for me to denigrate the abilities of one of my officers, especially in front of a civilian," Jasak said after a moment.

"And the fact that you feel constrained to say that tells me everything I really need to know, doesn't it, Hundred?" she asked. He said nothing, only looked at her, smiling ever so faintly, and she giggled again. Then she eased the straps of her pack across her shoulders, inhaled hugely, and looked up at the crystal blue patches of autumn sky showing between the dark needles of evergreens and the paint brush glory of seasonal foliage.

"My, what a magnificent day!" she observed.

Trooper 2/c Osmuna swore under his breath as the rock shifted under his right heel. His left arm rose, flailing for balance as he teetered in the middle of the broad, shallow stream. The heavy infantry arbalest in his right hand threatened to pull him the rest of the way off center and down, and the prospect of tumbling into the crystal clear, icy water rushing over its stony bed wrung another, more heartfelt obscenity out of him.

He managed, somehow, not to fall. Which was a damned good thing. Sword Harnak would have had his guts for garters (assuming that Gaythar Harklan, Osmuna's squad shield didn't rip them out first) if he'd fucked up and given Fifty Garlath an excuse to pitch another damned tantrum. Garlath was a piss-poor substitute for Fifty Thaylar, and he was already in a crappy enough mood. Fifty Thaylar would only have laughed it off if his point man fell into a river; Garlath would probably rip everyone involved a new anal orifice just to relieve his own emotional constipation.

Personally, Osmuna reflected, as he continued on across the stream, stepping more cautiously from stone to stone, he thought the bee the Old Man had obviously gotten into his bonnet was probably a bit on the irrational side. Oh, sure, The Book insisted that point elements and flanking scouts be thrown out and that they maintain visual contact with one another at all times. But despite all of that, it wasn't like they were going to run into hordes of howling savages, and everyone knew it. No one ever had, in two centuries of steady exploration and expansion. Still, between the Old Man and Garlath, Osmuna knew which he preferred. Officers who let themselves get sloppy about one thing tended to get sloppy about other things . . . and officers who got sloppy, tended to get their troopers killed.

His thoughts had carried him to the far bank, and he started up a shallow slope. The line of the stream had opened a hole in the forest canopy, which permitted the growth of the sort of dense, tangled brush and undergrowth which had been choked out elsewhere in the virgin mature forest. As he began to force his way through it, a flicker of movement higher up the slope, on the edge of the trees, caught his attention. He looked at it, and froze.

Falsan chan Salgmun froze in disbelief, staring down at the river.

The man-and it was, indisputably, a man, however he'd gotten here-looked completely out of place. And not simply because this was a virgin world, which meant, by definition, that no one lived there.

It wasn't just his uniform, although that pattern of dense green, black, and white would have been far better suited to a tropical rain forest somewhere than to the mixed conifers and deciduous trees towering above him. Nor was it his coloring, which, after all, was nothing extraordinary. It was the totality of his appearance-the peculiar spiked helmet, covered in the same inappropriate camouflage fabric of which his uniform was made; the clubbed braid of bright, golden hair spilling over the back of his collar; the knee-high, tightly laced boots; the short sword at his left hip . . . and the peculiar looking crossbow carried in his right hand.

It was like some weird composite image, some insane juxtapositioning of modern textiles and manufactured goods with medieval weaponry, and it couldn't be here. Couldn't exist. In eighty years of exploration under the Portal Authority's auspices, no trace of any other human civilization had ever been discovered.

Until, chan Salgmun realized, today.

And what the fuck do I do now?

Trooper Osmuna stared at the impossible apparition. It wore brown trousers, short boots, and a green jacket, and its slouch hat looked like something a Tukorian cattle herder might have worn. It had a puny looking sheath knife at one hip, certainly not anything anyone might have called a proper sword, and something else-something with a handgrip, almost like one of the hand crossbows some hunters used for small game-in an abbreviated scabbard on the other hip. It was also holding something in both hands. Something like an arbalest, but with no bow stave.

It couldn't be here, he thought. Not after two hundred years! Despite all of his training, all of his experience, Osmuna discovered that he'd been totally unprepared for what had been laughingly dismissed as "the other guy contingency" literally for generations.

His heart seemed to have stopped out of sheer shock, but then he felt his pulse begin to race and adrenaline flooded his system. He didn't know exactly what the other man was holding, or how it worked, but he knew from the way he held it that it was a weapon of some sort.

And what the fuck do I do now? he wondered frantically.

Chan Salgmun shook himself. He was only a private employee of the Chalgyn Consortium these days, working for one of the private firms licensed by the Portal Authority to explore the links between the universes. But in his day, he'd served in the Ternathian Army, which considered itself the best on Sharona, with reason, and he recognized the other man's confusion. Confusion that could be dangerous, under the circumstances.

Here we both stand, armed, and scared as shit, he thought. All we need is for one of us to fuck up. And that damned crossbow of his is cocked and ready to go. I know I don't intend to do anything stupid . . . but what about him?

His thumb moved, very carefully disengaging the safety on his Model 9 rifle.

Osmuna saw the not-arbalest move slowly, stealthily, and the level of adrenaline flooding his system rocketed upward. Doctrine was clear on this point. In the inconceivable event that another human civilization was encountered, contact was to be made peacefully, if at all possible. But the overriding responsibility was to ensure that news of the encounter got home. Which meant the people who had that news had to be alive-and free-to deliver it.

And if Osmuna intended to stay alive and uncaptured, it probably wouldn't be a very good idea to let this stranger point an unknown weapon at him.

He moved his left hand to the forearm of his arbalest and tipped it upward slightly.

Craaaaccccckkkkk!

"What the he-?"

Jasak's head snapped up at the sharp, totally unexpected sound. He'd never heard anything like that flat, hard explosion. It was almost like a tiny sliver bitten off a roll of thunder. Or perhaps the sound a frozen branch made shattering under an intolerable weight of winter ice. But it was neither of those things, and whatever it was, it wasn't a natural sound, either. He didn't know how he could be so positive, yet he was, and his first instant flare of astonishment disappeared into a sudden, terrible suspicion.

Chapter two.

Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr ducked under the open flap of her tent, stepped out into the early chill, and sucked in a deep double lungful of morning. The crisp autumn air tasted like heaven, and she stretched, closing her eyes to sort out the delightful scents floating on the breeze. Cinnamon-dry leaves underfoot mingled with the soft, green fragrance of moss, and the deep, rich scent of wet earth from the forest floor. She grinned in sheer delight, then opened her eyes to watch the gold-tinted mist that hung in a thick, whisper-soft curtain along the stream they'd been following for three days. She could hear the broad creek-it nearly qualified as a river-gurgling and chuckling its way through the ravine it had cut through the forest.

Her husband, Jathmar Nargra, emerged from the tent behind her, and slanting sunlight turned his thinning sandy hair into copper fire. The ends curled slightly from the dampness, like the baby curls in the pictures Jathmar's mother had shown her after their marriage. Field equipment festooned his sturdy canvas web gear: metal canteen, waterproofed compass, field glasses, canvas rucksack. He had his rifle slung across one shoulder for greater ease in carrying, and a Halanch and Welnahr revolver rode his belt.

The lever action rifle and heavy single-action pistol were for protection against inimical wildlife-today, at least. There was literally no chance that they'd run into anything like claim jumpers or a gang of portal pirates in a virgin universe, but that wasn't always the case out here on the leading edge of the frontier. Shaylar was more than a little relieved that he wasn't going to need all that hardware today, but she had to admit he made a brave and dashing figure, standing there in the golden sunlight that filtered down like shafts of molten butter through the gorgeously colored leaves overhead.

Jathmar's sun-bronzed face broke into a broad grin as her delight sparkled to him through their marriage bond.

"It is a good morning, isn't it?" he observed. "Even with my unheroic figure squarely in the middle of it."

"Oh, absolutely!" Shaylar laughed.

"You wound me, woman." His long face took on a crestfallen tragedy that would have fooled anyone else. "You weren't supposed to agree with me!"

"My dear, you're armed and dangerous enough to take on any black bears, timber wolves, wild boars, or cougars native to this part of the world." She batted her eyelashes at him. "What more could any delicately reared maiden ask?"

"Hah! That's more like it!"

He waggled his eyebrows and swaggered over for his good-morning kiss. Rather, his fifth good-morning kiss since they'd rolled out of their sleeping bags, twenty minutes previously, she thought with an inner laugh as he enfolded her in his arms. Jathmar Nargra was nothing if not an opportunist. And since they'd spent the vast bulk of the past four years in the company of forty unmarried men-give or take the odd one or two security types who'd hired on, then decided to homestead, or gotten eaten by the odd crocodile-Jathmar made the most of whatever opportunities came his way.

So did Shaylar, for that matter. Since most of the universes explored to date did have cougars in this region, and since-so far as anyone had been able to tell after eighty years of constant exploration-every portal's universe was very nearly identical to every other, Shaylar didn't mind in the least Jathmar's tendency to run about armed like a proper brigand. His various bits and pieces of lethal hardware might get in the way at moments like this, but that was just fine with her.

When Jathmar finally decided their kiss had been adequate, for now, at least, he stepped back, and she grinned as she noticed the sketchbook peeking out of his rucksack.

"Planning to loaf today, are we?" she inquired sweetly, and his clear hazel eyes twinkled.

"Tease me all you like, faithless wench. One of these days, I'll have to beat the art buyers off with a club, and we'll find ourselves retired, rich, and happy."

"I'm happy now," she smiled. "And with all of this," she swept an expansive arm at the pristine wilderness surrounding them, "who needs to be rich?"

"Who, indeed?" he echoed, brushing a lock of raven-black hair from her brow. A few strands always escaped the practical braids she wore while in the field. "You really are happy," he said, smiling as he read her emotions through the special bond between married Talents. "I worried about it, you know. When we first started our crusade to place you on a field team."

"Yes, I know," she said softly. "And I know how hard you pushed the Board to pull it off."

"Halidar Kinshe turned the tide of opinion, not me," Jathmar demurred. "And you've known the parliamentary representative a lot longer than I have, dear heart. Still," he grinned, "if you want to lavish thanks on your husband's humble head, far be it from me to discourage you."

"You," she said severely, swatting him with her rolled up tube of charts, "are incorrigible!"

"Not at all. Encouragable, now . . ."

She laughed as he waggled his eyebrows again. Then he tipped his head up to peer through the crimson and golden clouds of fall foliage high overhead.

"It is a grand morning for sketching, isn't it? Not to mention perfect weather for a survey. The mist ought to burn off early, I think."

"Not that you need a clear day," Shaylar chuckled. Jathmar's Talent was the ability to "see" terrain features in a five-mile circle around him, regardless of weather or ambient light-or the complete lack thereof. "But weather like this should make the hike more exhilarating. I'll give you that. In fact, I think I'm jealous about being stuck in camp while you go gadding about!"

"You're happy as a pearl in a bed of oysters," he told her, tweaking her nose gently. "Besides, after that last universe, you should be thrilled by any sunshine we can get."

"I'll say."

Shaylar's shudder of memory was only half-feigned. The universe they'd mapped prior to entering this one had connected via a portal in the middle of what had to be one of the rainiest spots in any known universe. Back home, it would have been northwest Rokhana, near the mouth of the Yirshan River where it spilled into the immense Western Ocean. They'd been incredibly lucky in that their arrival portal and the portal leading to this universe were less than three hundred miles apart, and they knew it. Portals in such close proximity to one another were almost unheard of, and correspondingly valuable.

Despite that, and despite the guidance Darcel Kinlafia, their Portal Hound, had been able to give them, it had taken them almost a month and a half to cover the two hundred and sixty-five dripping wet miles between them, and the last three weeks had been horrible. They hadn't seen the sun for twenty-three straight days, and most of their gear had sprouted mold that had required copious amounts of bleach once the rains finally stopped. After six weeks spent in perpetually soggy clothes, squelching through perpetually soggy wetlands, pushing through perpetually thick undergrowth with machetes, and sleeping under perpetual shrouds of mosquito netting and the smoke of smudge pots, this crisp, clear autumn air was heaven itself.

"I'm not complaining," she said cheerfully. "At least we could come through the portal and leave the rain behind. Poor Company-Captain Halifu had to build a fort in that mess. I don't think I've ever seen such an abundance of unenthusiastic soldiers in my life."

Grafin Halifu had favored Jathmar and Shaylar-carefully out of earshot of the men of his command-with a piquant rendition of his opinion of the multiverse's inconsiderate ill manners in placing a portal in that particular godsforsaken spot. And since Uromathians worshiped just about as many deities as there were individual Uromathians, a spot had to be nigh well lost at the back of forever before all the Uromathian gods decided to forsake it.

For some odd reason, the company-captain had seemed less than amused by Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl's decision to name that universe "New Uromath" in honor of Halifu's homeland.

"No, Grafin's troops weren't very happy, were they?" Jathmar chuckled. "Of course, I wouldn't have been very happy if Regs had required me to build on the already-mapped side of that particular portal, either. There they sit, sinking slowly into the mud, and right in front of them is all of this."

It was his turn to wave expansively at the towering forest giants all about them.

"At least Darcel wasn't bound by the PAAF's policy," Shaylar pointed out.

"I think some of Grafin's troopers were ready to commit mayhem when they realized he was bugging out for a better spot," Jathmar agreed.

"They couldn't possibly blame him," Shaylar replied primly, eyes laughing wickedly. "He's a telepath. And everyone knows that not even the best Voice can transmit through a portal."

"That's what all of you keep telling the rest of us, anyway," Jathmar said. "I'm not too sure Grafin's troopers were buying it this time around, though."

Shaylar chuckled. Like her, Darcel Kinlafia was a Voice, a Talented long-distance communications specialist. Voices, who were born with the gifts of perfect recall and the ability to connect, mind-to-mind, with other Voices, were essential in many aspects of Sharonian society.

Governments, the Portal Authority, and private industries ranging from manufacturing to news broadcasters used Voices to transmit complex messages that were word- and image-perfect. The military used Voices, as well, for its long-range communications. But as useful as Voices were throughout Sharona's multiple-universe civilization, they were utterly indispensable to the work of surveying new universes.

Every survey crew fielded a bare minimum of two Voices. One remained at the portal giving access to a new universe, serving as a link between the field team conducting the survey and the established settlements in the universes behind them. The more portals a field team surveyed, the more Voices it needed to cover the portals in their particular transit chain. And when their team reached the distance limit of Shaylar's transmission ability, they would need to move Darcel forward and replace him with a new Voice in a game of telepathic leapfrog.

This portal, in particular, was part of the reason they were so stretched for manpower. During the past ten months, Chalgyn Consortium's teams had found no less than three new portals, including New Uromathia and this one, which they hadn't named yet. That had forced them to split up, trying to claim and explore them all, and that was before they crossed into this universe and started to realize what they might have stumbled across. Their discoveries were going to be a massive windfall, and not just for them and their employer. In all of its eighty previous years of exploration, the Portal Authority had located and charted only forty-nine portals. The Chalgyn teams had already increased that total by over six percent, and if Darcel was right about this portal, the consequences for their entire civilization (not to mention their own bank accounts) would be stupendous.

All of that was wonderful, but it also left them incredibly shorthanded. Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl had split their team twice, already, claiming the other two portals and exploring the universes beyond them. As a result, they were down to only two Voices and a bare minimum of other crewmen, not to mention supplies, but nobody was complaining.

Fortunately, the Portal Authority was in charge of all portal transit traffic, which meant the units of the PAAF-the Portal Authority Armed Forces, composed of multinational military units assigned to Authority duty-built the portal forts and provided most of the personnel to man them, including at least one Portal Authority Voice. Or, that was the way it was supposed to work, at any rate. This portal was so new, and there were so many other portals along what had been designated the Karys Chain that needed forts, as well, that the military hadn't been able to bring in a new Voice, yet.

All of which left Darcel Kinlafia holding down the listening post for their team until a fort-based Voice could be moved in. Darcel would pass their field reports along from one Voice to the next, creating a chain of rapid communications. They could, if emergency required it, get a message all the way back to humanity's birth world, Sharona, in little more than a week. If not for the water gaps between some of the portals, which had to be crossed by ship, since no one could permanently post a relay Voice in the middle of an ocean, they could have gotten a message home in a matter of hours.

Shaylar was grateful that she would never be the Voice stuck at the portal, just waiting for someone else's messages. She wasn't merely the Voice assigned to the survey team, she was married to-and inextricably linked with-its primary Mapper. That made her not only an integral part of the survey, but meant she was critical to the team's primary mission: mapping a new universe. Jathmar could "See" the terrain around him, but Shaylar was the team's actual cartographer. It was her job to translate Jathmar's mental "pictures" of distant terrain features into the maps which would guide later exploration and settlements. Even if they stumbled across another portal, they wouldn't-couldn't-leave Shaylar there to cover it. They would have to send word back to field another survey crew to explore the new universe, or else to take over the exploration of this one so that they could concentrate on the new one.

Then again, they couldn't really leave Darcel, either. Not for long, anyway. He might not be as essential to the everyday operations of the field team as Shaylar and Jathmar were, but his secondary Talent was, in its own way, even more important to the Consortium's long term operations.

She knew exactly how lucky she was. Not just to escape the tedium of portal sitting, while others enjoyed all the fun of exploration, but to be out here at all. On the whole, Sharonian women enjoyed equal status with Sharonian men, although legal rights varied from one kingdom or republic to the next. After all, there was no question about female intelligence or inherent capabilities in a population where one in five people possessed at least some degree of Talent. That sort of discrimination had gone out with the dark ages, thousands upon thousands of years ago, during the first Ternathian Empire.

But mapping virgin universes was arduous, frequently dangerous work. The Portal Authority, whose governing members were drawn from each of Sharona's dozens of nations and city-states-not to mention the current Ternathian Empire-had decreed that women should not risk the dangers routinely braved by virgin-portal survey teams.

Shaylar was the Portal Authority's first exception to that ironclad rule, which had carried the weight of eighty years of precedent. She was very much aware that her performance was under scrutiny. She had the chance of a lifetime-the chance to blaze the way for other women who wanted to explore where no other human had ever set foot-but she was equally conscious of her responsibility to prove once and for all that it was time to set that long-standing rule permanently aside.

Shaylar had helped survey two other virgin universes before this expedition, not to mention putting in her time, along with Jathmar, pushing back the frontiers of other, already claimed universes. Each portal gave access to an entire planet, after all, and however physically similar all of those duplicate worlds might be, they still had to be explored and surveyed. And that wasn't the sort of chore which could be accomplished in the snap of your fingers. Besides, that sort of exploration was the final training period-the internship-the Authority required before it was prepared to turn a team loose on the far side of an unexplored portal.

It was just as rugged a life as everyone had warned her it would be. The frontier wasn't gentle, and it didn't make allowances for the "frailer sex." But despite the worries of the general public and the dire predictions of the naysayers-not to mention the very real harshness of conditions, and the ever-present dangers any pioneer faced in the wilderness-she was profoundly happy. Not to mention tremendously successful.

Having Jathmar at her side to share the experience only deepened the wonder of it all. Her eyes met his and the love that came rolling to her through their marriage bond was so strong and sweet tears prickled her eyelids. Jathmar leaned down the seven inches between their mismatched heights and placed a gentle kiss on her brow, a more tender expression of his feelings than a mere ardent lip-lock. Then he grinned and jerked his head towards the deep timber.

"Time's a-wasting," he said. "Let's see how much we can get mapped before lunch. And the sooner we talk to Ghartoun, the sooner we'll get started."

Their camp was nestled in a natural clearing where the stream looped its way through the timber. It had taken them three days to come this far, and they'd been here for nearly three more days, mapping the region. Shaylar knew she would miss the campsite when they moved on, but she was just as anxious as the others to see what lay ahead. Any survey was always slow work, of course, but it had taken five full days just to map the portal itself. Not surprisingly, since it was by far the largest any of them had ever seen, far less mapped.

In fact, at over thirty miles wide, it was actually larger than the Calirath Gate. That made it the largest portal ever discovered, and their first task on stepping through it had been to map the actual portal and lay out the grid coordinates of what would become this universe's primary base camp, one day's journey from Company-Captain Halifu's fort. This one would be a substantial affair-a fully manned fort and forward supply depot that would house Portal Authority administrators, medical teams, more soldiers, and enough equipment and supplies to serve as the staging area for other exploration teams, construction crews, miners, and the settlers who would inevitably follow.

Once they'd found a suitable site for that base of operations and sent its coordinates back for the Chalgyn Consortium to begin organizing the follow-on construction crews, they'd set out along a line to the south. As they pushed forward, they'd built small brush enclosures at the end of each full day's travel, designed to keep out unfriendly local wildlife. They'd remained in place at each camp long enough to thoroughly map the surrounding region-which meant hiking far enough to telepathically Map a twenty-mile grid-square-then pushed forward another full day's journey and built another camp to start the process all over again.

It was no accident that the Portal Authority had drawn upon the Ternathian Empire's method of expansion. Ternathia had been building empires for five thousand years, after all. That was an immense span of time in which to develop methods that worked, and the Portal Authority had borrowed heavily whenever and wherever appropriate, including the custom of building fortified camps along any line of exploratory advance through virgin territory. The fact that Ternathia provided over forty percent of the PA's multinational military contingent, and something like half of its total attached officers, might also have had a little something to do with it, Shaylar supposed.

With only twenty people on their currently understrength crew, she and her crewmates couldn't build the elaborate stockades which had comprised the Ternathian system of day-forts. But they could construct a perimeter of interwoven branches that served to keep out anything short of a herd of charging elephants. There were even tales from veteran crews of stampeding cattle and bison herds numbering in the tens of thousands, turning aside and flowing around the camp, rather than run directly into the jagged, sharp projecting branches of its brush wall. All in all, the system worked as well for the Portal Authority as it had for the Ternathians.

Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl was intimately familiar with that system, since he'd served with the Ternathian Army, as the honorific "chan" in his name proclaimed. He'd been an engineer, and after fulfilling his commitment to the Army, he'd returned to school. He had taken advantage of a major scholarship offer to pursue graduate studies in engineering and actually taught engineering at the branch of the Ternathian Imperial University in New Estafel on New Sharona, the first major colony established outside Sharona's home universe.