Chang saw Cachester among the leaders.

"How much room do we have?" she said, opening the hatch.

"We can get in three, I'd say."

"Let's hope we got fuel enough to get down alive with three, " Luisa said.

There was a heavy thud, and a tremendous shock ran through the docking bay.

"One of the modules must have detached," said Povet in her usual calm way.

Vacproof bulkheads were slamming shut all over the remainder of the habspace in a roar of steel slamming steel.

The docking bay floor was rippling.

Chang grabbed somebody, a man in a white uniform, no spacesuit. "Get in," she shrieked and shoved him inside.

Another man bulled past her and dove inside. There was no time for anyone else; Chang yanked the hatch shut and they blew free.

Just in time, the whole habspace was suddenly starkly illuminated by the green flash of the primary laser aboard Empress Wu.

Shaka died in that instant, along with Captain Ton and everyone who was left on the bridge.

The drop ships tumbled free. One and Two were each carrying four people. Three was carrying six, including a near gibbering Captain Cachester.

Aboard the second ship was Caroline Reese, who had learned somewhere along the line to be a survivor.

When she'd seen Cachester put on one of the emergency suits, she'd gone immediately to the suit dispenser in the drop-ship bay and put on a suit and checked the seals and the respiration unit.

She assumed that Cachester knew something and she suspected it had to do with the Empress Wu.

When the call had come she'd been way ahead of it, having positioned herself near the entrance to the drop-ship bay.

Now she clutched herself with her arms and prayed to the gods of her ancestors that they would get down in one piece.

The dark world below threw up a great shining crescent dead ahead. They were flying into the daylight.

High ice clouds glittered along the rim of the crescent. The thing seemed like a vast sword, a scimitar of the gods waiting to cut the line of fate in two.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX.

THE SHUTTLE DESCENT WAS FAST AND THE LANDING WAS HARD. All the way Luisa had wondered if the Wu would strike them down with that terrible laser.

It never came. Perhaps they were too hard to see amid all the breakage of the Shaka as it fell into the thin atmosphere and crashed, burning, in a thousand-klom-long swath across the surface. Perhaps their enemy wanted them to land, to make sure of them on the ground. Perhaps they were no longer worth bothering with.

She wanted to land as close as possible to the site where the second shuttle from the Empress Wu had landed, and fortunately it was still well within the range of the drop ships and they were able to make a pass high overhead and get a good video fix on the shuttle and surrounding terrain. It was set on the flat top of a high ridge, one of many in this region. Then they spiraled down to land nearby.

The other two drop-ship shuttles from the Shaka were following Chang's lead and came in to land shortly afterward.

They were on top of a long, sinuous ridge formation that dominated the surrounding terrain. Something about the way it coiled back and forth made Chang think of ancient burial mounds in Ohio, from the prehistoric period on the North American continent.

There were other ridges, spaced about ten kilometers apart, all over the surface in this section of the planet, but none was as tall or massive as this one.

Occasionally when the dust cleared momentarily there would be a startling glimpse of the surrounding terrain. Steep slopes rose up for thousands of meters above a dark, abyssal plain far below.

Jagged rifts and canyons with vertical walls a mile deep or more cut into the sides of these ridge formations. And yet the ridgetop itself was level and fairly smooth, and the landing was relatively easy.

Chang stood up, noted the strength of the gravity here, and used a command key to open the seals on the emergency evac airlock.

The shuttle software began apologizing for the bouncy landing before Chang reached over and turned its audio off.

"Time to get moving," she said quietly. In the back of her mind she wondered how Captain Blake would handle a mess like this. Blake, she decided, would go straight in with whatever he had and take the enemy on as quickly as possible. Shock him with the speed and fierceness of the attack.

"Ready, Colonel." Povet had her Schlesinger hooked into her harness above the hip, while a flat case of the DX3 explosive was attached over her shoulder. Clips for the Schlesinger dangled all over the front.

The two men, neither of whom had spacesuits, stared at them in wonder.

"Why are you going out there? " said the one in the white.

"Job to do," Chang said with desperate, studied nonchalance.

"You're going to go out and fight it, is that it? Just a couple of women?" the white overalls said.

"Dirtsiders are crazy, I always knew it," the second man said.

Chang's eyes snapped at that. "Shut your mouth, mister. We're not dirtsiders, we're the 624 OSF, and we can take care of you assholes without having to work up a sweat."

Both men had a couple of inches on Luisa Chang, but when she moved forward they both gave ground.

Chang snorted; this was stupid. Jean Povet was opening the small emergency airlock they would use to keep the atmosphere in the drop ship.

They left the men behind and clambered out into the freezing winds. There they switched on their flare lights to guide the other shuttles down and waited while they landed.

The third one came in hard and fast, broke its undercarriage, and slid across the flat surface until it ran into a fault line. Chang and Povet dropped everything and ran across the plateau top toward it.

The habseal on the crashed ship had blown; the front section was crumpled up. There were just two survivors, Captain Cachester and Flight Engineer Pentofski. The others had been without suits.

Chang just shook her head grimly. Cachester seemed to be one of those creatures of terrestrial origin that were impossible to exterminate, like the cockroach and the rat.

"If your commo's working, please respond, are you both all right?" she said.

"Well, Colonel, I guess we ought to thank you for showing such concern, but in the circumstances I'll leave out the courtesies. I'm alive but that's about it," Cachester said.

"I'm okay," the flight engineer said with a baffled look. The last few hours of experienced time had turned his world completely upside down.

"What about the others?"

"All dead."

Chang wasn't in a position to waste time. She turned back to the second shuttle, which lay in the opposite direction. The dust was getting thicker by the minute; the thin wind was picking up velocity, a dust storm was coming in.

From the second shuttle came four figures in suits: the two security men from Shaka, then Darel Hopester and a woman. Chang felt a surge of surprise when she saw that it was Caroline Reese.

"Well, well, nice of you to drop in for the finale, " she said after a moment.

Reese had undergone a transformation of sorts. She'd lost some of her bitterness. Constant exposure to death and deprivation had hardened her in ways she'd never dreamed of.

"I wouldn't have missed the end of this for a couple of worlds," she chuckled sadly. "I guess I have to see it through to the end, fate or something. "

"Fate, right," Luisa replied. "I've been thinking about fate quite a lot recently. There must be something more to the concept than I had previously considered possible."

Chang checked commo channels with everyone.

"All right people, heres what we have to do. There are some caves way over there, past the Wu's shuttle. The tracks lead to the caves, so we're going to follow them. "

"Oh, no, you can count me out of that," Cachester said. "I'm not getting down in some hole in the ground with that alien. I've seen those things, they're deadly."

Chang waited a beat before replying.

"All right, Captain Cachester is not coming with us. He is going to sit it out on the surface and keep his Fleetside ass nice and safe. "

She looked around at the others. The Fleet ensigns looked uncomfortable, but they were young and foolish; neither would back out now. They avoided looking at Cachester.

Even Cachester's insufferable insouciance wilted in this situation.

"Look," he exclaimed, "this is crazy. You can't go down there and destroy this thing on your own.

There'll be a sector fleet here soon enough. They can pick us up and put down a major force to handle this. That's the proper way to deal with this situation. "

The ensigns shuffled and looked away. They were Fleet officers and they knew the truth.

"All right," Chang continued. "Were on the surface of a dead planet in the back of beyond. We've dropped the coordinates down the Deep Link, so help is on the way, but over these distances relativistic effects are going to turn minutes into weeks, so who knows how long we'll have to go it alone. We can't leave this to chance, even if we don't have the force levels wed like to have."

"Force levels? Do we honestly have any kind of chance?" Hopester said. "I don't mean with the alien, but just of staying alive anyway. I mean how long will our air supply last?"

"There's enough food and water in the emergency packs on the three ships to last us a couple of months quite easily, three or four if we take it very carefully. And the air refreshers will keep the suits functioning for years. I think the two ships will also refresh for quite a long time. So we can make it, yes, if we can survive the alien."

"Then why antagonize it?" Cachester said in frustration. "Leave the damn thing alone and it might let us live. "

Chang had had enough. "Because, Captain, we have to find out what the hell it's doing and stop it.

There's more than just our lives to think about. There's the rest of the human race. We botch this once more and we may lose the lot, this thing will take over."

The ensigns had seen the video evidence concerning the alien's preferred method of parasitism. They stiffened; everything rested on this, including the honor of the Fleet.

Flight Engineer Pentofski wavered. He was terrified at this degree of proximity to the alien horror. He had no desire whatsoever to go down under the ground in pursuit of it. But he could not think of himself as a coward, and so he stayed beside the young security ensigns.

Cachester mumbled something and turned away, alone but determined in his cowardice.

Hopester said nothing but stayed where he was. He knew now that his old life was over, utterly gone from him. Everything now depended on how this menace was dealt with. His job was to film it all for as long as that was possible. A sense of duty filled him up and helped him push aside his anguished thoughts of his lost family.

"What about the big ship?" said Caroline Reese.

"Can't do anything about that," said Chang. "Out of my control. If she stays here when the sector fleet shows up then they'll destroy her. If she gets away then this whole thing goes on, until she's hunted down and finished. "

"What do you think it's trying to do?" said Reese.

How the hell should I know, Luisa wanted to scream, I'm a soldier, not a scientist.

She caught Jean Povet's eyes fixed on her through her suit mask.

"This is the homeworld of its kind; you tell me, Professor," she said after a moment.

Reese grunted and turned her helmet away.

They set out soon afterward, leaving Cachester behind.

They passed the Wu's shuttle and checked it for supplies. It was well stocked with everything and had enough fuel to regain orbital speed.

"That's an improvement on our situation, then," Chang said to Povet. "We might be able to make it for six months with that extra food and water. "

"Doesn't it suggest that the enemy isn't planning to stay here forever?"

"Uh-huh, it does. He's planning to go on somewhere. I think we have to stop him."

"We'll give it a shot, Colonel, can't say more than that."

"Ever been in combat, Jean?"

"No, Colonel, this is my first time."

"Well, it isn't as bad as they say it is. You get over being frightened pretty quick, and the time passes in a blink. "

"Heh, heh," Povet chuckled, "sounds like going to the dentist. "

Chang shook her head. Perhaps Povet didn't need any little encouraging words; she was one of the most placid, even tempered people Chang had ever met. Perhaps all this was just business as normal to the Jean Povets of the worlds.

Luisa licked her lips, which were very dry. It certainly didn't seem like business as normal to her; this was a matter of doom and extinction. The galaxy teetered here, all balanced on a slender point, them and it. And it was all up to her to come up with a way to defeat the damned thing.

They reached the caves indicated by analysis of the high-level video they'd shot. The tracks were confusing here; one set wandered around to all the cave entrances. But after some careful surveying of the footprints, Chang selected one cave into which at least three of the creatures had gone.

The cave had very smooth walls. Debris had piled up on the floor, and the ceiling above had many fine cracks running through it.