And that was not a pleasant thought at all.

"This," Lieutenant Kemmerer said over our cerebral links, "will be strictly a volunteer operation. We want twelve Marines."

In our heads, we saw a schematic diagram of the Haldane dropping into planetary orbit, then releasing a small, manta-ray-shaped shuttle.

"They'll be deploying in a Misty Junior," she continued, as the schematic focused in on the manta-ray landing craft as it flew down to the edge of the ice. "Their orders will be to investigate the colony site on planet, investigate the Gykr presence, and report by laser com back to Haldane. They are not, repeat, not to initiate hostilities, but they will defend themselves if attacked, and hold the LZ until Haldane and the rest of the MSEP can arrive.

"Since this will be a potential first-contact situation, I want two Corpsman volunteers as well . . . that does not include you, Chief Garner. I want you to manage the technical end of the op here on the Haldane, along with Dr. Montgomery and Dr. Ortega. Understand?"

"Aye, aye, Skipper," Garner's voice replied over the link. He didn't sound at all happy about it, though.

The "Misty Junior" the skipper had mentioned was one of Haldane's two onboard D/MST-28 TMVs. Like the Marine's larger MST-22 Misties, the Misty Juniors were trans-media vehicles that could operate in hard vacuum, in atmosphere, and both on and under the water. Each was designed to carry a full section-twenty-four Marines. Haldane was configured to allow her to land on a planet, as she'd done at the base on Europa, but the Misties allowed her to deploy just a few Marines as a scout/recon force without endangering the entire ship and all of the expedition's MSEP Marines.

As Lieutenant Kemmerer continued to describe the mission, I thought about whether or not I should volunteer to go in with the recon group. I was damned tired of the ship by that time, and of being restricted from sick bay for fear that I would bump into Kirchner.

Well . . . why not? That was why I was here, to go down to the surface of Abyssworld and investigate the disappearance of our research colony there. There was no sense in putting it off. The downside was that the situation was complicated by the Guckers, but that would have been a problem whether I went in with the first recon force or arrived later on the Haldane. Kirchner, certainly, would be staying with the ship. So, too, was Garner, and he'd been riding me pretty hard these past couple of weeks.

So . . . yeah. I volunteered.

There's an old saying in the military: never volunteer for anything. But I was amused to find out that every Marine and every Corpsman had volunteered to go down on the Misty Junior-even Dubois, who consistently maintained a pretty cynical attitude about sticking your neck out. Just my luck, I suppose, that of the four available Corpsmen, they picked me. Kari Harris was the other one.

The Marines would be Gunnery Sergeant Hancock, Staff Sergeant Darlene Callahan, plus Tomacek, Gibbs, Dalton, Hutchison, Masserotti, Colby, Aguirre, Wiseman, Gonzalez, and Woznowiec. Good people, all of them. I'd served with most of them at the Bloodstar, and all of them had been part of the Capricorn Zeta op. I wondered if the decision process had been guided by the fact that these Marines were combat veterans, and that they'd all worked with one another before.

Two hours later, we glided into orbit around Abyssworld, passing first over the day-lit side and its titanic swirl of storm clouds. Radio messages beamed on several frequencies to survivors of the human base went unanswered; messages deliberately beamed to the Gykrs in an attempt to open communications likewise were ignored. After several orbits, we made our way to the embarkation deck and began filing through the narrow connector rings into the Misty Junior. Both of the landing craft were actually mounted externally to Haldane; once aboard, we strapped ourselves down, sealed off the entrance, and broke the magnetic docking ring locks.

We fell toward the planet above the nightside, with the night-cloaked ice below a dark, blue-gray blur. The comet's tail arced above us like a vast, faint, dome of silver mist. The mechanism was simple enough. Water vapor-steam from a boiling ocean-rising high on the dayside above the storm, was snatched away by the solar wind at the edge of space and whipped back around the planet. A couple of thousand kilometers above the nightside, the water cooled enough to turn to microscopic flecks of ice, a cloud reflecting the star's light like the huge solar reflectors in Earth's Synchorbit.

The ride became bumpy as we entered the upper atmosphere. Abyssworld's air is mostly hydrogen, with a large dollop of carbon dioxide. The hydrogen comes from the dissociation of water molecules by the intense radiation from the sun. Oxygen is created by this means, too, of course, but free oxygen must recombine with hydrogen as quickly as it appears; we're not sure why so much more hydrogen remains, especially when the lighter hydrogen should more easily escape Abyssworld's gravity. Theories presented by the sub-zero base suggest that most of the free oxygen mixes with methane to create CO2 and more free hydrogen.

Where does the methane come from? Good question. There's a hell of lot of methane-CH4-dissolved in Abyssworld's enormous planetary ocean, but whether that comes from volcanism eleven thousand kilometers down or from the local ecosystem is unknown.

I was following the entry and approach on my in-head. Light glared from the viewall of the cargo deck as the swollen red sun edged above the horizon. When I opened my eyes, I saw that the interior of the cargo bay had switched to red as well.

"So, what do you think, Gunny?" Hutchison asked as we bumped deeper into the atmosphere. "Did the Gucks wipe out our colony?"

"That's what we're here to find out, Hutch," Hancock replied. "Everybody check your armor and your weapons! We hit the LZ in eight minutes!"

All of us were wrapped up in standard Mk. 10 MMCA combat armor with nanomatrix camouflage skins. We sported M287 jumpjet packs on our backs that would give us limited flight capability in Abyssworld's nine-tenths-G surface gravity. Most of the Marines carried standard Corps-issue Mk. 24 laser rifles, while Sergeants Dalton and Tomacek each were lugging a man-portable M4-A2 plasma weapon. My own weapon was a lightweight Sunbeam-Sony half-megajoule-pulse Mk. 30 laser carbine, with a holstered Browning Five slug thrower as my backup.

We just hoped that we weren't going to need to use any of that hardware. There were only the twelve of us-the TMV was piloted by an AI-and when I linked in through my in-head again, I saw a lot of Gucks already on the ice. At least a couple of dozen of squat, armored shapes were scattered across the ice down there as we banked over the site of the research colony. I could also see two heavy vehicles that appeared to be picking their way across the ice on a number of jointed mechanical legs, and a dark gray egg-shaped landing craft propped up on landing legs close by.

"Two minutes," Hancock said. "Hang on!"

"They're not shooting at us," Colby said. "That's encouraging."

The Misty TMV jolted hard. "Fuck! You spoke too soon!" Aguirre yelled.

"Negative, negative," Callahan said. "They're cold." That meant that our sensors had not picked up the heat of weapons discharging. Still, on the in-head display I could see turrets atop the legged vehicles and on the Gykr landing craft pivoting to follow us as we banked sharply left.

"The wind is something awful," Hancock said.

"Why aren't the Guckers shooting?" Tomacek wanted to know. "I thought those ugly little bastards shot at everything that moved!"

"Quiet down, people," Callahan said. Her voice was tense, sharp edged. "Clear the channel."

"Listen up, people!" Hancock called a moment later. "We are at Delta-Romeo Two, repeat, two."

Delta-Romeo Two. That stood for "Defense Readiness, condition two . . . meaning just short of actual hostilities. The only thing hotter was condition one, an actual, all-out firefight.

"We'll be touching down well back from the edge of the ice, about two klicks," Hancock continued. "I want you to deploy fast, slick, and by the numbers. I want to see blurs going down that debarkation ramp! Set up a full perimeter, and do not fire until and unless I give the order. I'm unlocking your weapons . . . now, but you will observe fire discipline on the ground. You hear me?"

"Ooh-rah!" chorused back from thirteen throats, the centuries-old Marine battle cry. I checked my carbine again, and saw that it was hot. Circuitry built into our combat armor could lock our weapons until the person in charge unlocked them, but Gunny Hancock didn't believe in crippling the Marines in his command that way, not when an instant's decision might mean life or death. He trusted us . . . and every one of us would have followed him into hell for that reason.

I glanced at the frigid icescape below through the cockpit feed. There were plenty of cultures on Earth that pictured hell as a frozen wasteland just like the one we were looking at.

"Marines! Stand up!"

In two columns, we stood, facing the TMV's rear door, which was already beginning to grind open. I managed to snatch a glance back at the cargo bay's viewall, and noticed that we had gotten well clear of the Guck landing area, and were coming down now on our own.

There was no sign of the Sub-zero base. What the hell had happened to it? I did see a large circular patch, like a shallow crater, lying in the ice between the alien LZ and ours, and there were some structures of some sort-small buildings, possibly-just outside the crater rim. It appeared that a perfectly circular section of the ice cap had simply vaporized, and if that was where the base had been, that would explain why it wasn't there any longer.

Was that what had happened? Had the Gykrs blown the whole base up? A kinetic-kill projectile would have punched through the ice like that . . . or a fusion beam. Damn it, Sub-zero had been a research station, strictly peaceful! The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

I clutched my carbine a bit tighter.

The Misty flared out just above the ice, engaging its quantum-spin repulsors and settling down with a thump in a white swirl of glittering ice particles. Then the ramp was down, we were surging forward in twin columns, and Gunny Hancock was screaming over the tac channel, "Move! Move! Move!"

I emerged from the TMV's red-lit cargo bay into an equally red-lit world of ice, deep purple sky, and a stiff breeze coming in off the distant ocean to the west. The local star peeked above that horizon, a swollen, blotch-faced red dome frozen in perpetual sunset visible through a thick violet haze. The sky overhead was dark enough that stars shone overhead, crisp, hard, and bright.

The Marines broke left and right, moving out and around to create a perimeter fifty meters across, with the grounded Misty at the center. Our armor had a nanoreactive coating that mimicked our surroundings, picking up the gray-white of the ice below, the violet of the sky above, and causing the armored men and women to fade to camouflaged invisibility.

I trailed after Tomacek, who was lugging his plasma gun toward the west side of the perimeter, and threw myself down alongside him in the snow. At our backs, the Misty Junior TMV faded out as well, as the cloak came on. We don't have effective invisibility yet, but we can use a nanomatrix skin to serve as a metamaterial, channeling light around a large object like a ship instead of scattering it off. The trick was good enough to fade the craft into the background, as the plasma gun turret pivoted around to present its twin weapons to the west.

"Harris! Carlyle!" Hancock called. "I need one of you docs on point for F.C."

"I'll go," Kari said, an instant before I could respond.

"No, me," I said. "I'm already in position."

"You're it, Harris," Hancock said, and I bit off a muttered curse.

Okay, so I'm an unrepentant romantic. I don't believe in sending a woman out to face what just might be a suicide op. F.C.-First Contact-was always a damned tricky proposition. This time it was worse, because we had already had first contact with the Gykrs-an encounter that had led to a short but incredibly brutal little interstellar war.

Of course, my old-fashioned attitudes had no place in the modern military. Women had been fully integrated into the service for a couple of centuries, now, and I certainly accepted that. But my father and his father both had been old-fashioned enough to pass on an ethical view of the universe that . . . well, I tended to keep it well hidden. Such beliefs could get me into trouble nowadays.

So I lay in the snow and watched as HM2 Harris walked past my position and off toward that bloody, bloated sun on the horizon. She had the same weapons I did; for a moment I was afraid Hancock would order her to go unarmed . . . but he didn't, thank the gods.

I couldn't see what the Gucks were doing. We were too far away.

"We're transmitting 'parlay' in Galactic Three on all channels," Hancock's voice said over the platoon link. "No response so far."

"Galactic Three," usually abbreviated to "Gal3," was an artificial language, one of the five interstellar linguae francae taught to us by the Brocs and used in the Encyclopedia Galactica. We'd used it at Tanis to stop the fighting with the Gucks. The Treaty of Tanis had been composed in Galactic Three. My understanding was that it had been designed by AIs, that it was all ones and zeros, which made it explicit, precise, and utterly devoid of emotional nuance. You would never write romantic poetry in Gal3. But we knew they would be able to understand us.

"Still transmitting," Hancock's voice said. "Stop where you are, Harris. We're getting movement out there."

"Copy, Gunnery Sergeant."

Kari was a hundred meters away from the perimeter now, a very, very tiny figure silhouetted against the light of the western sky, vulnerable and alone. She'd switched off her armor's nanoflage to demonstrate that she wasn't trying to sneak up on the Gucks.

I hoped they appreciated the gesture. Hell, I hoped they understood it.

"Okay!" Hancock called. "We just got an 'acknowledged' from the other side. Galactic Three."

Acknowledged, not we agree to talk. But it was something at least.

There are a lot of races across the Galaxy like the Gykr. Long before a species evolves sentience, it is likely to find a distinct survival value in aggression . . . in particular in attacking anything else that might pose even a potential threat. Xenosophontologists back home pontificate about how this actually becomes self-limiting. Once such a species achieves intelligence and a global civilization, shooting first and asking questions later becomes decidedly contra-survival. We've discovered a number of once-inhabited planets just in our own galactic neighborhood covered in the wreckage of civilizations that have committed suicide.

Self-limiting or not, there must still be some survival value in fight-or-fight. The Gykr aren't the only genocidal sociopaths out there.

"A strider is coming toward me," Kari said. "I'm transmitting from my helmet camera now. Are you getting this?"

"Roger," Hancock told her. "We have it in sight."

I linked into the channel, and could now see what Kari saw: a huge, spidery shape against the sunset. It very vaguely looked like it had been modeled on Gykr physiology, with a curving, hunch-backed body covered by strips of armor. It stood on six legs, the hind legs longer than the forelegs so that it moved in an ungainly head-down position.

And it stood four meters tall.

I switched back to my own point of view, and used my helmet optics to magnify the image. The strider had moved to within perhaps ten meters of Kari's position, hulking above her, a pair of weapons turrets angled in her direction on either side of the forward end of that dark torso, like mandibles. Its aft-end dipped, imbedding in the ice, and a hatchway opened. Two armored figures emerged.

"Translation circuits open," Kari's voice said. "Communication desirable. Negative threat . . ."

She was speaking in the terse, tightly structured format of Gal3, the words coming to us in English, to the aliens in their own speech. She raised one hand, palm out . . .

There was a flash, and Kari was pitched backward. The two armored Gykr rushed forward out from under the loom of the ice strider, gathering her up.

"Fire!" Hancock yelled. "Commence fire! Aim for the strider's legs!"

Beside me, Tomacek triggered his plasma weapon, slamming bolts of super-heated plasma into the war machine's dark armor. A pair of bolts snapped from the TMV behind us, searing through the air above our heads. I saw a hit on the strider . . . and then another. . . .

But the armored Gucks were already dragging Kari Harris inside the machine, and in another moment, it had turned and was picking its way across the icescape, moving back toward the Gykr encampment.

A few seconds had passed . . . and we were now at Delta-Romeo One.

Chapter Twelve.

So just why is it that Navy Corpsmen are expected to take point in First Contact situations with the Marines? I suppose it's the technical focus. Time was, a few centuries ago, when Corpsmen were the medics for both the U.S. Marines and the Navy-the water Navy, before we got into space in a big way. Corpsmen were the natural ones to become the technical assistants when the Marines deployed to an alien world, taking care of the environmental scans and exobiological workups so that the Marines could concentrate on what they were best at-combat. They're fiercely proud of the old saying, Every Marine a rifleman.

So wherever the Marines go, the Navy Hospital Corps goes, too, providing medical support, handling the planetary environmental studies, and, for the past century or so, doing First Contact work as well.

Normally, First Contact was the job of highly trained specialists-folks like Dr. Montgomery and Dr. Ortega-but the reality of the matter was that specialists like that rarely are in the right place at the right time. A Marine combat team pulling a recon on an alien planet was a lot more likely to encounter local intelligent life than the xenosophontological personnel and linguistic experts on a research starship.

So . . . okay, I understood the why. I still wished Montgomery and Ortega were here.

"Ship!" Hancock yelled. "Block them! Don't let that strider rejoin the others!" Behind us, the TMV stirred, then lifted into the air. "Marines! By squads, low-level overleap, Squad One, now!"

We were going after Kari. Good enough. The Marines never leave anyone behind. But we were badly outnumbered, and this was one time when those proud words just might not be possible.

The TMV contingent had been broken into two squads-each with six Marines plus a Corpsman-and I was in First Squad. I triggered my M287 meta-thrusters, sailing into the violet sky in a long, low leap.

Controlling those damned things in flight is hard. You have to hold your body just so to keep your center of mass centered, and to avoid going into a nasty airborne tumble. I left the details to my armor's AI, which juggled micro-bursts from my backpack to keep me on course, and warned me to shift my legs under me as I started to come down. I hit the ice with a jolt, but the M287 had already fired again, sending me off on another long, low-altitude flight. Around me, the rest of First Squad sailed through the thin air like manic, oversized locusts, closing on the fleeing Gykr ice strider.

The Misty Junior accelerated, passing overhead after the alien combat machine. Another bound . . . and another. We could see the strider ahead as the Misty overflew it, spun about, then drifted toward the ice, its dorsal turret snapping off shots at the Gykr machine. The strider took a direct hit forward and staggered back a step, taking the shock by flexing its jointed legs.

I took a final leap, cutting in my meta-thrusters for an extra boost that carried me in an arc that came down squarely on the strider's back. I hit, bounced, and slid . . . scrabbling to maintain my balance and my hold on the curving, segmented dorsal armor of the thing. The entire body was only perhaps five meters long, the aft end curving down to point at the snow below. I grabbed hold of one of the starboard leg joints with one hand, using the other to swing my carbine around and aim the muzzle at the joint point-blank. The armor-some kind of extremely tough plastic, I thought, rather than metal-absorbed the laser pulse and didn't even seem to get warm.

"Outta the way, Doc!" Masserotti said, crouching beside me. "Let the professionals do the job!"

Masserotti slapped a small nano-D charge against a starboard-side leg joint. Aguirre landed on the torso next, slapping down a second charge. The strider lurched then, taking another step, and I lost my balance. I fell three meters and landed in the snow with a jolt hard enough to hurt.

The Misty Junior had ceased its frantic barrage from ahead as armored Marines descended now on the back of the lurching Gykr machine. The strider opened up at the TMV with a triplet of bolts from its jutting mandibles, scoring two direct hits. The Misty drifted unsteadily toward the ice, smoke billowing from a hole in its flank. "Shit!" Hutchison yelled over the tactical channel. "That's our ride home!"

"I'm monitoring the ship telemetry!" Hancock yelled. "It's repairable! Keep on that strider!"

I opened fire with my carbine, but my half-megajoule pulses didn't appear to be doing much good. Lasers do damage in two ways-through sheer heat, cutting molecular bonds, and through thermal shock, causing the target to explode as it heats suddenly and unevenly. Whatever the material that was sheathing that six-legged walker actually was, it appeared to be good at sucking in heat and distributing it evenly and efficiently, essentially drinking incoming coherent light and rendering it harmless.

Nano-D, though, was different. The charges planted against the leg joints went off along the strider's starboard side in unison, each releasing a small black cloud of soot that clung to the machine's side and leg mechanisms, clung and gnawed hungrily, dissolving armor, exposing inner workings . . . and then each of the three starboard legs began collapsing one by one. The strider tried taking another step, found no support as the last starboard leg snapped loose in a spray of parts and fragments.

"Ooh-rah! Take that you ugly sucker!" Tomacek yelled, as the machine arced over, falling forward and to the side, hitting with a thud against the ice and sending the Marines on its back tumbling. Hancock bounded up to the exposed underbelly of the thing, waving to me. "Carlyle! Get your PC over here!"

I triggered my thrusters for a short jump, landing next to him as I pulled my hand plasma cutter from my equipment belt. The device was just big enough to fit in my gauntleted hand, and was designed to free people trapped inside tangled wreckage. I pressed the back-spray shield against the smooth surface of the strider's belly and triggered it. That armor might dissipate the heat from a laser pulse-but where a laser could flash-heat the target to a few thousand degrees, a plasma torch achieved and held a temperature of almost fifty thousand degrees. If we'd been in vacuum, I would have had to use a tank of inert gas to do the actual cutting, but the Mk. 80 plasma cutter could work with local atmosphere just fine, thank you. The small, attached tank of pressurized liquid O2 would feed the fire for the necessary few minutes.

And as I dragged the shield across the armor, a white-hot crevice opened in its track.

It wasn't quite like cutting through butter, but I kept at it, lengthening the gash that was opening slowly in the heavy armor. Then, abruptly, the hatch popped open, the hatch through which the bastards had dragged Kari a few moments before. I jumped back as a massively armored thing leaped out of the opening.

I had a blurred impression of dark gray armor, of a hunched-over torso shorter and squatter than I was, of a stubby looking weapon swinging up to aim at my chest . . .

. . . and then three Marines with lasers plus Tomacek and his plasma gun were all firing together from near point-blank range, slamming energy bolts into the alien as it twisted and jittered in the crossfire. A second alien appeared behind the first, blundering into it from behind and going down in a thrashing tangle of limbs.

I saw a joint in the second alien's torso armor flashing red in my in-head imaging. The AIs resident within the Marines' armor were analyzing the enemy's strengths and weaknesses and painting their in-heads with targeting suggestions. I raised my carbine to take a shot, but Hancock put a laser bolt through the joint in the Gykr's before I could react.