CHAPTER TWENTY.

ALL NIGHT Caroline REESE KEPT THE ATV ROLLING SOUTHWARD, listening to various radio stations along the way. She chose stations playing fast-paced Pat-Do country music. The words were unintelligible due to the heavy accent, but the strong beat and the wailing guitars helped to obliterate the other thoughts, the things she didn't want to think about.

However, the realization, made at the crossing of the Yellow-fork, that she'd left her ID tag behind with her other clothes at the fann left her coldly aware of the many difficulties that lay ahead.

The first thing she had to do was reestablish ID and credit codes, and in Patash-Do that could be difficult. Patash-Do was about as backward and out of touch as things got on Wexel.

At the same time she felt a terrible sense of guilt. People were going to die, had already died, and it was because of her greed, her stupidity.

She'd known there was something not quite right about Count Karvur from almost the beginning. An elemental greed, a kind of savageness that marked him as one of Wexel's troublesome aristocrats. They were capable of the foulest crimes, as the media showed the world every day.

And when she'd realized what he was offering she should have left an automessage on her machine, something to warn the world if she herself couldn't.

There was no getting around it, she'd fucked up and badly.

She prayed that there was a branch of the Cowdray Bank in Doisy-Dyan. There had to be; the "Cow Bank" had branches everywhere on Wexel, or almost. Of course, Doisy-Dyan was a real tropic hellhole with a huge underclass, where constant killing by Liberators and Regulators kept a high level of tension in the hot, humid air.

Did Cow Bank bother with a place like that?

It had to-the ITAA was based there.

And she had to have new ID. Without ID they wouldn't even let her into the ITAA offices. She could imagine the kind of security they must run.

She remembered her one trip to these southern states. She'd taken a tour to historic South Luc. They were in the beautiful city of Rotens-La. The streets were patrolled by "sangradores." At certain intersections accused Liberators were being crucified. There were steel nails driven into their palms and ankles.

At nightfall they heard the crackle of small-aims fire. And on the third night the hotel was actually attacked.

She'd never forget that night. Waking up to a dynamite blast at the front entrance. Then the ripping of automatic weapons, more explosions; it went on for twenty minutes until the "Liberators" were driven off.

It turned out that the "Liberators" in this case were Regulators, in fact sangradores, moonlighting for the local bosses, who wanted the hotel to kick back more protection money.

Caroline Reese had resolved at that very moment never to return to the wilder parts of Wexel. Outside of CK and a few other cities, that meant most of the planet.

She had stuck to her rule until the mad count had appeared in her life just a few days before and tempted her. And like a fool she'd followed him, as helpless as a moth in front of a light.

And now she was in Patash-Do, and she had to get new ID material, and she knew it could really be a bitch. If there wasn't a Cow Bank she'd have to try and do it all through another bank, and she knew that would be slow and very difficult.

What if the only banks were local ones? Patash-Do banks with legendarily slow and mean-spirited employees?

She felt the paranoia rising.

And what about that thing that she had left behind at Karvur Farm? What was it doing now?

She did not want to think about that, so she concentrated on the more immediate problems. Getting ID, establishing credit codes, and then buying some clean clothes and getting a hotel room and taking a long, hot bath.

Maybe she might even go out for a nice meal. One last indulgence before she became a prisoner.

And then, when she looked and sounded fully human again, she would go over and see the ITAA. And give up her life, her career, everything.

Would they clap her in irons at once? Would that be it? Detention before trial, followed by one of those ringing ITAA sentences, "Forty-five years terrestrial standard, no possibility of parole until after thirty-three years."

She moaned softly to herself.

She didn't want to spend thirty-three years in an ITAA prison. Even if her health credit plan with the university held up and kept paying for her Extended Life treatment, she'd still lose much of her looks, and three whole decades of life.

But there was no alternative, was there?

And then she thought about flying to CK City and getting a ticket on the next shuttle to the orbiter. If she took everything she had that was liquid credit, she could afford a ticket outsystem, get to Lursiane or Diphon's World. She'd be able to start over there. She'd be safe. Although she'd have to change identities.

And Wexel?

With no warning, what would happen to this terrible old planet of Wexel?

It could be consumed, like ancient Saskatch. Devoured by the terrible lifeform from the Starhammer Era.

So what, if she was safe somewhere else?

No, she couldn't do that. She couldn't live with herself.

She imagined the things running amok through her hometown in North Trios. She saw her family and relatives being eviscerated by greedy alien horrors, things that tore at them with worm mouths that bristled with teeth.

NO! She would not let that happen, even if it meant the end of her own career, her own life. And it would, of that she was certain. Because she'd have to go in person and sell the idiots in charge on her story. She couldn't just leave a message for the ITAA commander and then disappear. Crackpots left messages for the ITAA all the time. Wexel had more than its fair share of crackpots, after all, and in a place like Doisy-Dyan there would be thousands.

She had to go in person. She would have to sacrifice herself.

She sucked in a big breath.

This was not going to be easy. She didn't feel like a heroine and she didn't want to be one, either.

But while these gloomy thoughts refused to go away, the roads below the Yellowfork were a dramatic improvement over those north of it.

Soon she reached the junction with the east-west interstate, Highway Eight. She headed west, toward Sigayre City, where Eight met up with the major Patash-Do highway, the Nacional, which would take her more or less directly south to Doisy-Dyan.

She made good time here and turned onto the Nacional well after midnight.

Towns and villages were becoming progressively more numerous. There were more lights along the road.

Now she turned over the driving to the ATV's software and arranged her seat and tried to sleep, while the car hummed south on its big fat tires.

The ATV purred smoothly southward, heading for the coast and the velvet Patash-Do dawn, and after a while the tension broke and she sagged into a deep sleep.

At about the same time, several hundred kilometers ahead of her in Doisy-Dyan, Colonel Luisa Chang was logging the last enormous software package onto the base computer system.

In less than a day she had stripped down the ITAA base Al, "Sancor," and rebuilt it with fresh modules sent out directly from Scopus Central.

Then there'd been fresh auditing packages and keyware and language codes and a new security net, and it all had to be downloaded through the old Strand, which had a mere terabyte of RAM but could be absolutely trusted. Eventually the Strand copied it all and spat out loaded microdisks.

And then Luisa personally loaded the microdisks into the base computer hardware, an old Spika Inc.

network system.

Chang had already run a search/destroy software check on the machine to hunt out security breaches or worm programs that might still be resident in the computer after the dismantling of Sancor.

Quite a few things had been found and erased. Chang was sure that Captain Cachester and his backers would be most unhappy when they discovered this.

A long night lay ahead of her. Luisa bad decided not to wait another moment. With clean hardware and new auditing software, the reconstituted Sancor started to investigate the base accounts.

Chang left the high-security computer room and passed out through the guard.

Outside it was another warm and muggy Pat-Do night. Crickets chirped in the long grass beyond the fence. The lights of the base buildings were surrounded by faint nimbi of humidity.

Back in the office she found Povet still at work. Security was still good. None of the blastproof doors between her office and the building front door had been tampered with for days. The bulletproof shutters on the windows were locked down tight, and the vibrators and Taklish systems were on full.

She and Povet slapped palms together as the Strand interfaced with the Spika bigsystem.

Within minutes the auditing software had found a number of discrepancies in the base accounts system.

Put together they constituted a major bleed-off of funding.

Chang smiled grimly to herself as she studied the screen windows.

Cachester was in for a shock.

And then the screens shuddered and the building shook.

A dull, heavy thud echoed through the dank night air.

When Colonel Chang cracked up one of the shutters and looked out, she saw smoke billowing up from the ground-floor computer lab.

When she looked back to her screen she found error messages. The accounts files were gone, along with most of the Spika hardware, which had been destroyed by a bomb.

Alarms were wailing. Men and women were running across the concrete to the computer lab.

Chang swallowed hard and clenched her fists together in fury.

Another round to Cachester.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

WITHIN THE ISOLATED FARMHOUSE OF JAAD BENUIL A STRANGE horror continued deep into the night.

As far as Jaad Benuil was concerned, of course, the horror had ended with no more than a terrifying glimpse of a thing of tatters and tentacles and a human face. He gave a single shriek as the thing ripped his throat out on his doorstep.

For his wife, Beetris, however, things had not gone so well. She was taken as Secondary Form.

Indeed, while she was still conscious, still screaming, the thing held her down and grew assault nerves directly into her body from a structure like a black pipe, or hawser, that grew from its thoracic region directly into her belly. While it did this it continued to eat parts of her dead husband.

Fortunately the Battlemaster had learned much concerning the human nervous system, and the process was much accelerated compared to the initial mounting upon Count Karvur. Beetris's agonies cut off as her brain was bypassed and isolated within her skull. Later the brain tissues were inundated with enzymes to break them down and recycle the material. The Battlemaster had no use for human brain structures within a secondary form.

And so poor Beetris was dead, although her body was alive, now crouched in the fetal position, covered in a hardening pink layer of skin. Within this shell her body underwent enormous changes, with a terrifying rapidity that consumed seventy years of life in a matter of hours.

And while she changed, the Battlemaster finished devouring her husband's arms and studied the output of the biped. host creatures' planetary culture. For this purpose there were conveniently located spectrum-sampling devices, working in both visual and audio modes. After an hour's perusal of stations 2 to 27 on the Benuil's TV system, the Battlemaster decided that the host creatures used the visual mode as the primary source of information, and commented on the visual material through the audio.

The visual mode was conducted in a straightforward representational form, and the Battlemaster quickly concluded that this was some kind of entertainment format. There were similar systems built into all Imperial warships, but entertainment had not been their prime function.

It also realized that the system was most likely directed from satellites, and this set in train a whole series of speculations.

Soon it found a channel that appeared to use a visualization of a satellite in orbit as some kind of punctuation among a torrent of images of human females.

They had satellites. This implied space travel.

Further investigation of the channels revealed more and more disturbing information.

This was not the host creatures' homeworld.

They were spread across many worlds.

They were an enormous, amorphous entity, a colossus.

This era in the galactic future was effectively controlled by these sluggish bipedal creatures. Mighty spaceships employing a technology unknown to the Gods of Axone-Neurone wove a steady path between the far-flung worlds. Thus knit together in violation of the rules of physics, as understood by the Battlemaster, an enormous multiplanetary culture existed, with swarming hordes of these bipeds on world after world across an enormous reach of the galaxy.

Even worse, although anticipated, there was no reference whatsoever to the Empire of the Gods of Axone-Neurone.

That implied nonexistence of said Empire, indeed nonexistence over a large span of time.

The Empire could not have survived into this era. The Battlemaster, quite possibly, was absolutely alone.

The Battlemaster tried to confront this truth and then to formulate a plan. Battlemasters were endowed with an emotional structure of sorts; it bad been found essential to the successful conduct of war. Now these emotions rose in a choking cloud that rendered the Battlemaster barely able to think.

Rhem Kerwillig lay with his arms around Reena, staring up at the skies.

Clouds were thickening down from the Ruinarts, but the stars still showed through in patches.

Rhem had never been able to read the skies. He cut the classes on astronomy along with all the others back when it might have mattered.

Reena pointed suddenly. "There, you see that string of bright stars? Looks like a snake?"